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in place. However, Benedict Anderson introduced us an idea that nation is in fact an
imagined community because it provides a quasi-religious sense of belonging and
fellowship which is attached to those who are taken to share a particular symbolic place.
Anderson believed that the availability of print culture was crucial factor in the
construction of nationalism (Anderson, 1983). If the print culture was a traditional
vehicle to connect people to an imagined place called ‘nation,’ media products, especially
in visual and audio forms, are conduits in the era of globalization. These media forms,
thanks to the power of capital and technology, have been spread out on the earth with
unprecedented speed. The interesting point of these media products, however, is that they
involve multiple points of identification. For example, in music video, you can identify
yourself with the lyrics, melodies, rhythms, visual images or any combination of these.
Also with films, you can identify yourself with narratives, visuals, music, ethnicity of
characters, language, or any combination of these. While these multiple points of
identification may be the consequences of cultural economies, intentionally multicultural
or multinational, a sense of nation is still strong in crucial moments. The following case I
will be discussing is just one example that shows how critical the power of nation is in
politics of identities.
SEUNG-JUN YOO: A KIND OF SALMON
Yoen-uh-jok (a group of salmon) is one of the newly created words in the 90s in
Korea, referring to those people who revisit their mother country after growing up in
countries outside Korea. Just like salmon embark their journeys of hundreds of miles to
their headwater breeding grounds, these second or third generations of Korean
Convention