Transnational Communities in the Smartphone Age: The Korean Community in the Nations Capital

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Transnational Communities in the Smartphone Age: The Korean Community in the Nations Capital examines the durable ties immigrants maintain with the home country and focuses in particular on their transnational cultural activities. In light of changing technologies, especially information and communication technologies (ICTs), which enable a faster, easier, and greater social and cultural engagement with the home country, this book argues that middle-class immigrants, such as Korean immigrants in the Washington-Baltimore region, sustain more regular connections with the homeland through cultural, rather than economic or political, transnational activities. Though not as conspicuous and contentious as other forms of transnational participation, cultural transnational activities may prove to be more lasting and also serve as a backbone for maintaining longer-lasting connections and identities with the home country.

Reviews

Politicians can talk all they want about strengthening borders and building walls. The fact remains that in todays world culture transcends political and geographic boundaries. In this groundbreaking study, Dae Young Kim documents how Korean migrants and their children remain connected to their ancestral homeland while thriving in a new country. He argues that the technologies that allow Koreans to simultaneously consume cultural products and participate in social life on both sides of the Pacific have blurred the distinction between the old country and the new and are changing the meaning of citizenship. -- Philip Kasinitz, City University of New York
This book provides vivid pictures of Korean immigrants transnational lives in the Washington-Baltimore area, the third largest Korean community in the U.S. While most important previously published books covering a particular Korean community in the U.S. focused on Korean immigrants small business activities and/or their business-related intergroup conflicts, this book focuses on their transnational cultural and social activities. It is a great contribution not only to Korean American studies, but also to studies of immigrant transnationalism in general. -- Pyong Gap Min, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Transnational Communities in the Smartphone Agesteps outside traditional gateway cities such as New York and Los Angeles to focus on the understudied Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, home to the third largest Korean American community in the U.S. Kim shows us how current immigrant communities synchronize their old and new countries as well as the limits of this bifocality and the troubling side of transnationalism. -- Miliann Kang, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Author Bio

Dae Young Kim is associate professor of sociology at George Mason University.