Multiethnic Korea?: Multiculturalism, Migration, and Peoplehood Diversity in Contemporary South Korea

The myth of monoethnic and monocultural Korea is tenacious. In the aftermath of Japanese colonialism, it found renewed strength in the Park Chung Hee era and in South Korean cultural nationalism of the 1980s. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, government sponsorship of cultural globalization valorized the idea of “multiculturalism” (tamunhwa), but did not dispel widespread discrimination and xenophobia against actual multiethnic and multicultural populations. The contributors to this volume employ the dual concepts of “multicultural” and “multiethnic” to make sense of an intriguing facet of the recent and continuing South Korean social transformation. This is the first English-language book of its kind to address multiculturalism in South Korea.