• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.42 no.2 s.119
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• pp.196-217
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• 2007

During the last decade, Los Angeles Koreatown experienced unprecedented changes transforming it from an immigrant ethnic enclave into a transnational economic space. Alongside of the city government's redevelopment plans and local Korean Americans' grass-root efforts to regenerate Koreatown, transnational Korean actors have aggressively invested in property as well as business sectors. However, despite these multi-scaled geographic transitions, Koreatown remains one of the poorest and most crime-infested inner-city communities in the City of Los Angeles. This paper, based on a 'place-based' bottom-up approach, investigates contradictory geographies of Koreatown in which multi-scaled network of hegemonic transnational, urban and local development actors has developed representational, unlived economies. This research points out that the recent urban regeneration of Koreatown has not only excluded but also exploited local community members such as transnational Korean/Latino workers in the area. This paper conclusively suggests that the sustainable future of Koreatown's development would stem from place-based community consciousness that crisscrosses racial and ethnic boundaries.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.40 no.5 s.110
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• pp.473-490
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• 2005

The term hybridity has recently emerged as one of the most popularized leitmotivs in contemporary diasporic and transnational problematics on migrants' nomadic experiences. Especially, in postcolonial politics, hybridity is argued to provide a critical 'third space' on which to challenge discursive boundaries and redescribe power-embedded history However, this paper suggests that the hybrid subject position can be easily articulated in producing new cultural discourse and empowering hegemonic subjects in certain spates. Based on distinguishing the intentional, conscious hybridity from the organic, lived hybridity, this research Intends to investigate the Janus-faced, double-edged nature of the postcolonial politics of hybridity in the case of Los Angeles Koreatown. First, I discuss how a place of organic hybridity in Koreatown can lead to challenging invented and depoliticized ethnicity. At the second half of this paper, 1 focus on understanding the ways in which new Korean American professionals and elites employ the discourse of '1.5 generation' as an intentional hybridity for empowering their own political position at a local scale. I conclusively suggest that hybridity should be a deconstructive strategy to unlearn dominant socio-spatial boundaries rather than bring about the third space as a reterritorialized political position.