I began this series of blog posts with a simple question: What happened to the Korean language the Koryo saram must have spoken? In documenting the maintenance of the Korean language among the Koryo saram, my previous blog posts covered broad themes in the history of the Koryo saram (blog post 1) and language usage […]
Author: Corrina Fuller
Language and Social Institutions: Koryo Saram, Part II
Whereas my previous blog post outlined the lives and livelihoods of ethnic Koreans in the Russian Far East prior to their exile in 1937, my next two posts will shift gears slightly, focusing more on the status of the Korean language among Koryo saram throughout the past century. This post will track the maintenance of […]
Migration, Exile, and Homeland: Koryo Saram, Part I
The Soviet Era often brings talk of the multi-ethnic nature of the Union. Certainly, its vast territorial expanse would encompass the homelands of many indigenous Eurasians. One group that often sits at the periphery of discussions of both the Soviet Union and Eurasia is the Koreans. In 1937, 170,000 of them – nearly the entire […]
“Coming Home”: Motherland and Mother Language in Kazakhstan’s ‘Oralman’ Policies
What role does an imagined homeland have in influencing one’s sense of belonging? This summer, I had a rather odd experience with this exact dynamic. My younger sister, an avid Tik Tok user, showed me a short clip on the platform of a Ghanaian official speaking out against racial injustice in the US and instructing […]
Constructing New National Identities in the Soviet Union and Turkey
As part of his “Introduction” to The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, author Hein de Haas underscores a key point of tension regarding migration in the modern era: while the movement of peoples is nothing new, the challenges they present to nationalist ideas underlying many contemporary nation-states are. From the […]