Collective Freedom to “Live Right, Know Your Roots, Live Strong, Live Together”: Reconceptualizing Freedom through the Memories of Activism and Spirituality in the Korean Diaspora

This paper argues for a reconceptualization of freedom by drawing from my ethnographic field research on a transnational social movement network in the Korean diaspora in the U.S. that originated from the 1980 South Korean pro-democracy movement. The story of this intergenerational movement network, which has built solidarity with other communities of color, demonstrates the limits of narrowly defined freedom as individual liberty and disrupts the hegemony that restricts Asian American social belongings based on meritocracy. By analyzing their stories, I provide an expansive conceptualization of freedom in the context of marginalized people—as the capacity for imagining the collective self as the protagonist for freedom-building and transformative social change and building communal capacity to pursue them. These memories of our ancestors’ collective moral agency restore ethical dignity and radical hope in the process of freedom-building. This freedom enables us to pursue democracy by re-membering the marginalized as a center.