"Korean America was Born in 1992"

The constellation of public gatherings known as the 1992 Los Angeles Riots / Uprising included a massive multigenerational, multiracial rally in the city's Koreatown. Over 30,000 people marched through Koreatown in what some have called the largest Asian American protest in US history. This article reads the rally through a performative lens as an instance of Asian American political thought in practice. It argues that the rally unified its diverse participants as a singular, if tenuously held, force—Korean America—and enacted anew a visibility and civic membership that did not precede the gathering. In so doing, it founded a counterpublic for participants to see themselves in their collective power. That this rally is virtually ignored in hegemonic historical narratives about the 1992 events, however, indicates that such enactments are made in a social world where audiences may or may not engage our performative acts. The language of performative invitation provides a better frame for theorizing the rally's enactive force, given the plurality of the shared world, public contestation, and the possibilities of audience refusal

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Media studies · Performative utterance · Political science · Publicity · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law