Week 9 Discussion Post

Like I mentioned during my second individual post, art and music can help outsiders connect to the struggle of an individual group while still remaining entertaining. Anyone, Korean or not can relate to waiting for a payday and coupled with nice acoustics, you introduce your fight to a lot more people than with brochures or lectures.

Going back to the Goffe reading, I think the migrants in Korea are trying to achieve a similar ‘extra-colonial’ space, similar to the sound systems and small markets of Jamaica. Especially with the film festivals it seems they are trying to create a mutual space of understanding where capitalism and the desire to work sits outside their desire for more rights and non-discriminatory policies. But with reggae and the music of that Jamaica, I think the struggle against colonialism was much less evident, at least from what I can gather. Many of the people involved in Jamaica seemed genuinely interested in creating unique artistic spaces, while the racial elements were more subtle. Comparatively, it seems the migrants in Korea have a message that they started with and used media as a means of broadcasting it out to the greater Korean population in order to garner empathy and attention. However, this is just a surface-level assumption on my part.