As South Korea rapidly becomes a multicultural society that is transitioning from an ethnocentric logic of kinship and nationalism to a globalized society of citizenship and cosmopolitanism, the collective desire of Koreans to understand the nation’s history and restructure its racial, national, and cultural identity is exploding. As a powerful yet often overlooked area in research about contemporary Korean studies, public interactions with architectural design and spatial identity play important roles in reflecting sociocultural changes and the political climate in and around South Korea. This project traces the historical significance of the district of Dongdaemun as the leading site of Korean modernity and attempts to read the diasporic sensibility of Koreans and their sense of displacement and collective memory embedded in the process of developing the cityscape.

Miseong Woo is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yonsei University in South Korea. Her research interests include race, gender, modernity in modern drama, the literary and visual history of Asian diaspora, and cultural encounters between the East and West in popular culture. She published Representation of Asian Women in the West (2014) with Sam & Parkers, which won the 2014 Korea Research Foundation Achievement Award. She received a Fulbright Scholar Award for the 2011–2012 academic year, taught at Cornell University as a distinguished visiting professor in Korean studies in 2016, and is the first scholar selected as the Fulbright Korea Distinguished Chair at Emory University in 2020.