The fields of anthropology, sociology, and psychology have long considered the question of how the self is constructed in relation to larger collectives such as the family, community, society, and nation—entities to which an individual can anchor oneself and develop a sense of belonging. Sonia Ryang's Writing Selves in Diaspora revisits this question, but shifts the perspective by focusing on the multiple selves that arise from the experiences of not belonging—displacement, denationalization, and diaspora.

In her powerful introduction, Ryang invokes the symbolic importance of the sacred text for the Jewish diaspora, which allowed Jews to build an imaginary home. Ryang suggests that autobiographic writing serves as a process of creating sacred texts for modern diasporas such as the Korean diaspora. Instances of writing about a lost homeland “are acts which preserve life by keeping open the window through which the authors can glimpse their lost homes and homelands, and the life contained in them—that is, their precarious humanity” (p. xiii).

Using an ethnographic approach, she examines both published and unpublished autobiographic writings of diasporic Korean women in Japan and the United States to understand how they make meaning of their lives as women who are ethnically Korean but belong neither to Korea nor to their “host” country. In so doing, the author and her informants begin to construct a notional homeland that both eulogizes the home from which their families were exiled and recognizes the unfamiliar, unknowable, and sometimes fictional contours of that place.

As much as this book draws on Ryang's ethnographic study of other women's autobiographical writing, it is also an autoethnographic work in that the author's analysis relies on her own life experience and sense of self as a diasporic Korean. More specifically, Ryang is a Zainichi Korean—a Korean whose family was permanently displaced from Korea to Japan as a result of Japanese colonization. She identifies herself as a person who formally belongs to no nation—and therefore receives no national benefits—and as the mother of a sick child. The precariousness of life within Ryang's own family is clear at the outset.

Most studies of the Korean diaspora have been written by Korean American scholars whose research is U.S. centered, and Ryang's work offers an important and underrepresented perspective. This is one of the great strengths of this book, in that the three chapters devoted to Koreans in Japan—“Love and Diaspora,” “A Letter from Afar,” and “Diaspora and the Ethic of Care”—resonate with Ryang's personal story to illuminate the social and psychic conditions of the Zainichi Korean diaspora. If Koreans in the United States are second-class citizens, Koreans in Japan are not citizens at all, Ryang explains. Having been displaced prior to the division of the Korean peninsula, Zainichi were uprooted from a country that no longer exists and therefore cannot grant citizenship. It was not until 1965 that Koreans in Japan could apply for South Korean citizenship; many rejected this opportunity because they did not want to be affiliated with South Korea's military dictatorship, and many held on to their loyalties to the undivided Korea of the past (Joseon) or to a reunified Korea of the future. As neither Japanese nor Korean citizens, Zainichi constitute a stateless population that is on the margins of not only Japanese society, but also of a global society organized along lines of national belonging.

It is through this historical and political context that Ryang, borrowing primarily from Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt, analyzes questions of how denationalized subjects can live in a political order that does not recognize them. How does it affect the intimate details of their lives such as whom they love and marry? How do they understand personal hardship? How do they learn to care for others in a society that does not return that care?

One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is Ryang's discussion of North Korea and North Korean political power among Koreans in Japan. While all three chapters on Zainichi Koreans illuminate this, chapter 3 deals with it most explicitly. What distinguishes Ryang's work here is that she neither romanticizes nor demonizes North Korea. She critiques North Korean totalitarianism without any trace of the morally superior tone that often accompanies such critiques. In fact, Ryang places totalitarianism alongside neoliberalism as two different but complementary mechanisms of a larger biopolitical system.

The two chapters that are based on the autobiographies of Korean American women are thoughtful meditations on language, identity, and experience, but they are not as compelling as the chapters on stateless Koreans in Japan. A deeper engagement with Korean American diasporic scholarship would have strengthened these two chapters. Overall, Writing Selves in Diaspora is an important contribution to Korean diaspora studies for its emphasis on an underexposed part of the Korean diaspora and for its unique perspective on North Korea. This book would be of interest to anyone studying statelessness, biopolitics, autobiography, and feminist subjectivity.