Abstract
This article examines the challenges of representing diasporic history via an analysis of Kim Young-ha's novel Geomeun Kkot (Black Flower), a historical fiction novel that depicts the early twentieth century migration of Koreans to Mexico. I argue that Black Flower critiques the ethnonational basis of Korean sovereignty in the homeland and the diaspora in order to contest how the South Korean state increasingly claims diasporic history as its own. Yet the novel also denies the existence of Korean descendants in Mexico who continue to assert their Koreanness—an erasure that encodes the very hierarchies between homeland and diaspora that the novel proports to disrupt, reflecting the stratifications of authenticity embedded in contemporary South Korean literary attempts to represent Korean diasporic communities.