Minor Settler Grief: Korean Diaspora, Settler Colonialism, and the Pastoral Fantasy in Minari (2021)

Abstract: The critically acclaimed film Minari (2021), directed by Lee Isaac Chung, has been recognized for its emotionally moving on-screen representation of a rural Asian American experience. Building on transpacific scholarship, the present essay examines Minari as a narrative of "minor settler grief," an expression of grief by minor settlers that is closely tied to colonial and militarized aesthetics of earth across the Pacific. The article ties Minari's Korean American farming efforts in 1980s Arkansas to the intersecting histories of settler colonialism in the US and Japanese empires and South Korean authoritarian developmentalism. It considers the Korean nativist aesthetics of earth at work in Minari , an aesthetics of pastoral fantasy that had served imperialism and authoritarian developmentalism, as well as anticolonial imaginations in modern Korea and the diaspora. The essay argues that minor settler grief functions by obscuring relationalities, such as the histories of Native American removal in present-day Arkansas. Mining these histories and visual references enables a critique of certain expressions of grief that produce settler colonial recognition and forgetting.