Gut feelings: the sonic afterlives of Korean gastarbeiters and ESEA migration

This article proposes migrant sensoria as a methodological and epistemological framework for approaching histories of migration that remain absent, flattened, or reduced to administrative categories in official archives. Drawing on affect theory, sound studies, and archival critique, it argues that visceral and sonic sensations – such as breath, gut tension, fatigue, and bodily noise – function as embodied archives that register the social and political conditions of migration beyond representational capture. The discussion is anchored in Gut Feelings, an ongoing audio-visual and lecture-performance research project that emerged from the author’s experience as an East Asian migrant in the United Kingdom and expanded through engagement with archival materials and oral histories of Korean Gastarbeiter recruited to West Germany during the Cold War. Situating these histories alongside, but not collapsing them into, other Asian migratory contexts, including ESEA migration in the UK and the forced displacement of Koryoin in Central Asia, the article examines how temporary labor regimes, racialized expectations of silence, and institutional regulation shape embodied forms of endurance. By foregrounding sensory residue as historical evidence, the article advances a counter-archival approach that treats bodily sensation not as anecdotal excess but as a critical site of historical knowledge production.