Abstract
This dissertation examines how the Atlanta Spa Shooting of March 16, 2021, became remembered, contested, and lived with among Korean Americans in Georgia and within U.S. state discourse. Rather than asking only whether Asian deaths are remembered or forgotten, it asks what it means to remember them, and how different forms of remembering shape political and moral relations to the past. Drawing on presidential statements, legal and policy materials, news coverage, community archives, ethnographic fieldwork, oral history materials, and interviews with Korean Americans across generations, the dissertation develops a three-part framework: mnemonic labor, mnemonic work, and mnemonic action. Mnemonic labor describes routinized forms of remembrance, especially state practices that classify violence through legal and administrative categories such as hate crime, gun violence, and domestic extremism. Mnemonic work refers to the contested production of meaning, as Korean Americans reinterpreted March 16 through narratives of transnational memory and the American Dream. Mnemonic action names forms of remembering that do not resolve the past into stable meaning, but persist through ordinary care, bodily vigilance, grief, silence, and continued existence. By distinguishing these modes, the dissertation shows that the politics of memory is not only about recognition or narrative, but also about how people remain responsible for unresolved pasts.
