Minu Park

Diasporic Indigeneity: Fermenting Shamanic Epistemologies in the Mundane  (monograph, working title)

This book-in-progress is a liminal, shape-shifting project that emerges at the intersection of academic scholarship, creative nonfiction, and ancestral listening. It draws from my academic  trainings, but resists institutional borders, especially those shaped by colonial models of citation and authorship. The writing aims not only to reflect on knowledge-making but to enact an embodied epistemology that ferments, accumulates, transforms, and lives.  

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This work commits to diasporic Korean shamanic epistemologies not as esoteric or lost traditions, but as ever-present, everyday ways of knowing embedded in daily gestures, griefs, meals, relationships, and refusals. It demonstrates how ancient knowledge systems do not disappear under colonial modernity, but rather lingers in the cracks of the ordinary. This book turns to fermentation as both metaphor and method to recover such subterranean knowledges. 

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Each chapter tends to a different site where this epistemology pulses - 

• Exploring the female body as a site of fermentation 

• Reading cinematic horror through abject and postcolonial hauntings

• On animal communication that allow for interspecies resonance of shamanic ontologies

• Tracing diasporic food-making as embodied knowledge across geographies 

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This book does not follow a linear, explanatory logic. It unfolds through impressions and sensorial accumulations. I am writing toward a form that feels fermented: slow, alive, unstable, and real. In this form, readers are invited taste and linger.