Upcoming Events

Racial Malleability: A Transpacific Approach to the Concept of Race in East Asia

Juwon Kim, a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korean Studies Institute, will discuss how race can be meaningfully applied to understanding colonial legacies in postwar East Asia, with attention to Korea between 1945 and 1953. This presentation examines how race can be meaningfully applied to the context of postwar East Asia, during which former colonial Koreans were repatriated-qua-(re)displaced after the Japanese defeat in 1945. Informed by critical race and ethnic studies scholarship, this analysis defines race as a normative category that distinguishes the human from the sub- and non-human by drawing from social contexts of class, gender, ability, political ideology, and geography. The presentation argues that race, conceptualized as a social construct more than a signifier of biological difference, has been integral to the postwar delineation of the “Korean” subject. After the Japanese defeat, despite the rhetoric of decolonizing and building a homogenous Korean nation-state, the U.S. military government (1945–1948) and the nascent South Korean state classified postwar Koreans into the South Korean “national,” Japanese “alien,” “displaced/diasporic person,” and the North Korean “enemy.” This classification in the South was largely based on the Japanese colonial-era (1910–1945) family and resident registration systems, which were retained as a border-making and surveillance mechanisms throughout the occupation and the Korean War (1950–1953). This presentation traces the hierarchical differentiation of former colonial Koreans in South Korea’s first Constitution, national configuration of the postcolonial economy, and the production of identification documents. What emerges across these sites is an operation of “racial malleability,” whereby the supposedly unified Korean subject comes to embody multiple and even contradictory racialized identities. Challenging the general presumption of Asian racial homogeneity, “racial malleability” demonstrates how empires and postcolonial nation-states mobilized colonial ideas of race and racialization to create difference and hierarchy within a seemingly homogenous population in East Asia.

*Dr. Kim’s talk doubles as a teaching demo, with 50 minutes of presentation and 40 minutes of Q&A to follow