Perspectives on Contemporary Korea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. viii, 246 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$35.00, paper; US$35.00, ebook. ISBN 9780472055456.
An increasing number of returning immigrants, expatriates, students, and workers are migrating to South Korea. As Korea becomes a hub of cultural exchange and global capital, the changing dynamics—the desire to migrate for prosperity—disrupts both the previous geographical flow from East to West and racial and ethnic hierarchies. David C. Oh’s anthology Mediating the South Korean Other provides a timely analysis of the Korean diaspora. It offers a wide range of subjects and methodologies divided into two parts and elucidates complicated, dynamic, and even contradictory moments of Korean others and others within and beyond Korea.
The book’s primary goal is to theorize racism in Korea, and racism directed at Koreans and by Koreans beyond the nation. Due to US neocolonial influences, Korea has accepted a white-centred racial hierarchy. Yet colonial under Japanese rule created a different modality as an “atypical postcolonial society” (8). Korean racism connects to white supremacy but cannot be reduced to Western racism. Otherwise, it will be a “translation loss” (216). White supremacy is adapted to benefit Koreanness and its “perceived meaning and value to Koreans” (222).
To translate local racism, the editor proposes “anthrocategorism” (injongchabyeol) as an alternative to racism in the Korean context. It is a system of “othering” and “discrimination based on perceived human groupings” and “hierarchical difference” (7). In otherings, “desirability and belonging” (222) co-exist with multiple factors, such as ethnocentricism, neo-nationalism, regions, postcolonialism, national development, geopolitical power, and Confucianism (7, 217, 224). Eastern European women are stereotyped as sex-workers associated with poverty (217, 222). The Western white woman is deemed educated, cosmopolitan, and a “wise mother and good wife,” (42) whose interracial relations with Korean men is “proof” (42) of the cosmopolitan, aspirational “global (heterosexual) desirability” (15) of Korean masculinity.
Foreigners and the Korean diaspora experience “conditional acceptance” (63, 224) through which their Korean Dream is contested. Korean Americans are portrayed as fluent in Korean, highlighting ethnic sameness (Korean) rather than cultural differences (American). Yet, Korean Americans’ belonging is contingent upon their “ability to perform native Koreanness” or “success” in the West (225). Multiculturalism (damunhwa) policy is also instrumental. Education and media programs are not intended to change Koreans but to teach foreign spouses and North Korean refugees how to assimilate into Korean society (12). Korean-Chinese nationals (joseonjok) can win at a survival audition even if they are “second-class citizens” (73), and Black entertainers can be celebrated as “exceptional others” (15) if they perform “authentic” Koreanness, such through Korean language ability or love for culture without confrontation.
Compared to white supremacy, which perceives being white as “superior and normal,” racial hierarchy in Korea does not perceive Koreans as superior, but still normal (219). Unlike invisible whiteness as neutral, Koreanness is made “explicit” (219) as exemplified by Koreans use of “our” (uri), as in “our country,” and the positive associations with this. Such a generalization reflects a “defensive nationalism” (220). Korean do not consider themselves superior because of their colonial trauma, but as a people endeavoring to recover the ethnic identity. There is a process of “double othering” by Koreans: a “self-othering” to be more like the advanced West, searching for acceptance, and an “othering expectation” that those lower on the global hierarchy should be like Koreans (13, 225).
The primary goal of this book is to delineate both the connections and distinctions between critical race studies in the US and those in Korea. While most contributors to this volume are US-trained academics, they attempt to answer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question, “Can the subaltern speak?” by using the language of the colonizers. Though some chapters broadly apply Western theory to the Korean context, on the whole the book achieves its goal, especially with the editor’s conclusion. That conclusion explains how each chapter contributes to the larger spectrum of critical race studies in Korea and beyond.
With different case studies from film and television, primarily via textual and discourse analysis, the chapters examine the intersectionality of and about Korean others and others in Korea and their “home” across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, physical ability, citizenship, class, geography, and economic power. Characters analyzed include celebrated interracial relatiohips between cosmopolitan Korean men and white Western women; a Korean Chinese (joseonjok) winner of a survival show; Black celebrities in Korea; Koreans in Japan (zainichi) and their sense of community; a former Korean-American idol exiled from Korea after failing to meet his military duties; a white Uzbek female ballerina who ends up working in the sex industry; a Vietnamese woman married to an elderly low-income Korean man; vilified but sympathetic Japanese figures; dehumanized North Korean defectors and refugees as the enemy; a 65-year-old female sex worker who abandoned her biracial son with an African-American solider and now searches for belonging.
Although the chapters’ scholarly insights and theoretical contributions are evident, the case studies could be timelier, as well as include greater literature reviews. Given the fast-shifting media industry, the inclusion of more social media representations might have lent more nuance to the volume. Critical studies is not meant to simply criticize but also to find a constructive critique. Myoung-Sun Song’s chapter provides a takeaway that illuminates how to move forward: “a simple interest in the truth—can help to uncover a new possibility in not only understanding marginalized identities but also expanding the notion of belonging in Korea” (137). Min Wha Han opens her chapter with an anecdote of her experience as a zainichi and her childhood searching for “cultural belonging” from and in Korea as a “co-ethnic other,” an “outsider within” (179).
No academic research can claim to be purely objective. Since I have closely followed many of the contributors’ works, it was pure joy to read this volume filled with the contributors’ autoethnographies, visions, and lifetime struggles and resillence as a part of the Korean diaspora. The book will prove not only a valuable source for academics and students interested in the Korean diaspora, its history, and complex identities, but also for those searching for answers through the humanities. An academic article can stem from someone’s personal diary that encraved the author’s life before it was published. Thus, it can always return to readers’ lives, even if the voices are often shadowed in theoretical terms.
Chuyun Oh
San Diego State University, San Diego