Korean Research Monograph, 36. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2013. 231 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-55729-104-2
The research articles published in Mobile Subjects present historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated accounts of transnational mobility in modern Korea over the long twentieth century. This collection demonstrates how Korean encounters with people, laws and institutions of other nations within and beyond the Korean Peninsula shaped modern ideas of nation and identity. While recognizing the centrality of discourses of Korean ethnic nationalism, the essays detail how ideas of national belonging have been shaped and contested in the context of movement, migration, and hierarchies of power between nations. The forces of global capitalism and the managerial state are ever present in detailed accounts of Koreans negotiating Japanese colonialism, maneuvering within United States occupation, and migrating to China for economic opportunities. Koreans are presented as central agents in the radical changes that transformed the nation through accounts that reveal the strategic and at times contradictory actions that took place in borderlands of language, ideology and behaviour.
Koreans were “the most mobile subjects in East Asia” at the beginning of the twentieth century (4) notes editor Wen-hsin Yeh. Yeh situates Korean mobility within the context of modern foreign encounters and the construction of a powerful territorial ideology of ethnic nationalism based on the myth that the Korean Peninsula was the place of origin and natural homeland for a homogenous race of people. While many scholars have examined the strategic uses of territoriality, the essays in this volume foreground the processes of cultural interaction, dislocation and dispossession as critically important to understanding the actual experiences of Koreans and to shaping understandings of the modern nation. The text sets itself apart from other collections on the Korean diaspora by refusing to define diaspora against nation as a solid reference point, but rather demonstrates how Korean modernity itself has been shaped by experiences of transnational movement and foreign encounter.
The individual research articles focus on migrations and engagements between Korea and China, Japan and the United States. The chapters regarding relations with China are primarily concerned with the Korean economic migration within the Sino-Korean border region. Kwangmin Kim’s chapter on Korean migration to Manchuria in the nineteenth century offers a rich account of the negotiated, contentious, and shifting relationship between Korean agricultural labourers with local and regional Chinese officials. While Kim’s work focuses on the political contexts that enabled Korean labourers to eventually settle on a long-term basis, Yishi Liu traces the lives of Korean workers in the Yanbian region and their position vis-à-vis the Chinese state through detailed analyses of Korean vernacular architecture. Liu’s descriptions span over a century of vernacular architecture detailing how Korean homes in the region reveal the lifestyles and the status of the Korean population. The border region received a great number of North Korean economic refugees after the fall of the Soviet Union and a series of natural disasters. While many predicted that the regime would fall given its economic collapse and the subsequent mass emigration, Ivo Plsek explains that the government retained its power through the crisis as refugees functioned as a kind of safety valve for the regime.
Rather than focus strictly on experiences of colonial displacement and dispossession, the essays on Korean experiences of Japanese colonialism highlight the contradictory and differential experiences shaped within colonial institutions and ideologies. As Yeh states, the essays “draw attention to disparities in the hierarchical spatial positions of Korea in nationalistic and colonial discourses” (6). In an essay on Japan’s lucrative opium economy, Miriam Kingsberg details the role of Koreans in distributing and selling opium to Chinese people in Manchuria. Koreans acted as imperial agents who enabled Japanese authorities to avoid the cultural contamination associated with Chinese opium users while enriching themselves through their presumed racial proximity to the Japanese. On the Korean Peninsula, the institution of Japanese family law radically altered the legal interpretations of household claims to inheritance, creating new opportunities for women to claim their rights to divorce and inheritance. Sungyun Lim notes that the figure of the “moving woman” who left her married family to selfishly pursue her own desires became a symbol of anxieties around changing family dynamics and the increased power of some women.
Taejin Hwang and Jane Cho bring rich archival detail to accounts of the United States occupation, revealing how the presence of the United States in Korea shaped Korean institutions, cultural practices, and ideologies. Hwang presents American military camptowns as “‘borderlands’ between two sovereign states” that shaped South Korean modernity in the postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s (88). The essay details the essential role of camptowns in shaping economic policy, domestic laws, foreign policy, and immigration patterns between South Korea and the United States. Cho focuses on how study abroad in the United States defined an elite class by tracking the institutional and ideological support for such studies. In the postwar years, cultural discourses considered an American education the pinnacle of academic achievement and praised those who succeeded in obtaining advanced degrees in the United States as national heroes.
This collection operates as a source book for those looking to engage in research on cross-border movements, colonial modernities, and diaspora in Korea and the Northeast Asian region. As the product of a multi-year project at the University of California Berkeley, this volume demonstrates the generative potential of intensive and extended engagement on a central research question. The essays present a number of approaches to the question of mobility and offer important methodological insights into effective inter-disciplinary engagement. Given the quality of original research presented in this volume, it is clear that the authors will have a lasting impact in the field of Korean Studies.
Rachael M. Joo
Middlebury College, Middlebury, USA