Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2019. ix, 185 pp. US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0293-2.
In this provocative book, Jinah Kim explores the ways in which trans-Pacific victims of imperial colonial politics and militarism have navigated their relationships with decolonial politics since World War II, and the ensuing psychological transformations. Kim analyzes how key historical events and artwork continue to affect the lives of those in the Korean and Japanese diaspora. Interestingly, she does so through juxtaposing both “Eastern” and “non-Eastern” gazes: Hisae Yamanaka’s short story “A Fire in Fontana” (1988) with psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s famous analysis of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth (chapter 1); the Rodney King and Korean grocery-store riots in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, and Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s documentary film about this, Sa-I-Gu, with Héctor Tobar’s novel of Guatemalan refugees, The Tattooed Soldier (chapter 2); Samuel Fuller’s film noir of an interracial love affair, The Crimson Kimono, and Naomi Hirahara’s Japanese American murder mystery, Summer of the Big Bachi (chapter 3); and Teresa Ralli’s performance of Peruvian poet José Watanabe’s retelling of the Sophocles play in their Antigona, with Ann Patchett’s best-selling novel Bel Canto, and journalist Jennifer Egan’s New York Times piece on “The Liberation of Lori Benson,” both addressing the takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima in 1996, when controversial Alberto Fujimori was prime minister of Peru (chapter 4).
Jinah Kim is an assistant professor of communications studies at CSU-Northridge, and a specialist in the literature and history of cultural migration and contact between Asia and the Americas. Her interests lie in the legacies of modernity and war, the migration of bodies, and capital and its representations. Thus, she is prone to using a highly specialized Foucauldian rhetoric to examine the logic of power and racial-colonialism.
Kim argues that American politics is deeply linked to the capitalist market economy, particularly a special form of “racial capitalism” which is related to the colonial logic of white supremacy. Yet, she claims Americans’ professed logic is “America as the training center of the skilled servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice” (7–8). As anyone who has studied Foucault knows, however, these ideologies are used to form a political policy wrapped around cultural imperialism.
Kim organizes this book around the concepts of mourning, melancholia, and grief to try and understand the cognitive processes of those trans-Pacific and diaspora peoples who have experienced the pain of loss under war, deterritorialization, and neo- and decolonialization. One example is the demand placed on the Japanese people—and Japanese Americans—to be silent about their experiences under the current climate of necropolitics. This necropolitics is related to a fear of imperial, cultural, and military violence over the diaspora communities—communities which are still in melancholy. Melancholy is due to not being able to mourn and recover their grief. This process is permanent and self-perpetuating: the LA riots, for example, were caused by the intersection of American military violence and neocolonialism in Guatemala, and South Korean immigrant struggles with African Americans—all in an environment of deindustrialization and segregation.
One striking set of examples Kim analyzes is the plight of Koreans in the twentieth century. There were numerous Koreans brought to Japan to work during World War II. Many of these workers became atomic bomb victims. Likewise, I am reminded that while some 43,000 Koreans were transplanted to Sakhalin for the war effort, after the war ended and the Soviet Union occupied the island, these people were abandoned by all the governments involved, basically never to be thought of—i.e., heard from—again. That is, in these cases, their voices—indeed, their presence—have been effectively silenced. And this doesn’t even begin to consider the silence of all Koreans due to US geopolitical dominance over the Korean Peninsula since the Korean War (1950–1953). For example, talk of reunification of the two Koreas is rarely reported on in the United States.
Kim also thoroughly analyzes the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) insurgency while the Japanese Peruvian politician Alberto Fujimori was president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. Fujimori, the first ethnic Asian leader in the Western world, also had his citizenship questioned (like Barack Obama). The MRTA occupied the Japanese embassy for four months, holding 72 people hostage. The Fujimori government used the military to free the hostages, killing all but one of the 14 insurgents. This—along with his attempts to reform traditional aristocratic politics—was a controversial action, which Kim discusses using the symbolic vocabulary of the classic Greek tale of Antigone, the woman who publicly mourns her brother Polynices in open defiance of the king who killed him.
This is an important contribution, and should be read by not only students and scholars of literature and history, but also those from Asian American and East Asian studies, anthropology, sociology, and political science. That said, however, I need to point out some gaps which detract from an otherwise excellent book. First, Kim writes, “non-Japanese peoples who were put into [Japanese-American] internment camps—like Carolinians and Chamorro people in the Northern Mariana Islands—have also not received an apology” (she means, from the US government, under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 after the Japanese American redress movement) (37). However, the Japanese occupied the Mariana Islands in 1914 and Guam in 1941. Thus, if I understand things correctly, any relocating of these populations had to have been done by the Japanese military government. And if they were relocated by the Allies, to which camp were they sent? Hawaii? Loveday Camp in Australia? We aren’t told. Since apology is such a significant trope in Kim’s analysis, this lack of information or citation is noticeable. Also, no clear retrievable citations are given for her claim (67) that “[a]pproximately 70,000 Hiroshima victims were Korean—one in seven of the total hibakusha—and likely 20,000 Koreans were killed by the atomic bomb.” Other numbers are passed off equally cavalierly: “17,000 residents” (at the Colorado River Indian Reservation) (36), “nearly three million Asians and Latins immigrated in Los Angeles” (46), or “the nearly 80,000 Peruvians disappeared or murdered ” (90). However, overall this book is a valuable addition to the social science and humanities literature.
Nobuko Adachi
Illinois State University, Normal