Jaeeun Kim

Contested Embrace (eBook, ePUB)

Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Scholars have long examined the relationship between nation-states and their "internal others," such as immigrants and ethnoracial minorities. Contested Embrace shifts the analytic focus to explore how a state relates to people it views as "external members" such as emigrants and diasporas. Specifically, Jaeeun Kim analyzes disputes over the belonging of Koreans in Japan and China, focusing on their contested relationship with the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula.

Extending the constructivist approach to nationalisms and the culturalist view of the modern state to a transnational context, Contested Embrace illuminates the political and bureaucratic construction of ethno-national populations beyond the territorial boundary of the state. Through a comparative analysis of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book shows how the configuration of geopolitics, bureaucratic techniques, and actors' agency shapes the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties. Kim demonstrates that being a "homeland" state or a member of the "transborder nation" is a precarious, arduous, and revocable political achievement.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 360
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Juli 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780804799614
• Artikelnr.: 48420520

Autorenporträt

Jaeeun Kim is Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the University of Michigan. Kim was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University from 2012 to 2013.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Transborder Ties
chapter abstract
This chapter begins with three ethnographic vignettes that reveal the
common experiences of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants and their
descendants in Japan and northeast China: forcible separation from and
neglect by their state of origin; shifting sense of loyalty and belonging
to multiple states involved; efforts to maintain, rebuild, or take
advantage of cross-border family ties; and complex dealings with various
documentation practices in attempts to reclaim membership in their putative
"homeland." The chapter situates the book in the literature on transborder
membership politics and discusses its distinctive contributions. Building
on a wide range of literature on official classification practices, modern
identification techniques, the symbolic power of the state, and the control
of cross-border migration, this chapter proposes a set of theoretical
arguments about how states' registration and documentation practices
contribute to the making, unmaking, and remaking of the "homeland state"
and the "transborder nation."
Chapter 1: Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move: Colonial State,
Migration, and Diasporic Nationhood
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 analyzes the construction of the legal, bureaucratic, and
semantic infrastructures of Korean nation-building, which emerged amidst
the dramatic transformation of the regional interstate system and the
massive intraregional migration in the beginning of the twentieth century.
By comparatively examining the colonial state's engagement with Korean
migrants in Japan and Manchuria, Chapter 1 shows how these infrastructures
helped the colonial state claim migrants of peninsular origin uniformly as
"its own"-if with varying degrees of success-despite differences among
these migrants, their resistance to this compulsory incorporation, and the
competing claims made by other states. The colonial state's transborder
engagement contributed to the formation of the Korean nation as a legally
codified, pervasively institutionalized, and enduringly documented
community both inside and outside the colony, providing a critical
institutional scaffolding for the diasporic imagination of Korean
nationalism and laying the ground for transborder membership politics for
decades to come.
Chapter 2: "Who Owns the Nation?" Cold War Competition over Zainichi
Koreans in Japan
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 examines the prolonged and vehement competition between North and
South Korea over the allegiance of colonial-era Korean migrants who
remained in Japan in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. The
divergent transborder nation-building strategies that the two postcolonial
states employed to make their own docile citizens out of this opaque and
recalcitrant population are identified. North Korea launched a successful
repatriation campaign and heavily invested in Korean enclaves, presenting
itself as a safe haven in which marginalized Koreans could find an escape.
South Korea instead fashioned itself as a broker that could facilitate
their integration into the Japanese mainstream, and a gatekeeper that could
control their engagement with families and home communities in South Korea.
The control of the bureaucratic persona of Koreans in Japan, buttressed by
the consensual practices of other states, was critical for South Korea's
eventual ascendancy in this competition.
Chapter 3: Beyond "Bamboo Curtain" and "Hermit Kingdom": Korean Chinese
between Two Socialist Fatherlands
chapter abstract
The successful incorporation of Koreans who remained in Manchuria into
communist China led to their disownment by South Korea, yet this
incorporation was not necessarily seen as incompatible with their special
tie to North Korea. Chapter 3 examines how China, North Korea, and the
Korean Chinese embraced or challenged varying interpretations of this
transborder tie, and how they reconfigured the boundary and the meaning of
the Korean nation. Beyond the realm of ethnic minority policies, it
examines the changing management of several cross-border migration flows
(both authorized and unauthorized) as a lens with which to explore the
unfolding of this relationship. It shows how various forms of cross-border
transactions profoundly shaped the war-making, state-making, and
nation-making (or unmaking) processes in both countries, as well as the
life trajectories of Korean Chinese who straddled their two fatherlands to
navigate the turbulent socialist transition in both countries.
Chapter 4: Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion: Korean Chinese
"Return" Migration to Post-Cold War South Korea
chapter abstract
Post Cold-War transborder membership politics gained momentum from the
influx of Korean Chinese into South Korea. Chapter 4 highlight the
protracted confusion, uncertainty, and indeterminacy that both state and
non-state actors in South Korea experienced in trying to "properly"
classify the long forgotten ethnonational kin, substantiate their belated
claim to membership, and regulate their access to the affluent "homeland."
It also reveals the porosity of the walls within which South Korea enclosed
itself to exclude the Korean Chinese from transborder membership. On the
one hand, Korean Chinese migrants struggled to redefine their collective
identity in the legal, political, and public spheres by presenting
themselves as an integral part of the Korean nation. But equally
importantly, Korean Chinese migrants challenged the state's monopolistic
truth claim about their individual identities by engaging in micropolitical
struggles in bureaucratic settings, mobilizing alternative genres of
identification and creating false paper identities for themselves.
Conclusion: Ethnic Nationalism, Globalization, and the Future of
Transborder Membership Politics
chapter abstract
The conclusion recapitulates the book's five main theoretical arguments. It
shows how each chapter highlights the fundamentally political,
performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building;
examines the bureaucratic underpinning of transborder membership politics;
reveals its historical nature; demonstrates the importance of the broader
interstate system in determining the efficacy of the state's transborder
claims-making; and offers a deeply agentic portrayal of transborder
membership politics by attending not only to the macropolitics but also to
the micropolitics of identity. It also demonstrates the values and the
limitations of ethnic nationalism as an analytic category by identifying
the historical genesis of the bureaucratic and semantic infrastructures of
ethnic nationalism, its variable manifestations (or lack thereof) in
different policy domains and repertoires of contention, and its persistence
as well as metamorphosis over time. A discussion on the future of
transborder membership politics in the contemporary phase of globalization
follows.