Mixed Race Studies

Pure mixed blood: The multiple identities of Amerasians in South Korea

Indiana University
February 2007
256 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3253643

Sue-Je Lee Gage, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ithaca University

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of  Anthropology, Indiana University

Political and social currents play a role in how identities are ascribed and claimed by Amerasians in South Korea. Amerasians continue to be racialized as “other” within a set of desirable and undesirable qualities. Attitudes are complicated by the effects of globalization, especially the temporary immigration of US military personnel and guest workers, as well as current fashion and aesthetic trends. Within the context of a diversifying Korea, the very nature of “Amerasian” (American and Asian) and “Kosian” (Korean and South Asian) call into question notions of purity and race within the assumed ethnonation of Korea. How “pure” is pure when it comes to people and identity? In what ways do perceived appearances affect experiences?

Many Amerasians subscribe to a presumed racial hierarchy incorporated and contextualized in the countries of their births from a western perspective on “race” in their own identity ascription and claiming. However, this hierarchy is neither simple nor fixed. It is complicated by perceptions and notions of “race” and what it means to be “human.” Class, gender, generation, English-speaking ability, appearance/beauty, parentage, education, and social support networks and organization affiliations also influence attitudes and perceptions. My research examines the local, global, and historical reasons that contribute to the ways Amerasians are perceived, as well as the ways they perceive themselves, including the on-going racial/ethnic/political dialogue within Korea and between Korea, the United States, and the international community.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• List of illustrations and appendixes
• Note to Reader
• CHAPTER 1. Introduction
  • Methodology
  • Theory
  • Overview of the Book
• Part I: The Thick and Thin of Blood
  • CHAPTER 2. Minjok and the History of Korean Nationalism
    • Pre-Modern Context and Early Korean Interactions with the West
    • Nationalist Movements and the Articulation of Identities
    • US-ROK Relation
    • The More Recent Period
    • Conclusion
  • CHAPTER 3. Racing Self and Otherness in South Korea
    • Racing the Korean Self
    • Representations
    • Racing the Other in Korea
    • Globalization
    • Conclusion
  • CHAPTER 4. The “Amerasian Problem”: Blood, Duty, and Race
    • Representations of Amerasian Identity in the United States
    • Transnational Advocacy Networks Prior to the 1980s
    • Amerasian Policy Formation
    • Conclusion
• Part II: The Purity of Mixed Blood
  • CHAPTER 5. Living “Amerasian”
    • The Legacy of a Name: Looking “American,” Feeling “Korean”
    • American Names & Korean Names
    • Marriage & Breeding Out Amerasian Blood
    • Amerasian Entertainers & Celebrities
    • “Our Country” & Patriotism
    • Redefining and Claiming Amerasian Identity
    • Conclusion
  • CHAPTER 6. “We Want What Everybody Else Wants, to Live”
    • Human Rights, International Community & Globalization
    • From “other” to “Other
    • Immigrating to the US – Why and Why not?
    • Conclusion
• Part III: Globalizing Blood – Intersections and Conclusion
  • CHAPTER 7. Conclusion: Pure Mixed Blood
  • CHAPTER 8. Afterward: Feeling the Want of Something More – ashwiwŏ hada
• Epilogue
• Appendix A Glossary
• Appendix B Illustrations
• Bibliography
• Curriculum Vitae

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

• Figure 1.1 US Military Map of Korea. Highlights the major US military installations – Camp Casey in Tongduch’on, Osan Airbase near Pyongt’aek.
• Figure 1.2 Kyonggi Province (Gyeonggi-do) – Includes Tongduch’on to the north of Seoul, Seoul, and Pyongt’aek to the south of Seoul.
• Figure 1.3 Shalom House Building
• Figure 3.1 Korea Special Tourism sign – “This Facility is for Foreigners, Tourists, and US Soldiers Stationed in Korea Only.”
• Figure 3.2 Club Proof of Inspection by the Second Infantry, US Army in Tongduch’on – “Cheer” is handwritten on the label on the right corner.
• Figure 3.3 Korea Special Tourism Association Club. Exchange Bank located on the Right Side of the Club.
• Figure 3.4 Tongduch’on’s Kijich’on
• Figure 3.5 Molly Holt
• Figure 3.6 Director Woo, Sun-duk and Two Women Working in the Clubs
• Figure 3.7 Advertisement for Whitening Lotion for Men
• Figure 4.1 St. Vincent’s Home Sign
• Figure 5.1 I am Korean
• Figure 5.2 I am Korean
• Figure 5.3 We are Korean
• Figure 5.4 We are Korean
• Figure 5.5 I am Korean
• Figure 5.6 We are Korean
• Figure 5.7 I am Korean
• Figure 5.8 We are Korean
• Figure 5.9 We are Korean
• Figure 5.10 Pearl S. Buck Summer Camp 2002, Picture Taken at the Blue House
• Figure 5.11 Mrs. Chung Rodrigues
• Figure 5.12 Mrs. and Mr. Kang
• Figure 6.1 ACA Students
• Figure 6.2 Sports Day
• Figure 6.3 Durihana ACA Logo
• Figure 6.4 Marriage and Visa Center in Itaewon
• Figure 7.1 The Right to Experience Life
• Figure 8.1 Dance Therapy at Sunlit Sisters’ Center
• Figure 8.2 Family and Me in Tongduch’on
• Figure 8.3 Family in Tongduch’on
• Figure 8.4 Family in Anjong-ri
• Figure 8.5 Family and Me in Anjong-ri
• Figure 9.1 Baby Buddhas

APPENDIXES

• Appendix A Glossary
• Appendix B Illustrations
• Appendix C Map of Tongduch’on with Legend of Clubs and Shops

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Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley

University Press of Florida
2000
160 pages
6 x 9
Cloth: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1733-4 ISBN 10: 0-8130-1733-5
Paper: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-2117-1 ISBN 10: 0-8130-2117-0

Edited and Annotated by

Daniel W. Stowell, Director & Editor
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln

Foreword by Eugene Genovese

For the first time, all the proslavery—but also pro-black—writings of Zephaniah Kingsley (1765-1843) appear together in one volume. Kingsley was a slave trader and the owner of a large plantation near Jacksonville in what was then Spanish East Florida. He married one of his slaves and had children with several others.

While Kingsley eventually emancipated all of his children and their mothers, he became alarmed at the deteriorating status of free blacks after Florida became a territory in 1821. His unusual protest of their treatment, “A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society [,as it exists in some governments and colonies in America, and in the United States, under the name of slavery: with its necessity and advantages (1833)],” called for a three-caste society that separated race and class. He envisioned a buffer caste of free people of color between whites and enslaved blacks, but united with whites by economic interests. The treatise simultaneously upheld the legitimacy and necessity of slavery yet assaulted the white southern premise of abject black inferiority.

Daniel Stowell carefully assembles all of Kingsley’s writings on race and slavery to illuminate the evolution of his thought. The intriguing hybrid text of the four editions of the treatise clearly identifies both subtle and substantial differences among the editions. Other extensively annotated documents show how Kingsley’s interracial family and his experiences in various slaveholding societies in the Caribbean and South America influenced his thinking on race, class, and slavery.

In despair of ever changing the slaveholding patterns of Florida, Kingsley finally settled his mixed-race children and several of his slaves in Haiti; however, he left behind more than 80 of his slaves to work his plantations in Florida. When he died, these African Americans remained in bondage, unfortunate victims of hardening American racial attitudes and of Kingsley’s effort to “balance evils judiciously.”

Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790–1792

French Historical Studies
Volume 31, Number 4 (2008)
pages 581-607
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-2008-007

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

On October 16, 1790, a group of topas men wrote a petition to the Colonial Assembly at Pondichéry, protesting the decision of September that year to exclude them from the electoral list of active citizens on the basis of “race.” These propertied, free men of color demanded to have the same rights as Europeans and the métis. While historians of the French empire have long considered how mulatto and creole people in the French Caribbean negotiated the boundaries of citizenship after the Revolution, the debate that emerged in India offers a different view. This essay argues that the topas drew on precedents from other French colonies, as well as on the status of foreigners in France itself, to argue that domicile (ius solis) rather than bloodline (ius sanguinis) formed the basis of what it meant to be French. Hence skin color could not be a barrier to citizenship rights.

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Historicizing Hybridity and the Politics of Location: Three Early Colonial Indian Narratives

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (2007)
pages 143-155
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082996

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

From White Mughals to Vikram Seth, novels, historical blockbusters and more nuanced anthropological and postcolonial critiques have exposed the fiction of fixed notions of “race” through sensitive understandings of the liminal space of the “inter-racial” relationship and the “mixed-race” experience. In an era where the textual and cultural production of hybridity has become a new form of cultural capital, articulations of racial “inbetween-ness” have also become somewhat universalised and romanticised. While acknowledging the radical potential of these new paradigms of transnational slippage and métissage as an affront to the old narratives of racial certainty, this article challenges the universalization of the term “mixed-race” in the context of colonial India, both ontologically and historically. By historicising cultural difference according to the social syntax that gives it meaning, it asks whether the term “mixed race” has political relevance in all colonial spaces and across time and culture or whether it needs to be interrogated as an historical product in itself. Finallly, this article turns to the politics of location in a global context to illustrate the limits of Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space” by moving beyond celebratory and static notions of the “mixed-race” experience.

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Identity Notes Part One: Playing in the Light

American University Law Review
Volume 45, Number 3 (February 1996)
pages 695-720

Adrienne D. Davis, Vice Provost; William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law
Washington University in St. Louis

What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as “American”?’

INTRODUCTION

There is now a well-developed and compelling body of scholarship challenging the notion that race is either a natural or a scientific category. Scholarly treatments regarding the social construction of race are still finding their way into law and legal scholarship. Most of these treatments argue that race is socially constructed. This Essay makes a different point. Using two cases from the early and midnineteenth century, I discuss how race is socially constructed, why it matters, and how the process can appear in issues as dry as an allocation of the burden of proof. In particular, I focus on the construction of whiteness, which, I argue, drives the process of legally classifying groups of color.

A focus on the politics of local contests invites an archaeological exploration of historic sites where a black/white paradigm of race was in crisis and vulnerable to correction. In each of these crises, however, the force of the paradigm itself prevailed, reinscribing itself with yet more force in law and the lives of all three groups implicated: African Americans, other groups of color, and whites. An historical assessment of the relationship of other groups of color to a black/white paradigm reveals the paradigm as not only undescriptive and inaccurate, but debilitating for legal analysis, as well as civil rights oriented organizing.

The two cases reveal distinct dynamics of the binary model, which I suggest is hegemonic for the following reasons. A primary mechanism of this model is its disciplining function on other groups of color seeking legal rights and recognition. It is an organizing principle for knowledge (here, law), it has an internal hierarchy of power, it masks this hierarchy through a seemingly neutral shell of “race,” and it operates as self-reinforcing through its disciplining mechanism. In addition, in classicly hegemonic fashion, the paradigm includes rules that prove to be internally inconsistent. The cases reveal the internal contradiction of the rules employed by courts to establish racial identity at law. In one opinion, jurists use mutually exclusive determinations of racial identity in resolving a single legal matter. The underlying facts and interests involved suggest that the court’s reasoning was driven not by the interests of the immediate parties, but rather by a larger, perhaps unconscious, desire to define white identity and secure white liberty interests.

Finally, I hope that the contrast of the two cases demonstrates that the black/white paradigm exercises influence on legal reasoning across time and geographic space, and also that the paradigm itself appears to be a natural ordering, obscuring the assumption of a white subject position. Though involving seemingly unrelated legal conflicts, the cases are linked together through the discursive structure formed by binarism. It orders the legal logic and rhetoric of the judges, as well as the arguments of the litigants. Both cases prove to be inescapably embedded with racial determinations and, inevitably, legal constructions.

What follows stems from a series of discussions, and remains an inquiry directed toward certain suggestive episodes within a much broader history that I leave to others to continue to explore and excavate…

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