Nadia Y. Kim's Imperial Citizens joins the growing ranks of scholarship on race, diaspora, and citizenship emerging from the productive intersection of Asian studies and Asian American studies. Following the “transnational turn” in fields and disciplines that previously tended to be nation bound and U.S.-centric, Kim sets out in this book to bring historical depth and theoretical breadth by examining how pre-migration attitudes toward race and racial hierarchy shape and determine immigrants' experience of racial triangulation and racial ideologies long before their arrival in the United States. The transnational approach does more than avoid potential pitfalls of “methodological nationalism”—it also sheds light on the inseparability of (im)migrant subject formation and transnational racial subjection. Kim reveals how global racial ideologies are structured by interwoven dynamics of geopolitics and socioeconomic mobility, missionary encounters and military deployments, as well as the global circulation and consumption of mass media.
Particularly compelling are chapters 4 and 5 on “Racialization in South Korea, Part II: Koreans and White–Black America” and “Racial Terrain of Los Angeles and the United States.” These chapters discuss South Koreans' social location vis-à-vis the white–black military state and locate Korean Americans in the sociocultural and political economic landscape of Southern California, drawing from interviews with nearly a hundred South Korean and Korean American respondents on their perceptions of blackness, whiteness, and “Latinoness.” These discussions culminate in a discussion of the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings, which not only served as a watershed moment in race consciousness for the research subjects, but also kindled the author's own research interests, as she makes evident in the first pages of the introduction.
On a few occasions, insufficient sources detract from some of Kim's historical accounts. For instance, the section on “early encounters with white America” in chapter 2 relies almost entirely on Sucheng Chan's introductory chapter to the Korean American classic Quiet Odyssey by Mary Paik Lee. Though there is nothing egregiously wrong in this account, the tone is far too upbeat and one-sided about the contribution of American protestant missionaries, and it unproblematically reproduces the idea that American protestant missionaries were and continue to be held in high regard because of their contributions to medicine, education, and modernization in Korea, and for their support in Korean nationalist resistance against Japanese colonialism. The use of a more critical and robust historical scholarship would have added depth and nuance in interpreting this pivotal encounter in Korean history.
By employing interview and ethnographic data, Kim takes seriously the global dynamics of racialization as interpreted and experienced by ordinary people who navigate territorial borders and negotiate social hierarchies. The book ambitiously covers ideologies of race and ethnicity in premodern Korea to American military dominance in postwar Korea, from American ideologies of “white-over-black” racial hierarchy to Korean American reactions to both “model minority” and “perpetual foreigner” perceptions.
I have no quibbles with the book's nonpositivist research design, but even so, there are some methodological gaps that ultimately weaken some of the arguments. For instance, Kim explains that the socioeconomic status of her sample in Los Angeles was largely middle class, all presenting themselves as heterosexual and most of them married, but she concludes that there are no “discernible differences in nationalist leanings or in racial perceptions” (p. 256) between working-class and middle-class respondents. Similarly, she concedes that her sample is predominantly Christian or church affiliated, but then argues that she did not find “Christian identification to yield noticeable differences in racial understanding vis-à-vis non-Christians” (p. 133). These are not claims that can be substantiated by her research sampling.
Imperial Citizens, and the central argument implicit in its provocative title, could have been strengthened by a more substantial and sustained discussion of citizenship and imperialism. No doubt there exist unequal power relations between South Korea and the United States in terms of geopolitical hierarchy, military dominance, and cultural hegemony, and there is no question that these relations can be attributed to the dynamics of empire. But less clear are how the United States asserts its imperial power in South Korea, how American racial hierarchies became dominant over other preexisting sets of “race thinking,” and how this process of racialization can be described primarily as “imperial citizenship” with distinctly American stripes. Earlier sections on the convergence of Euro-American and Japanese ideologies of white racial superiority and, in particular, Japanese racism's influence on Korea (chapter 2, and briefly in chapter 3) convincingly reveal how various legacies of racial ideologies and institutions corroborate each other. But the centrality of imperial legacies of U.S. racism and racialization seems overdetermined by the book's focus on the U.S. military in South Korea and Korean Americans in the United States. Had the book featured the Zainichi (Korean Japanese) population or another diasporic group, for instance, the term “imperial citizens” might point to an entirely different set of dynamics concerning empire and citizenship.
Kim presents an engaging and clearly written book that challenges prevailing assumptions and raises new questions. It would work well for undergraduate and graduate courses on (geo)politics of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and would pair productively with other readings on multicuturalism and diasporic community formation. Especially for classes with significant numbers of immigrant Asian American students, the book should stimulate critical reflections on the students' own autobiographies and experiences. Kim's first-person anecdotes and observations throughout the book will be appreciated as encouragement to reflect on the readers' own resistance against, and complicity in, racism.
