This remarkable and ambitious book will be of great use for the purposes of intellectual discussion and instruction, beyond the author's home discipline of literary studies, towards an interdisciplinary approach to understanding contemporary Korean history, society, culture, and political economy. Jin-kyung Lee's book covers diverse subjects, such as the Korean army in the service of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, the masculinity and subjectivity of Korean male soldiers under the U.S. empire and the Korean sub-empire, Korean sex work industries operating for the purposes of the governance of the domestic population and for that of U.S. soldiers in South Korea, respectively, and international migrant labor in South Korea as well as Korean immigrant migrant workers elsewhere.
The range of these subjects might give the impression that they could not possibly be made to come together as part of a single, coherent volume. This assumption would probably be buttressed given that many of the above-mentioned subjects have been established as stand-alone academic matters, especially in the Anglophone literature of social studies of South Korea. To name a few examples of work touching on similar topics, without necessarily making any connections between them, there are Katharine Moon's Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University, 1997), about prostitution in U.S. army bases in South Korea, applying a political scientific analysis to the international relationship between the US and Korea. Seungsook Moon's Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) takes a historical sociological point of view on the development of the military and military practices as a crucial matrix that continues to shape the Korean nation-state's gender regime of masculinity and femininity. Sealing Cheng's On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2010) is an ethnography of the changing demography of female sex workers of U.S. military bases in South Korea (from Korean national to migrant workers), thereby considering the social and human geography of military-related spaces.
These independently established, and thus seemingly separate, matters, however, are found to be convincingly coherent thanks to the author's brilliant and innovative conceptual work. First, Lee deploys proletarian labor as an organizing tool to understand the positions of soldiers, sex workers, military prostitutes, immigrants, and migrant workers. Building on Giorgio Agamben's critical engagement with Foucault's bio-power concept (asserting that it is not always consistent as a power of fostering life), Lee theorizes necropolitical labor, defining it as labor extracted as “living death” as an essential condition of their labor because it is already premised on the possibility of death (if not the eventual event of death for very many).
Second, in her utilization of the concept of proletarianization (meaning transformation of feudal laborer to industrial wageworkers), Lee does not use the concept of proletarianization simply for the purpose of describing the populations she deals with as being working class in common with one another. Rather, building on Virilio's theory, she employs the concept of proletarianization beyond manufacturing workers, by proposing that sexuality and race are proletarianized, in that working-class sexuality and race are appropriated and regularized as forms of labor, especially in the service industries of military work and sex work. For example, Lee demonstrates how sex workers (regardless of whether they are the target of the domestic market or that of U.S. military bases) and military soldiers are essential commodities of the labor force that they make up. Second, cases of immigrant Korean workers in North America and migrant workers in South Korea, in addition to military and sex workers, show how ethnicity is sexualized, and how sexuality is racialized, for the purposes of commodifying potential labor in permitted job markets.
Third, Lee impressively deconstructs the myth of Korean development as a success story by tracing positions held by the Korean nation-state that overlap between a status as provider of surrogate (or prosthetic) labor, such as Korean soldiers in the Vietnam war as paid-workers by the U.S. military state or immigrants to the U.S. for the purposes of the availability of a low-strata labor force. In particular, this surrogate labor is manifested in a neocolonial relationship between South Korea and the U.S. throughout the Vietnam War and its continuing period of economic development as well as a quasi-imperial position of South Korea to Vietnam and other countries that send migrant workers to South Korea. Fourth, her sharp analysis of Korean ethnic nationalism isn't limited to criticizing a military regime that exploited a Korean surrogate working class for the purposes of national growth, complicit with the U.S. empire. She also targets Korean leftist nationalism for its crucial role in solidifying Korean ethno-centrism through the propagation of anti-American that has been used in such a way as not to promote the transnationality of South Korea as a radical option.
Last, in addition to contributing to an understanding of how political economic analysis of surrogate labor can and must be applied at the intersection of class, race, and sexuality in order to apprehend this complicated nexus as an essential realm of proletarianization, Lee exemplifies a nuanced analysis of literary texts. She demonstrates how contemporary literary texts reveal, disguise, or mystify tensions among the venues of class, race and sexuality in the way fully congruent with her arguments and theoretical framework. Examples of the wide sweep of literary texts that she reads are novels by An Chŏng-hyo, An Il-sun, Cho Sŏn-jak, and Hwang Sŏk-yŏng, where her arguments shedding new light on the interpretative possibilities of these texts. Lee's work amounts to a rich supply of what could be called story-telling (about novels), for its ability to communicate its point in plain language through the use of potent examples. As such it will offer great assistance to Korean studies or interdisciplinary courses on labor, gender, ethno-nationalism, and transnationalism.
