Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea by Hae Yeon Choo and Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea by Jaeeun Kim both approach the formation of national membership and citizenship in light of the experiences of people at the margins of nation—in Choo's book, the Filipina migrants in South Korea, and in Kim's book, the Korean diaspora in Japan and China. Understood through these others of the nation, national membership is not a bundle of legal rights but a negotiated relationship among the state, civil society, and individuals. In tune with the growing interest in the rights-claims of people at the margins in citizenship studies of the last decade or so, Choo and Kim delve into the political and cultural construction of rights, identities, and entitlements. In their studies migration is, in turn, not simply the pursuit of economic opportunity but also a political, symbolic, and moral quest for belonging.
Notwithstanding this commonality, Kim and Choo offer contrasting and complementary perspectives on nation. Kim's Contested Embrace presents a state-centered perspective that centers on the bureaucratic and symbolic power of the state in regulating the movement of people. Breaking with the territory-bound analysis of nation-state and citizenship, Contested Embrace conceptualizes the politics of “transborder membership,” in which the classification, identification, and boundary-crossing of ethnonational kin populations living outside the territory are “made, unmade, and remade” by the interaction of these diasporic populations, state bureaucracy, and regional interstate dynamics. In contrast, Choo shifts the analytic focus of national membership from the state to civil society in her move to “decenter” the inquiry. Choo's Decentering Citizenship concerns not so much the state's management of migrants as the ingenious responses of the Filipina migrants, who, in interactions with South Korean civil society, frame their rights in family values, gender norms, and human dignity. While delineating legacies of the democracy struggle of the 1980s, Choo looks beneath the cosmopolitanism and human rights of social activism since the 1990s to expose the logic of gender and sexuality in everyday politics.
Kim's Contested Embrace presents a commanding account the long-term macrohistorical and regional interstate dynamics of the Korean transborder membership, mapping the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Korean migration and repatriation across East Asia. Whereas other scholars take the stringent regulation of in-migration as evidence of the ongoing importance of the nation-state in an age of migration and globalization, Kim looks into the state's direct and long-distance management of the diasporic population. She weaves together discrete studies of the state-diaspora relationship across time and borders with her comparative and historical method.
Contributing to the colonial modernity thesis, Contested Embrace ascribes the construction of Korean modernity to the legal, bureaucratic, and symbolic practices of the Japanese colonial power, which established the vertical relationship of the state and its people and the horizontal relationship among the people. In addition to the colonial semantics of the Korean people (kungmin and minjok), the family registration system was integral to this modern nation-building. Initially enacted in Japan, the family registration system was introduced to Korea in 1909, on the eve of Japanese colonization, and was consolidated in the next decade, eliminating mediating authorities and practices such as clan, caste, and local powers. Kim elucidates the role of the family registration system not only in differentiating Koreans and Japanese in the Japanese empire but also in regulating the migration of Koreans across the empire. For instance, the passport-like travel document issued by the colonial police listed the person's place of birth. Familiar organizations and events (e.g., Chosonin Minhoe and the Wanbaoshan Incident) are cited in Kim's book for their pertinence to the making of transborder membership.
During the Cold War, the national classification and identification of Koreans in Japan and China encapsulated the complex process of nation-state formation in East Asia, since the end of the Japanese empire was followed by the Korean War and shifting regional politics. For example, South Korea and North Korea offered Koreans in Japan, who faced exclusion there, quite different versions of transborder membership. The South Korean state functioned as “a broker” to facilitate the integration of Koreans into Japanese society, issuing family registration documents, “nationals abroad” certificates, and passports to Koreans in Japan. In contrast, the North Korean state cast itself as “a safe haven” to which Koreans in Japan could escape from exclusion and poverty and pursue education and social mobility, and thus orchestrated a repatriation program in cooperation with the Japanese state.
A similar drive of Korean Chinese for survival and educational opportunity developed their transborder relationships with North Korea and China into quasi-dual national membership. Unlike Koreans in Japan, Koreans in China were simultaneously integrated as Chinese nationals and encouraged by China and North Korea to settle in North Korea, so as to join the Korean War and postwar reconstruction efforts. In a decisive contribution to the literature, Kim also unearths the waves of unofficial migration of Korean Chinese between China and North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s, which are buried in the official history of Korean Chinese. Her ethnographic analysis of Korean Chinese migrants’ perplexing encounters with North Korean modernization (e.g., hygiene and labor discipline) is insightful. Though some scholars may differ with her, Kim argues that these migrants’ quasi-dual membership exudes the flexibility and agency of Koreans at least until the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The return migration of Korean Chinese to South Korea from the 1990s on has been met by the reluctant and selective embrace of the South Korean state. Kim's Contested Embrace delineates the laws, policies, and bureaucratic techniques that regulate their migration and residency in South Korea, while following Korean Chinese migrants’ own moral indignation and strategic claims and practices of rights and membership in South Korea. Their resorting to using counterfeit papers and DNA evidence available on the black market is, for instance, necessary to comply with the terms of the transborder membership constructed by the South Korean state. Fulfilling family obligations is, paradoxically, rendered possible only by severing family ties on paper so that, for instance, a woman can marry a South Korean man and thus support her legally divorced spouse and their children in China.
As a type of long-distance nationalism, transborder membership is not a popular imagined construct but a political and bureaucratic invention. Given this conceptualization, the accounts of national membership across the borders in Kim's Contested Embrace remain largely dissociated from other aspects of building a nation-state, such as socioeconomic development and democratization.
In contrast, explaining the social and cultural process of national membership is the central aim of Choo's Decentering Citizenship, which focuses on the Filipina migrant workers in South Korea since the 1990s. Choo argues that the state's immigration raids are not a means to crack down on the undocumented migrants but rather to manage them by containing them in factory towns and disciplining them through the fear of deportation. These geographic and social boundaries have been breached by the collective resistance of South Korean activists and Filipina migrant workers who block immigration vans on the streets and mobilize the media. After explaining these acts of solidarity, Choo spends much of the rest of Decentering Citizenship delineating the differences among and across the activists and the workers—splits and conflicts along the lines of nationalism, generation, gender, sexuality, and dignity. For instance, South Korean male and female advocates of the old generation relate to the migrants, respectively, as national protectors and mothers of the nation. And although younger South Korean activists and volunteers are generally known to espouse cosmopolitanism, Choo unpacks this as consisting of the desire to travel, experience a new culture, and escape boredom and a sense of the meaninglessness of life.
Choo's Decentering Citizenship interrogates the social and cultural construction of the Filipina workers that groups them into the following three dichotomies: migrant workers and migrant wives, factory workers and bar hostesses, and migrant wives and bar hostesses. The symbolic demarcation of migrant workers and migrant wives results from the paternalistic and gendered approach of civil society groups toward the migrants. Religious centers and labor activists provide the migrant factory workers with labor counseling and medical assistance, yet often without due respect for the migrants’ own choices. Other religious groups and NGOs, with funding from the government, draw on multiculturalism to teach migrant wives about child rearing and family relations with husbands and in-laws.
The spatial construction of factory workers and bar hostesses reflects a gendered organization of work and community relations, Choo argues. These two groups of Filipina workers not only reside in different geographic places—factories and US military camp towns—but also differ in their labor processes and their abilities to claim rights. Despite holding less-skilled jobs and earning less than their male counterparts, migrant women factory workers develop coethnic social networks; tap into their male counterparts’ social bonding with South Korean factory owners; and garner resources for finding jobs, skills training, and higher wages. Lacking such social and symbolic resources, bar hostesses in the US camp towns face isolation and alienation at work. They survive on tips and commissions on sales and must meet a monthly quota in the sale of drinks, developing paternalist ties with female club owners and managers and pursuing romantic relationships with GIs both to sell drinks and, potentially, to escape into marriage and emigration to the US. South Korean activists contrast these two groups of Filipina workers, treating the factory workers as breadwinners deserving of rights and respect but regarding bar hostesses as victims of prostitution and sexual trafficking and thus as objects of pity, if not contempt.
The different rights-claims of migrant wives and bar hostesses are also socially constructed. Both migrant wives and bar hostesses reject the discourse of their victimization, which is readily imposed by their South Korean advocates. Migrant wives construe their husbands’ domestic abuse as the “Korean way” and adopt motherhood as the basis for claiming their rights and national membership in South Korea. If South Korean activists juxtapose pure love and brokered international marriages, then these migrant wives meld love and economic sustainability. Bar hostesses, for their part, shed the label of being victims of prostitution or sexual trafficking and cultivate their own upward path of mobility through the pursuit of romantic relationships with GIs.
Decentering Citizenship demonstrates the importance of the everyday life and moral community of the migrants as the sites of their rights-claims. As much as Choo's analysis is a rare in-depth and comparative study of migrant activism, its emphasis on differences in identities and rights-claims across the migrants and activists raises the thorny question of the relationship between solidarity and difference.
Both Kim's Contested Embrace and Choo's Decentering Citizenship are exemplary comparative studies of migrants, national membership, and citizenship. In Contested Embrace, migrants seek to acquire identification papers at all costs, so as to pursue a better life and fulfill family responsibilities. In the process, they lose their otherness in seeking to be counted as members of the transborder nation. In Decentering Citizenship, migrants with or without proper documents create their own claims to rights and entitlements through the building of social networks and moral community. Their gendered otherness is not a liability but a necessary location of their belonging.
