Abstract: This essay employs the "Korean War minor" as a methodological lens to demonstrate the need for more Asian Americanist critique at the intersection of American childhood studies and empire studies. While scholars have shown how children and children's culture were central to advancing US Cold War policy at home and abroad, this body of research largely neglects to interrogate the centrality of whiteness to dominant constructions of children/childhood. Attending to childhood as a technology of racist, patriarchal, imperial power, I elucidate how the biopolitics of the Korean War produce juvenile Asian-raced and gendered bodies at the precarious boundaries of childhood, as not quite children but, rather, childlike . I grapple, in particular, with how to reclaim the "girl" from US military archives, as the rubric of the "boy-mascot" and "camptown woman" overdetermine and constrain how the girl is allowed to come into view. I develop and enact this decolonial practice of reclaiming the Korean War minor through an analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl , a novel that is particularly invested in narrating the camptown girl into being. Fox Girl directs attention to the limits of a politics of childhood innocence and prompts a generative reconceptualization of childhood in relation to justice.
{"title":"Reclaiming the Korean War Minor: Beyond a Politics of Childhood Innocence","authors":"Sharon Tran","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a921580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a921580","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay employs the \"Korean War minor\" as a methodological lens to demonstrate the need for more Asian Americanist critique at the intersection of American childhood studies and empire studies. While scholars have shown how children and children's culture were central to advancing US Cold War policy at home and abroad, this body of research largely neglects to interrogate the centrality of whiteness to dominant constructions of children/childhood. Attending to childhood as a technology of racist, patriarchal, imperial power, I elucidate how the biopolitics of the Korean War produce juvenile Asian-raced and gendered bodies at the precarious boundaries of childhood, as not quite children but, rather, childlike . I grapple, in particular, with how to reclaim the \"girl\" from US military archives, as the rubric of the \"boy-mascot\" and \"camptown woman\" overdetermine and constrain how the girl is allowed to come into view. I develop and enact this decolonial practice of reclaiming the Korean War minor through an analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl , a novel that is particularly invested in narrating the camptown girl into being. Fox Girl directs attention to the limits of a politics of childhood innocence and prompts a generative reconceptualization of childhood in relation to justice.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140274934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: This essay examines a conjugal migration program at the Iwahig Penal Colony in the early twentieth-century Philippines that was designed by American colonial administrators and built by incarcerated Filipino men. The penal colony was part of a settler colonial project that was pushing to transform Indigenous spaces into terrains primed for the influx of land-seeking migrants from Hispanicized islands. Before the prison was opened, Indigenous Tagbanua lived at the site, which had never been governed by Euro-American colonizers. US officials cast Tagbanua families as impediments to development. The penal colony's incarcerated men were from lowland areas that had come under colonial rule for centuries. Colonial administrators saw their labor, conversely, as the linchpin that would turn the land, and eventually the entire island, into a terrain for commercial agriculture. Bureaucrats worked to transport women to Iwahig who had been in romantic relationships with prisoners before their arrests in order to support this project. Even though only 10 percent of incarcerated men were ever joined by their female partners, state agents cynically characterized the nuclear families formed through conjugal migration as institutions that sat at the foundation of the penal colony's settler colonial goals. Ultimately, American colonizers used these logics to confiscate Indigenous land that they identified as "underutilized," and integrate it into the colonial political economy.
{"title":"Agents of the Settler State: Incarcerated Filipino Workers, Conjugal Migration, and Indigenous Dispossession at the Iwahig Penal Colony","authors":"Karen Miller","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a921579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a921579","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay examines a conjugal migration program at the Iwahig Penal Colony in the early twentieth-century Philippines that was designed by American colonial administrators and built by incarcerated Filipino men. The penal colony was part of a settler colonial project that was pushing to transform Indigenous spaces into terrains primed for the influx of land-seeking migrants from Hispanicized islands. Before the prison was opened, Indigenous Tagbanua lived at the site, which had never been governed by Euro-American colonizers. US officials cast Tagbanua families as impediments to development. The penal colony's incarcerated men were from lowland areas that had come under colonial rule for centuries. Colonial administrators saw their labor, conversely, as the linchpin that would turn the land, and eventually the entire island, into a terrain for commercial agriculture. Bureaucrats worked to transport women to Iwahig who had been in romantic relationships with prisoners before their arrests in order to support this project. Even though only 10 percent of incarcerated men were ever joined by their female partners, state agents cynically characterized the nuclear families formed through conjugal migration as institutions that sat at the foundation of the penal colony's settler colonial goals. Ultimately, American colonizers used these logics to confiscate Indigenous land that they identified as \"underutilized,\" and integrate it into the colonial political economy.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140281429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: The critically acclaimed film Minari (2021), directed by Lee Isaac Chung, has been recognized for its emotionally moving on-screen representation of a rural Asian American experience. Building on transpacific scholarship, the present essay examines Minari as a narrative of "minor settler grief," an expression of grief by minor settlers that is closely tied to colonial and militarized aesthetics of earth across the Pacific. The article ties Minari's Korean American farming efforts in 1980s Arkansas to the intersecting histories of settler colonialism in the US and Japanese empires and South Korean authoritarian developmentalism. It considers the Korean nativist aesthetics of earth at work in Minari , an aesthetics of pastoral fantasy that had served imperialism and authoritarian developmentalism, as well as anticolonial imaginations in modern Korea and the diaspora. The essay argues that minor settler grief functions by obscuring relationalities, such as the histories of Native American removal in present-day Arkansas. Mining these histories and visual references enables a critique of certain expressions of grief that produce settler colonial recognition and forgetting.
{"title":"Minor Settler Grief: Korean Diaspora, Settler Colonialism, and the Pastoral Fantasy in Minari (2021)","authors":"Jeong Eun Annabel We","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a921581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a921581","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The critically acclaimed film Minari (2021), directed by Lee Isaac Chung, has been recognized for its emotionally moving on-screen representation of a rural Asian American experience. Building on transpacific scholarship, the present essay examines Minari as a narrative of \"minor settler grief,\" an expression of grief by minor settlers that is closely tied to colonial and militarized aesthetics of earth across the Pacific. The article ties Minari's Korean American farming efforts in 1980s Arkansas to the intersecting histories of settler colonialism in the US and Japanese empires and South Korean authoritarian developmentalism. It considers the Korean nativist aesthetics of earth at work in Minari , an aesthetics of pastoral fantasy that had served imperialism and authoritarian developmentalism, as well as anticolonial imaginations in modern Korea and the diaspora. The essay argues that minor settler grief functions by obscuring relationalities, such as the histories of Native American removal in present-day Arkansas. Mining these histories and visual references enables a critique of certain expressions of grief that produce settler colonial recognition and forgetting.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140281195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: Born to a free Black family, Jack Hodges (ca. 1763–1842) was arrested for the murder of a white man in 1819 and served a term at New York's Auburn State Prison, the world-famous prototype of industrial prison discipline, where he experienced a life-altering Christian conversion. Also known as Jacob Hodges, he became one of the nineteenth century's most famous incarcerated African Americans, appearing in popular crime writing, children's books, reform society reports, and spiritual biographies. Today, however, Hodges is unacknowledged, even among scholars of race and prison studies. My interdisciplinary essay advances both historical and interpretive claims. I reconstruct Hodges's life in the crucible of evangelical Protestantism, racial assimilation, and industrial market capitalism, which worked together, I argue, to shape the ideology of the modern prison system. I also analyze the vivid fantasies about Hodges that circulated in reformist literature. Unlike the majority of captives, whose struggles left only faint traces in the archives, Hodges was neither the object of dehumanizing violence nor the subject of coldly rational surveillance; he was listened to, admired, and treated with sympathy. As a case study in evangelical reformism's sentimental, possessive style of love, the literature about Hodges poses special challenges and opportunities for abolitionist reading.
{"title":"Conversions of Jacob Hodges: Religion, Race, and Labor in Prison Reform Literature","authors":"Caleb Smith","doi":"10.1353/aq.2024.a921578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a921578","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Born to a free Black family, Jack Hodges (ca. 1763–1842) was arrested for the murder of a white man in 1819 and served a term at New York's Auburn State Prison, the world-famous prototype of industrial prison discipline, where he experienced a life-altering Christian conversion. Also known as Jacob Hodges, he became one of the nineteenth century's most famous incarcerated African Americans, appearing in popular crime writing, children's books, reform society reports, and spiritual biographies. Today, however, Hodges is unacknowledged, even among scholars of race and prison studies. My interdisciplinary essay advances both historical and interpretive claims. I reconstruct Hodges's life in the crucible of evangelical Protestantism, racial assimilation, and industrial market capitalism, which worked together, I argue, to shape the ideology of the modern prison system. I also analyze the vivid fantasies about Hodges that circulated in reformist literature. Unlike the majority of captives, whose struggles left only faint traces in the archives, Hodges was neither the object of dehumanizing violence nor the subject of coldly rational surveillance; he was listened to, admired, and treated with sympathy. As a case study in evangelical reformism's sentimental, possessive style of love, the literature about Hodges poses special challenges and opportunities for abolitionist reading.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140282824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Index to American Quarterly Volume 75 March 2023 to December 2023","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a913527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a913527","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138616290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay examines Black political activism during the Korean War in publications that defined their present moment as slavery’s future and characterized slavery and antiblack racism as part of an ongoing war against Black people, connected to US empire’s wars abroad. In particular, it reads Lloyd Brown’s novel Iron City (1951), about four Black men incarcerated on trumped-up charges, alongside Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper (1950–55) and William Patterson’s We Charge Genocide (1951). Centering on four Black men serving time, the novel demonstrates that one tactic in the war against Black freedom is through the control of time and shows a connection between incarceration and slavery by revealing the disciplinary mechanism of time in service of US empire. Rather than acquiesce to the omnipotence of empire’s time and endless wars, however, Iron City, exemplifying the Black radical thought of the 1950s, imagines a different future, which I term fugitive othertime. Building on Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of a “fugitive elsewhere,” “an imagined place [that] might afford you a vision of freedom,” I argue for reading Iron City for its dream of a fugitive othertime, as an imagined temporality in which that elsewhere might exist.
{"title":"Imagining Freedom in Slavery’s Future: Iron City’s Fugitive Othertime in the US Carceral Empire-State","authors":"Caroline H. Yang","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a913519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a913519","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines Black political activism during the Korean War in publications that defined their present moment as slavery’s future and characterized slavery and antiblack racism as part of an ongoing war against Black people, connected to US empire’s wars abroad. In particular, it reads Lloyd Brown’s novel Iron City (1951), about four Black men incarcerated on trumped-up charges, alongside Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper (1950–55) and William Patterson’s We Charge Genocide (1951). Centering on four Black men serving time, the novel demonstrates that one tactic in the war against Black freedom is through the control of time and shows a connection between incarceration and slavery by revealing the disciplinary mechanism of time in service of US empire. Rather than acquiesce to the omnipotence of empire’s time and endless wars, however, Iron City, exemplifying the Black radical thought of the 1950s, imagines a different future, which I term fugitive othertime. Building on Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of a “fugitive elsewhere,” “an imagined place [that] might afford you a vision of freedom,” I argue for reading Iron City for its dream of a fugitive othertime, as an imagined temporality in which that elsewhere might exist.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139205021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Re)Mapping Worlds: An Indigenous (Studies) Perspective on the Potential for Abolitionist and Decolonial Futures","authors":"Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a913524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a913524","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139197224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay contributes a study of the undocumemoir to existing scholarship on undocu literature. I define the undocumemoir as an evolving literary form that transgresses literary boundaries and is distinguished by three defining characteristics: an engagement with immigration law and policy, a narrative arc of illegality, and the adoption of one or more generic conventions of established literary forms. I provide a reading of three recent undocumemoirs and argue that the undocumemoir departs from discussions of legal citizenship as full legal and political inclusion and show, instead, what I call citizenship violence and define as legal citizenship’s function as a mechanism to criminalize and contain migrants. I interpret the undocumemoir’s critique of citizenship violence as an incipient abolitionism invested in the creation of a borderless world that both echoes Black abolitionist and recent immigrant rights advocates’ critiques of legal citizenship, and invites a consideration of the liberatory potential in the rejection of legal citizenship.
{"title":"Citizenship Violence, Illegality, and Abolition in the Undocumemoir","authors":"Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a913521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a913521","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay contributes a study of the undocumemoir to existing scholarship on undocu literature. I define the undocumemoir as an evolving literary form that transgresses literary boundaries and is distinguished by three defining characteristics: an engagement with immigration law and policy, a narrative arc of illegality, and the adoption of one or more generic conventions of established literary forms. I provide a reading of three recent undocumemoirs and argue that the undocumemoir departs from discussions of legal citizenship as full legal and political inclusion and show, instead, what I call citizenship violence and define as legal citizenship’s function as a mechanism to criminalize and contain migrants. I interpret the undocumemoir’s critique of citizenship violence as an incipient abolitionism invested in the creation of a borderless world that both echoes Black abolitionist and recent immigrant rights advocates’ critiques of legal citizenship, and invites a consideration of the liberatory potential in the rejection of legal citizenship.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139196590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper, to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.
{"title":"Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School","authors":"Elizabeth C. Brown","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a913518","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a913518","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper, to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139200977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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