The Military Camptown in Retrospect: Multiracial Korean American Subject Formation Along the Black-White Binary
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: This thesis applies theoretical approaches from the sociology of literature and AsianAmericanist critique to a study of two novels by multiracial Korean American authors.I investigate themes of multiracial identity and consumption in Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl, both set in the 1960's and 1970's gijichon or military camptown geography, recreational institutions established around U.S. military installations in the Republic of Korea.I trace the literary production of Korean American subjectivity along a socially constructed dichotomy of blackness and whiteness, examining the novels' representations of cross-racial interactions in a camptown economy based on the militarized sexual labor of working-class Korean women.I conclude that Black-White binarisms are reproduced in the gijichon through the consumption practices of both American military personnel and Korean gijichon workers, and that retrospective fictional accounts of gijichon multiraciality signal a shift in artistic, scholarly, and popular conceptualizations of Korean American and Asian American group identities.
Author: Perry Dal-nim Miller
Institution: Bowling Green State University
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W947535372