Racial Malleability: A Transpacific Approach to the Concept of Race in East Asia

Juwon Kim, a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korean Studies Institute, will discuss how race can be meaningfully applied to understanding colonial legacies in postwar East Asia, with attention to Korea between 1945 and 1953. This presentation examines how race can be meaningfully applied to the context of postwar East Asia, during which former colonial Koreans were repatriated-qua-(re)displaced after the Japanese defeat in 1945. Informed by critical race and ethnic studies scholarship, this analysis defines race as a normative category that distinguishes the human from the sub- an…