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Mechanisms of (in)visibility: Korean militarized subjects, critical sensing, and the project of decolonization

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Mechanisms of (in)visibility: Korean militarized subjects, critical sensing, and the project of decolonization

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MECHANISMS OF (IN)VISIBILITY:
KOREAN MILITARIZED SUBJECTS, CRITICAL SENSING, AND THE
PROJECT OF DECOLONIZATION

by
Crystal Mun-hye Baik

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSIY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPY
(AMERICAN STUDIES & ETHNICITY)
December 2014

Copyright 2014 Crystal Mun-hye Baik

ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures iv
Abstract vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
Critical Sensing as Method and Praxis 3
Literature Review 5
Chapter Outline 13
Methodology 16
Chapter 1: Critical Sensing as Methodological Framework 19
Critical Sensing: An Introduction 22
The Problematics of Vision & Visuality 26
Critical Sensing As a Methodological Framework 31
Critical Sensing as Multi-Sensory 31
Critical Sensing As Experiential 34
Critical Sensing: Vision as Relational 37
Conclusion: Crow’s Eye View 38
Chapter 2: The Unmaking of the Home: Korean/Americans, the Home Film, and the 41
Politics of Belonging

Methodology 45
The Emergence of American Home Film Practice 49
Korean/Americans, Home Film Practice, and Un/Becoming An American 54
Background, Framing, & Context: Korean/American Home Films 54
Home Footage as Intercultural Formations: Irvin Paik’s Home Films 56

iii
The Domestic is the Transnational: Shungnak “Luke” Kim & Home Films 70
Conclusion 87
Chapter 3: American Humanitarianism: Memory, Justice, and The Glendale “Comfort” 90
Women” Memorial

“Comfort Women” Discourse: U.S. Citizenship, American Civic Duty, & Strategic 92
Forgetting
Motivations & Insights 95
“Comfort Women,” Women’s Rights as Human Rights, and U.S.-Based Advocacy 97
“Women’s Rights as Human Rights”: Voice, Visibility and Truth 97
Glendale and the Korean Americans for Justice (KAJ) 100
Glendale “Comfort Women” Memorial, Critical Sensing, 108
and the Politics of Memory

Glendale “Comfort Women” Memorial 109
Conclusion 122
Chapter 4: Unfaithful Returns: Jane Jin Kaisen, Jeju-do, and Reiterations of Dissent 124

Korean Transnational Adoptees, Cultural Production, and the “Counterpublic” 127
“Freedom is not Given Freely”: Reiterations of Dissent & Critical Sensing 134
Conclusion 159
Coda: Possibilities and Future Iterations 162
Bibliography 168
Chapter Notes 181

iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1
Ciné-Kodak Advertisement for Color Film and Movie Camera (1947) 53

Figures 2.2-4
Still shots from Irvin Paik’s home films, Arthur returns home 64

Figure 2.5-7
Still shots from Irvin Paik’s home films, Family at Exposition Park 66

Figure 2.8
Map of early “Koreatown” in Los Angeles (1930-1955) 67

Figure 2.9
Shungnak “Luke” Kim, U.S. Immigrant Identification Card 72

Figure 2.10
Still shot from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home films
Near the Union Theological Seminary 76

Figure 2.11
Still shot from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home films
Aerial shot of the Philippines 77

Figures 2.12-14
Still shot from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home films
Korean Presbyterian Church Summer Bazaars 79

Figures 2.15-16
Still shots from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home film
National Armed Forces Day, Women in Hanbok 83

Figures 2.17-18
Still shots from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home film,
National Armed Forces Day, Men in Parade Attire 84

Figure 2.19
Still shot from Irvin Paik’s home films, Irvin’s first encounter with the movie camera 88

Figure 3.1
Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial 109

Figures 3.2-3
Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial 110

v
Figure 3.4
Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial 110

Figures 3.5-6
Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial 112

Figure 4.1
Reiterations of Dissent (2011), Installation View 125

Figure 4.2
Still shot from “Lamentations of the Dead” in Reiterations of Dissent (2011) 140

Figure 4.3
Layout of Dissident Translations (2011) at Kunstbygning (Art Building) 143

Figure 4.4
Reiterations of Dissent at Art C Gallery (August 2013) 145

Figure 4.5
Still shot from “Ghosts” in Reiterations of Dissent (2011) 148

Figure 4.6
Still shot from “Ghosts” in Reiterations of Dissent (2011) 150

Figure 4.7
Still shot from Reiterations of Dissent (2011),
Archive footage by Yang Dong-Kyo used in “History of Endless Rebellion” 156

vi
ABSTRACT
In "Mechanisms of (In)visibility: Korean Militarized Subjects, Critical Sensing, and The
Possibility of Decolonization,” I focus on a corpus of obscured memories, subjectivities, and
profound contradictions underlying the making of a Korean transnational milieu across the
Pacific and in the United States (1945 to present). Specifically, I interrogate how contemporary
Korean/American cultural institutions, affiliated actors, and the U.S. state deploy an array of
visual memory objects, ranging from the Korean/American home film to “comfort women”
memorials, to reproduce a seamless narrative of “becoming American,” in which racialized and
gendered Korean subjects are eventually absorbed into a liberal U.S. nation-state. Configured as
mechanisms of visibility, or visual technologies that consolidate the relationship between vision,
transparency, and the “real,” these mnemonic objects generate a hypervisible Korean/American
citizen sutured to the “Americanized” logics of justice, freedom, and liberation.
Yet, such a discourse is not totalizing nor is it without gaps and slippages. Through a
supple method I conceptualize as critical sensing—an interdisciplinary approach that interrupts
the processes in which visual constructions are naturalized as unmediated, direct, and hence,
truthful—mechanisms of visibility are recalibrated as unstable and always already shifting
formations that puncture progressive renderings of nation, time, and space. Albeit fleeting, these
moments of disruption hint at or “sense” transnational memories of war, militarization, and
violence that exceed the intertwined narratives of citizenship, becoming, and belonging.
Indeed, by offering an alternative genealogy of subaltern memories, mechanisms of visibility
gesture to a different mode of “sight” or “vision” in which to imagine a decolonized Korea and
the Pacific. Hence, as argued in this dissertation, a radical reading of the visual is not limited to
the naked eye or optical vision. Rather by attending to the multi-sensory, experiential, and

vii
affective dimensions of the visual, critical sensing reconfigures “seeing” from a discrete act
located in the human body to a distributive process extending far beyond the ocular sense.

viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I am indebted to the intellectual community and the network of mentors,
colleagues, and friends I was fortunate enough to meet and engage with during my time at the
University of Southern California (USC). In particular, I feel tremendously lucky to have been a
student in the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity (ASE), an interdisciplinary space
that supported this project as it slowly emerged and took shape during my second year in
graduate school. Indeed, I could not have asked for a more superb dissertation committee. My
committee chair, Macarena Gómez-Barris, went beyond her duties as a mentor and an advisor.
Her grace and guidance, constant encouragement, and critical engagement—and her own
brilliant scholarship regarding the visual and the project(s) of decolonization— was crucial to the
completion of this project. Jack Halberstam provided astute insights as I conceptualized this
project and never wavered in his support for my work throughout my time at ASE, and Dorinne
Kondo was pivotal as I began to challenge and unpack the notion of the post-1945 Korean
“diaspora.” I also feel fortunate to have had Youngmin Choe as a committee member; her Fall
2011 graduate seminar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC)
provided real camaraderie as I began to work with and mobilize visual sources for my research.
Last, but certainly not the least, I am indebted to my outside committee member, Jodi Kim, who
was always willing to speak to me about my research and provided me with careful and
constructive comments. Her integrity as a scholar is exemplary, and her mentorship has meant so
much to me.
There is also a cluster of faculty members at and beyond USC who provided keen insights
throughout the gestation of this dissertation. Laura Isabel Serna and Nitin Govil of the USC
Department of Cinematic Arts, as well as Neetu Khanna of the USC Department of Comparative

ix
Literature, are smart and gracious readers, and were key to the development and redrafting of the
final chapter (Chapter 4). Through the USC Mazon Seminar for advanced graduate students,
Sarita See of UC Riverside provided thoughtful comments for Chapters 2 and 4, and pushed me
to refine my conceptualization of critical sensing as elaborated in the first chapter. Although
Nayan Shah arrived at ASE toward the tail end of my time at USC, his leadership as department
chair as well as his steadfast commitment to graduate students—as evident in his exemplary
facilitation of the chapter-writing seminar AMST 701 (Spring 2014)— was essential to the
completion of Chapters 2 and 3. My dissertation writing group, which included Macarena
Gómez-Barris, Jih-Fei Cheng and Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, patiently read almost every single word
of this work-in-progress; their thoughtful feedback made the redrafting process more productive
and enjoyable. The USC Center for Transpacific Studies and its co-directors, Viet Nguyen and
Janet Hoskins, provided generous funding for fieldwork in South Korea during the summer of
2013; ASE and the USC Korean Studies Institute (KSI) also provided block research grants
during the summers of 2012 and 2013. A big thank you to the wonderful ASE staff, including
Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, and Jujuana Preston, who work very hard to ensure that ASE
graduate students receive their fellowship stipends and TA paychecks in a timely fashion. Their
efforts, care, and labor make the department run seamlessly and smoothly.
The research for this project would have been impossible without the guidance and help of
key librarians at the USC Korean Heritage Library. In particular, I am fortunate to have met and
worked with Kenneth Klein, whose expertise, wealth of knowledge and quiet patience were key
to the completion of Chapters 2 and 3. I am also indebted to Irvin Paik, who allowed me to view
his family home films originally shot by his parents and who answered numerous questions
regarding the filming and archiving process of the footage. Jane Jin Kaisen, a visual artist whom

x
I first met while organizing a symposium at USC in 2012, has continued to provide illuminating
feedback on my scholarship and was gracious enough to provide me with photographs of her
brilliant work, discussed in depth in Chapter 4. Her intelligence, openness, and insights are truly
awe-inspiring and I consider her a friend. Other acquaintances also provided invaluable
information and support for this project, including Daisy Kim (Chapter 2), Phyllis Kim (Chapter
3), Kim Stoker (Chapter 4), and Sylbee Kim (Coda). A different version of Chapter 4 will be
published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies (February 2015).
Graduate school is an arduous, a labor-intensive, and at times, a lonely and solitary
process, so I am grateful for the dear friends I met during my time at ASE. When I first arrived at
ASE during Fall 2010, I was fortunate to have entered with a small yet fiercely intelligent and
incredibly talented cohort that included Umayyah Cable, Nic Ramos, Ryan Fukumori, and
Jessica Young. Through the inevitable ups and downs of graduate life, writing, and teaching,
each of them sustained me with their humor, curiosity, and willingness to engage with my
scholarship. I am also grateful for my friendships with Deborah Al-Najjar, Celeste Menchaca,
Jih-Fei Cheng, Feng-Mei Heberer, Anjali Nath, Jessica Lovaas, Viola Lasmana, Amee Chew,
Patty Ahn, Joshua Mitchell, Shannon Zhao, Yunji Park, Sarah Fong, and Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne.
Before I entered the doctorate program in American Studies & Ethnicity at USC, I was a masters
degree student in oral history (OHMA) at Columbia University. The OHMA program was a
special, unique and rigorous experience, and I continue to be inspired by the unforgettable Clare
Oh Strausberg, Svetlana Kitto, Elizabeth Stela, Cindy Choung, and Anna Kaplan. The OHMA
mentorship and training I received from Mary Marshall Clark was extraordinary and I will
always be grateful for her commitment to the practice of oral history, as well as her continuing
support and brilliance.

xi
My family and close friends in and outside of academia were unconditional sources of
comfort and love as I struggled to complete my dissertation. Since 2001, Elizabeth Sunwoo has
supported me in all of my endeavors. Her commitment to her family, community, and social
justice inspire all who surround her; I am very lucky to call her a dear friend and sister. Abigail
Naomi Jackson, Katherine Foo, Lisa Ahn, and Susie Yeo, whom I first met during our
undergraduate years at Williams College, sustained me with their phone calls, e-mails, and care
packages; even from afar, I always felt supported by each of them. Laura Reizman provided
stellar and constructive comments on my work and our conversations over good meals provided
salve during particularly harsh moments in graduate school. Even with her incredibly busy
schedule and two young boys, Mari Ryono never failed to check-up on me via phone, e-mails,
and text messages; I am grateful for her friendship and deep well of compassion. From India,
Nancy Yu continued to support me with her e-mails, Skype calls, and kindness; I am so fortunate
to have her in my life. My parents, Young Ok and In Ki Baik, have been avid supporters of my
career. Their selflessness and constant encouragement, as well as their home-cooked meals and
emotional support, have made me who I am today. My sisters, Coleen and Cristiana Baik, read
various chapters, took me out to delicious dinners during their visits to Los Angeles, and kept me
grounded with their grace and humor; I could not have asked for more beautiful and incredible
siblings. Finally, to Daniel Kikuo Ichinose, who I am fortunate to call my life partner. His love,
care, and willingness to support me every step of the way is the primary reason why I was able to
complete this dissertation in a timely (and mostly sane) fashion.

1
INTRODUCTION
In May 2003, the Smithsonian Institute organized a traveling photographic exhibition entitled “A
Korean American Century” to mark the centennial of Korean immigration to the United States
(1903-2003). Primarily drawing upon the anthropological and archival collection housed at the
Institute, as well as selected images from family holdings and private collections, “A Korean
American Century” captures an impressive spectrum of historic moments, including the
establishment of diplomatic contact between the United States and Korea during the late
nineteenth century, the settlement of Korean agricultural laborers in Hawai’i and California
(1903-1920), national division and the Korean War (1950-1953), and the 1992 Los Angeles
Uprising. Carefully crafted in its narrative structure, the exhibition reflects upon a “people and
country in transition [as they] embrace modern conveniences and [adapt] religious and
educational institutions.”
1
The exhibition also offers a now familiar storyline of hardship,
fortitude, and eventual success, as uprooted Korean migrants are eventually absorbed into a
spectacular “new world”: the “Western” world and more specifically, the United States. For Paul
M. Taylor, the director of the Asian Cultural Program at the Smithsonian and a co-curator of the
exhibition, “A Korean American Century” explores the “heritage of the more than one million
Korean Americans,” rendering visible their “migrations, struggles, and contributions” to a
vibrant and multicultural U.S. nation-state.
2

Yet, as registered by the assemblage of selected images and the strategic circulation of
the exhibition in national spaces such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History
and the Korean Cultural Center of Los Angeles (funded by the Embassy of the Republic of
Korea), the “Korean American Century” occludes from its visual archive the more unpleasant
terms and conditions–for instance, violent tactics and gunboat diplomacy that “opened” Korea to

2
Japan and Western powers in the late nineteenth century; colonialism vis-à-vis American
missionary excursions; U.S. Cold War political intervention in the afterlife of Japanese
imperialism; and American military occupation that continues today— that make possible the
flourishing relationship between the United States and South Korea. In a paradoxical sense, the
conspicuous absence of these “othered” memories generates a spectral dynamic, casting a murky
shadow presence upon the transparent images included in the Smithsonian exhibition.
In many ways, this vexing relationship between visibility and invisibility lies at the very
heart of my dissertation, “Mechanisms of Visibility: Korean Militarized Subjects, Critical
Sensing, and the Possibility of Decolonization.” By exploring how contemporary U.S. and South
Korean states and Korean/American actors deploy a range of mechanisms of visibility—visual
objects that consolidate the relationship between visibility, cultural authenticity, and “objective
truth”— to reproduce a seamless narrative of American belonging in the post-1945 moment, I
articulate how these attempts inadvertently generate a ripple of breaks and profound
contradictions that allude to an alternative genealogy of memories, political tensions and
socialities obscured from the visible surface.
To note, I mobilize the term, “Korean/American” rather than “Korean American” to
signify the volatility and instability that underlie Korean/American subject-formation within the
U.S. nation-state. For David Palumbo-Liu and Laura Hyun Yi Kang, “Asian/American” or
“Korean/American” does not signify a singular or totalizing identity.
3
Rather and as marked by
the inclusion of a solidus (“/”), Korean/American subjectivity is an always already changing
composition, or as coined by Kang, a slippery “enfiguration” encompassing political, legal,
social, and cultural dynamics. Thus, as a term of analysis, I draw upon “Korean/American” to
underscore the subjective and shifting processes that constitute seemingly fixed articulations of

3
“identity” generated by the U.S. nation-state and a broader American audience. As stressed
throughout the dissertation, the U.S. nation-state and affiliated actors continue to deploy a liberal
understanding of identity to actualize a spectrum of political and/or legislative objectives.
Critical Sensing as Method and Praxis
By focusing on the dialectical relationship between visibility and invisibility, I do not
conceptualize mechanisms of visibility as self-evident or transparent indexical sources. Rather,
by drawing upon a rigorous yet supple method I conceptualize as critical sensing, I flesh out the
different ways in which mechanisms of visibility momentarily sense affective dynamics,
contradictions, and social residues that exceed the dominant visual narrative. Through these
fleeting moments, visual formations gesture to the possibility of different histories, memories
and subjectivities, culminating in a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary Korean
transnational nexus.
In the most general sense, critical sensing is an overarching method that interrupts or
suspends the processes in which mechanisms of visibility are constructed as direct, unmediated,
and objectively truthful. Functioning less as a disciplinary methodological framework and more
as unruly constellation of discursive practices, techniques, and insights culled from visual culture
and cinema studies, ecology and new materialism, affect theory, and feminist theory, I draw
upon critical sensing to emphasize the multi-sensory, experiential, and relational dimensions of
the visual, as “vision” is reconfigured from a discrete act sutured to the human eye to an unruly
process unfolding across an assemblage of bodies, objects, and sites. Yet, even as critical sensing
configures spectators as multi-sensory, active, and sensual participants, the method primarily
attends to visual objects or mechanisms of visibility: described as agentive formations,
mechanisms of visibility exceed the conditions and intentions in which they are initially

4
appropriated for. Overlapping with Laura U. Marks’ articulation of visual objects as “radioactive
fossils” that are “reactivated” by memory as well as Timothy Morton’s theorization of an object-
oriented ontology (OOO), I describe mechanisms of visibility as formations constituted by
morphing conditions, accrued affect, and unforeseen interactions.
4
Exploring the animated
encounters that crystallize between spectators and mechanisms of visibility, I emphasize the
ways in which mechanisms of visibility return, so to speak, the gaze(s) projected onto them by
the state, spectators, and other actors. Mechanisms of visibility, then, are not dormant or discrete
objects, but materialize as unstable formations that problematize, even if for a fleeting moment,
the teleological narrative of progress, accelerated development, and neoliberal freedom so central
to the political alliance between the U.S. and South Korean states.
Highlighting the unsettling tensions, profound contradictions, and unanticipated
consequences produced by a disparate archive of visual formations, this dissertation focuses on
three interrelated questions. First and foremost, how do mechanisms of visibility encompass
seemingly lost or erased memories, subjectivities, and social residues linked to the crystallization
of a contemporary Korean transnational milieu (1945 to present)? Secondly, how does the
method of critical sensing hint at or register these obscured dimensions of war, violence, and
militarization, particularly as these traces are resistant to or strategically excluded from the
“Americanized” narrative of national citizenship, visibility, and belonging? Lastly, by drawing
upon critical sensing as a methodological framework—and, as articulated in the last chapter, an
aesthetic practice—how do mechanisms of visibility gesture to the possibility of a decolonized
and demilitarized “Asia Pacific”?

5
In order to address these primary questions and situate my interdisciplinary project within
existing bodies of scholarship, I offer a brief literature review that clearly articulates the stakes of
my work and the theoretical arguments that my dissertation builds upon.
Literature Review
In my dissertation, I reappraise literature related to four broad themes: the militarization
of the Korean diaspora; decolonization in relationship to “Asia and the Pacific”; critical memory
studies; and visual culture and cinema studies (which incorporates theories of affect, ecology,
and new materialism). As Chapter 1 is entirely devoted to a conceptualization of critical sensing
and engages extensively with visual culture and cinema studies, this section primarily addresses
the first three themes. However, to emphasize, I mobilize these different categories, not as hard-
and-fast classifications, but as overlapping bodies of knowledge underlying the expansive field
of Korean transnational studies and visual culture.
For Catherine Lutz and Sasha Davis, militarization refers to the “material and discursive
nature of military dominance” ranging from military base construction to the institutionalization
of compulsory military service, as is the case in North and South Korea.
5
As emphasized by
Lutz, militarization is not a discrete or an isolated process, but wedded to imperialistic ambitions
and objectives, as foreign military bases proliferate in spaces in which a state’s “policies aim to
assert and maintain dominance in other regions.”
6

Within this context, the twentieth century militarization of Korea must be situated within
a matrix of imperial dynamics, desires, and power that have contoured the crystallization of a
seemingly coherent and discrete “Asia Pacific block region.”
7
Specifically, in the afterlife of
Japanese colonialism (1910-1945) and with the onset of the Cold War, the American military
became an omnipresent force in Korea and East Asia. As aptly noted by Seungsook Moon and

6
Maria Höhn, the maintenance of a hypervisible American military in Korea is linked to the Cold
War transformation of the South Korean state into a staunch U.S. ally and subimperial force in
Asia.
8
As elaborated upon in this introduction, uneven politico-economic dynamics continue to
govern formal relations between South Korea and the U.S., configuring the former into a state
that is “always already indebted” to the latter.
9
For instance, although South Korea is a liberal
democratic nation-state with the fifteenth largest market economy in the world, the U.S.
continues to maintain wartime command of the South Korean military. Currently, nearly 30,000
U.S. troops are stationed along the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) and across South Korea,
with eighty-three U.S. Department of Defense facilities spread across 34,011 acres of land.
10

The existing body of Korean/American scholarship addressing the impact of U.S
militarization has primarily focused on the palpable effects (i.e., material, economic, and
ecological) of the U.S.-South Korean military alliance. Consequences of U.S. military presence
include the emergence of kijichons or camptowns on the outskirts of U.S. military bases in South
Korea, and the formation of an extensive sex labor economy linked to the U.S.-South Korean
military industrial complex.
11
Such formations point to the structural issue of gender and sexual
violence permeating military culture in South Korea.
12
The literature also highlights the
displacement and deracination of specific populations, including Korean agricultural workers
from the heavily militarized area of Pyongtaek, the zainichi, or ethnic Koreans born and residing
in Japan,
13
transnational adoptees scattered across North America and Western Europe,
14
and
military “war brides” married to American soldiers.
15

My research, then, expands upon this critical genealogy of scholarship by elaborating
upon the invisible or immaterial dimensions of militarization, particularly in the immediate
aftermath of Japanese colonization and the surfacing of a U.S. militarized presence in Korea and

7
across the Pacific and Oceania (1945 to present). In other words, militarization does not only
manifest via visible, physical, or material forms, but as psychic, affective, and mnemonic traces.
My emphasizing of seemingly hidden residues of war and imperialism offers several important
observations. For one, it ruptures a linear reading of time and space, as phenomena and things
rendered to the past continue to inhabit and unravel in the contemporary moment. Therefore,
even as I draw upon “1945” as a temporal marker, I mobilize the “past,” “present,” and “future”
as arbitrary and overlapping formations, rather than as discrete and isolated periods. Second, an
elaboration of the obscured ramifications of war, colonialism, and militarization does not insert
the material and immaterial into a fixed binary; rather, I describe the ways in which spectral
memories of the dead take on very material, tangible, and structural forms. In that sense, the
hauntings explored in this dissertation—including memories of the Korean War, the absent-
presence of “comfort women,” and the April 3, 948 Jeju Island Massacre—intermittently surface
as corporeal objects and/or are embedded within the everyday and mundane.
By exploring the ways in which contemporary Korean/American institutions, the U.S.
state, and cultural producers remember and reconstruct memories related to Japanese
colonization, U.S. militarization, and national division, I also emphasize two key insights that
frame my understanding of a contemporary Korean transnational milieu: first, the intimate
relationship between the United States and South Korea initially generated through U.S. military
intervention and Cold War policies—a relationship that might be described as a bi-national
condition—and second, the intertwining of Japanese and U.S. imperialisms in the making of a
modern “Asia Pacific.”
Initially coined by Jason Luna Gavilan, bi-nationalism refers to the cultivation of a
powerful partnership between two nation-states through formal (i.e., state policies and

8
legislation, government funding, militarized occupation) and informal (i.e., political and cultural
ideologies, cultural apparatuses, sentimental affiliations) channels.
16
Although the term does not
gesture to an “equitable” arrangement or “equal” relationship, bi-nationalism refers to the
formation of a deeply entrenched political alliance. Building and expanding upon Gavilan’s
astute analysis, I draw upon the notion of U.S.-South Korean bi-nationalism to underscore the
material and affective linkages constituting the imbalanced “friendship” between the United
States and South Korea. That is, the forging of powerful ties between the two nation-states is
closely affiliated with and premised upon the extraordinary amount of U.S. monetary aid, and
political and military support bestowed upon the South Korean state. For Lisa Yoneyama and
Mimi Thi Nguyen, such uneven exchanges produce an affective economy of obligation, debt and
gratitude, as one nation (South Korea) becomes indefinitely beholden and indebted to another
nation (the U.S.).
17
Indeed, as emphasized in each chapter, U.S.-South Korean bi-nationalism has
given way to precarious conditions and detrimental consequences for Korean and Korean
transnational subjects, as their lives are deemed as both instrumental and disposable to the U.S.-
South Korean bi-national alliance. The “terms of agreement” between the United States and
South Korea range from the continued presence of nearly 30,000 U.S. armed forces in Korea and
the formal incorporation of South Korean soldiers into the U.S. military (in the form of the
“Korean Augmentation to the United States Army” or KATUSA program), to a steadfast loyalty
and allegiance to the United States among a well-established network of self-identified “Korean
Americans.”
Simultaneously, in attending to the intersections between Japanese imperialism and U.S.
militarization, I destabilize a prevalent mode of periodization that has dominated
Korean/American historiography. In a general sense, Korean/Americanists have either dismissed

9
the pre-1965 Korean/American presence as a “virtual non-entity,”
18
or taken up distinct segments
of Korean diasporic history, including the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945), the Korean War
(1950-1953), and post-1965 Korean immigration.
19
By drawing upon the intertwined histories of
Japanese and U.S. imperialisms, or what Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo refer to as a strong
“transpacific alliance,”
20
I contextualize the transpacific upheavals marking the early-to-mid
twentieth century— ranging from the early twentieth century formation of Korean settler
populations in Hawai’i and California to contemporary redress and recuperation efforts for
“comfort women”— as part and parcel of a broader imperial project: the racialized and gendered
incorporation of Korean transnational subjects into a militarized “Asia Pacific” region indelibly
shaped by a post-1945 U.S.-Japan politico-economic alliance.
21
Such an analysis, I argue, does
not discount the significant breaks underlying the making of the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, but highlights the gradated processes and complex historical conditions underlying the
development of a modern Korean diaspora.
For instance, as most explicitly examined in Chapter 2 and alluded to in Chapters 3 and 4
of this dissertation, the twentieth century emergence of a visible Korean population across the
Pacific and in the United States is linked to the tenuous location of Korean colonial subjects
between the emergent Japanese and U.S. empires. Due to Korea’s transformation into a Japanese
protectorate in 1905, and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association’s (HSPA) recruitment of
Korean laborers for sugar plantation work (primarily due to the 1882 U.S. Chinese Exclusion
Act, which banned Chinese immigration to the U.S.), Koreans were uprooted from their homes
and ejected across the Pacific. Arriving in Hawai’i and subsequently scattering across the
western United States, Korean migrants struggled to forge new meanings of home, belonging,
and community as a means to attenuate harsh living conditions.
22

10
Yet, Korean/American attempts to flourish in new spaces are not absolved from colonial forms
of governance or they ethno-nationalist sentiments. As discussed in each chapter, the very
process of becoming a visible and legible Korean/American subject in the U.S. has been
informed by competing discourses of anti-colonialism, American settler colonial logics,
patriarchal sentiments and fierce ethno-national pride. In that sense, the emergence of a
contemporary Korean milieu in the United States is a complicated, contradictory, and multi-
faceted process contoured by ramifications of Japanese and U.S. military occupation, as well as
by an affective constellation of nationalistic sentiments, desires, and ideals.
This project, however, extends beyond a critique of U.S. militarization, Japanese
colonialism, and ethno-nationalistic discourses, as I engage with visual formations that hint at the
possibility of a decolonized Korea and Pacific. For Frantz Fanon, Kuan Hsing-Chen and Nak-
Chung Paik,
23
decolonization is a multi-prong, multi-scalar process informed by ontological,
psychic, and epistemological dimensions. Fanon describes colonialism as a “psychological–
economic structure”
24
or an “epidermalization of… inferiority”
25
that contours the social and
psychic life of the colonized subject and colonizer. Colonialism, then, is a deeply ingrained
structure informing the very process of subject-formation. Speaking to the modern experience of
colonialism, war, and national division in Korea, Paik expands upon Fanon’s observations by
describing the South Korean population’s embodiment of the Manichean, Cold War “division
system.” As proffered by Paik, the division system has “‘solidified’… everywhere in the daily
lives of Korean people,” through mechanisms such as the national education system, and South
Korean popular media’s constant demonization of the North Korean state.
26

Decolonization, then, does not only point to the eradication of tangible structures, such as
the American military industrial complex, nor does it suggest a romanticized return to an idyllic

11
past. Rather, decolonization points to a decomposition of existing social, politico-economic, and
discursive systems, and an intensive engagement with radically different ways of knowing,
being, and seeing. A decolonization of Korea, for instance, would begin with a destabilization of
the prevailing patriarchal and militarized system of U.S.-South Korean bi-national security. In
the modern era, life, death, and security are biopolitical logics
27
informed by principles of
neoliberal governance, scarcity, and accumulation.
As exemplified by the rapid economic and industrial development of South Korea under
the Park Chung Hee regime in the post-Korean War era, a process Seungsook Moon refers to as
“militarized modernity,”
28
the state’s production of a legible South Korean citizenry has
depended on the military government’s regulation of bodies through intelligence gathering, the
vilification of the North Korean state, and technologies of extreme torture. Hence, the
astonishing accumulation of wealth and capital, as well as the flourishing of “first world
standards” in South Korea, are enmeshed with the state’s violent monitoring and disciplining of
expendable civilians.
29
Subsequently, a destabilization of militarized logics returns security to
the very level of ontology—that is, to the material self and body.
30
Indeed, as observed in the
direct action and organizing work of the transnational activist collective, Women for Genuine
Security, security embodies the protection of the physical environment so it is capable of
sustaining all forms of life; the securing of “basic needs”(i.e., food, clothing, shelter, health care
and education) for an entire population; and a flourishing of heterogeneous cultural identities and
practices.
31

As knowledge production functions as a primary site in “which imperialism operates and
exercises its power,”
32
decolonization is also an “ongoing process of unlearning”
33
that contests
naturalized frameworks and reference points. This process, however, does not give way to a

12
singular counter-discourse that simply replaces “dominant” structures of knowledge and power,
nor does it insert silenced voices into a progressive teleology. Rather, decolonization gives way
to a recalibration of forgotten bodies, obscured memories, and social fragments—traces that
allude to, in the Benjaminian sense, lost or forgotten social formations that were never seized
upon or occluded from the historical archive. Therefore, through the mobilization of social
residues, historical traces, and fragmented memories, or what Herman Grey and Macarena
Gómez-Barris posit as the “sociological trace,” the past is remembered, not as a calcified era, but
as fertile ground capable of generating a radically different genealogy of cultural and social
practices, histories, and memories.
34

Lastly, as a project invested in memory discourse and production, my research expands
upon the current literature in Korean/American cultural studies. As articulated by Andreas
Huyssen, Ann Cvetkovich, and Dylan Rodriguez,
35
post-1980 memory studies in the U.S. has
been inextricably tied to the theorization of trauma as an internal and “unspeakable” wound, with
the Jewish Holocaust cited as the paradigmatic traumatic experience of the modern era.
36

Therefore, “trauma” has transformed into an all-encompassing term in memory studies, as
traumatic experience is essentialized into an ahistorical, “timeless entity with an intrinsic
unity.”
37
However, within the past two decades, cultural memory studies has challenged this
dominant discourse of trauma. Rather than solely attributing memory to interior ruptures, cultural
memory studies defines memory as a social, cultural, and political construct. Specifically, the
realm of culture has allowed scholars to reconfigure memory as epistemological and embodied
formations produced by politicized structures of power and knowledge. Raymond Williams and
Lisa Lowe contextualize culture as a politicized terrain embodying affective, material, social,
aesthetic and spiritual practices and processes of the contemporary moment—even while the

13
present is simultaneously shaped by residual traces and gives way to emergent formations.
38

Indeed, for Lowe, it is through culture that subjects “become, act, and speak,” and engage in acts
of remembrance and forgetting.
39

By engaging with visual formations primary through cultural studies frameworks, I
address mechanisms of visibility as technologies capable of registering and potentially unsettling
the militarized logics of Japanese colonialism, U.S. military intervention, and U.S.-South Korea
bi-nationalsim. Such an exploration is quite timely, as it segues with an expanding body of
cultural studies scholarship addressing the field of Korean diasporic memory. Key texts,
including Grace Cho’s Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War,
Jin-Kyung Lee’s Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea,
Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War, Jini Kim Watson’s The
New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form, and most recently, Suk-
Young Kim’s DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border,
focus on the divergent memories and subjectivities linked to U.S. militarized violence and the
Cold War development of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. However, even as these works
identify the violent consequences of militarization upon Korean diasporic lives, I pay heed to and
primarily focus on the ways in which cultural practices and/or visual forms dislodge systems of
power that relegate certain subjects as “ungrievable.”
40

Chapter Outline
Situated within these bodies of critical scholarship, this dissertation is organized in the
following manner. In Chapter 1, I provide a rigorous groundwork and conceptualization for the
overarching method of critical sensing. Drawing upon visual culture and cinema studies, new
materialism, and affect theory, I conceptualize critical sensing as a multi-faceted method that

14
reconfigures vision as a multi-sensory, experiential, and relational process that troubles the rigid
demarcation between the invisible and visible. As articulated in this chapter, the
reconceptualization of vision and “seeing” reinscribes mechanisms of visibility as agentive
formations that trouble the gaze projected onto them by the U.S-South Korean bi-national state,
Korean/American cultural institutions, and other affiliated actors.
Building upon this methodological and theoretical foundation established in Chapter 1, I
transition to Chapter 2, which interrogates an archive of home films produced by
Korean/Americans living in the greater Los Angeles area during and immediately after World
War II (1941-1965). Drawing upon a specific cluster of vernacular moving images as my
primary sites of analysis, I contextualize the peculiar role played by the home film, a
private/public memory object that projects idealized images of the past and present to an
imagined future audience(s). Although media organizations, including the San Francisco Bay
Area’s Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), describe recently recovered home films as
historical artifacts that attest to the successful transformation of Asian im/migrants into proper
and visible American citizens, I challenge this discourse by conceptualizing the home film as
animated formations that touch upon or “sense” transnational memories, experiences, and desires
strategically excluded from the visual screen. Namely, through the method of critical sensing, I
draw upon the home film as an avisual tool or a mechanism of “sightless vision”
41
that alludes to
racialized sentiments, national loyalties, and militarized sentiments that trouble the fixed
narrative of Americanization and assimilation.
In Chapter 3, I shift my focus to a complicated phenomenon described by Lisa Yoneyama
as the “Americanization of justice” or the legislation of Japanese imperial war crimes through the
contemporary American judicial system and civic rights channels.
42
Specifically, this chapter

15
focuses on the recent wave of “comfort women” redress activism in the United States— most
notably, recent legislation passed and memorial construction in California— coordinated by non-
profit organizations such as the Korean Americans for Justice (KAJ). Exemplified by KAJ’s
efforts to erect a “comfort women” memorial in Glendale, California, the “comfort women”
issue, for many, has transformed into a rallying point bolstering the seemingly benevolent project
of “American humanitarianism” and Korean/American citizenship, as the United States—and
more specifically, the Korean/American citizen-subject— is celebrated as the visible and vocal
agent of truth, justice, and human rights. However, by engaging with the Glendale “comfort
women” memorial through the lens of critical sensing, this chapter reinscribes the memorial as a
mechanism of visibility that inadvertently summons a corpus of militarized memories,
subjectivities, and American violence. Albeit fleeting, these performances problematize the
rendering of the United States as the ultimate arbiter of human rights and justice.
Finally, in Chapter 4, I draw upon Jane Jin Kaisen’s multi-channel video installation,
Reiterations of Dissent, as a mechanism of visibility that unsettles the rhetoric of U.S.-South
Korean bi-nationalism, democracy, and freedom. As emphasized by Kaisen, Reiterations of
Dissent does not seamlessly transmit a fixed set of meanings. Designed as a phenomenological
and interactive project, the video installation draws upon the visual, sensorial, and kinesthetic in
order to destabilize singular conceptualizations of historical narrative and to produce alternative
meanings of memory making. By linking the mid-twentieth century militarization of Jeju-do, a
small island located off the coast of the Korean peninsula, to the imperial militarization of the
Pacific and the Korean transnational nexus, Reiterations of Dissent illuminates the militarized
logics that continue to yoke Koreans and Korean transnational subjects to the lingering legacies
of Japanese colonialism, U.S. militarized security, and Korean nationalism.

16
In offering this chapter outline, I would like to contextualize the intentions of the
narrative structure and trajectory of this dissertation. Whereas Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the
ways in which visual formations, or mechanisms of visibility inadvertently register obscured
memories and social traces occluded from the visible frame, the analysis in Chapter 4 frames
Kaisen’s work as a critical aesthetic project that ruptures the progressive narrative of American
liberation, national belonging, and autonomy. In that sense, this last chapter represents a
significant departure from previous chapters, as it mobilizes critical sensing as a rigorous
discursive method and an aesthetic practice. As offered in the Coda, the deployment of critical
sensing as method and aesthetic praxis hints at the future iteration of this project, as I continue to
explore and engage with the ways in which in which critical art practitioners and cultural
producers purposefully interrogate the dialectical relationship between visibility and invisibility
to contemplate, imagine and generate images of a decolonized Korea and Pacific
Methodology
Finally, in conclusion, I would like to elaborate upon the methodological approaches
deployed in this dissertation. As a transnational, an interdisciplinary, and experimental project,
this dissertation draws upon a range of discursive and theoretical frameworks as “reading
practices,” as well as historical and qualitative tools (i.e., archival research and site-visits) to
enrich my textual analysis of visual formations, including still and moving images, memorials,
and video installations.
First and foremost, I offer critical sensing as the central method of my dissertation.
Informed by theories within new materialism, affect studies, visual culture studies, and cinema
studies, I conceptualize critical sensing as a flexible method that hints at or “senses” disappeared
subjects, submerged memories, and forgotten histories linked to the militarized formation of the

17
twentieth century Korean transnational milieu. Fleshed out in Chapter 1 (next chapter), critical
sensing, I argue, reconfigures visual objects as material, epistemological and sensual formations
contoured by shifting circumstances and structural conditions (i.e., historical, political, and
socio-cultural).
However, critical sensing does not merely offer a “deeper” or more complex
understanding of vision and the visual; it also troubles the sensory mechanism of optical vision.
Namely, by engaging with the critical works of Michel Foucault, Jonathan Crary, Nicholas
Mirzoeff, and Frantz Fanon, I contextualize optical vision and visuality as complex modern
systems informed by power, authority, and knowledge. In other words, the act of seeing— and
subsequently, the privilege of “looking,” as well as the act of being gazed upon— cannot be
essentialized as a purely physiological phenomenon located in and isolated to the objective
human observer. Rather, optical vision refers to a much broader relational and social nexus, as it
is mobilized as a mechanism of power, surveillance, and monitoring by the modern nation-state.
Secondly, my work addresses the circulation and reception of visual objects in different sites and
spaces. Although I primarily draw upon cultural studies methods and visual studies frameworks
to analyze mechanisms of visibility, I also utilize historical (i.e., archival research) and
qualitative methods (i.e., participant-observation) to better understand and articulate how public
engagement with visual works inform the divergent, even contradictory, meanings accrued by
each visual object. It is important to note, however, that I mobilize the notion of “experience” in
explicit opposition to a purely empiricist understanding of the term. For Miriam Hansen,
experience is “that which mediates individual perception with social meaning, conscious with
unconscious processes, loss of self with self-reflexivity,” and is “the matrix of conflicting
temporalities, of memory and hope.”
43
By emphasizing the discursive dimensions and

18
organization of experience, I configure reception as a mechanism that mediates between the
individual and public, the historical and theoretical, and the experiential and epistemological.
Within this understanding in mind, I draw upon archival research and site-visits to
contextualize my research, especially as I engage with still and moving images and other visual
formations that emerge from specific sites and spaces. In addition to archival research conducted
at the Korean Heritage Library of the University of Southern California (USC), the Los Angeles
Central Library, the Central Glendale Library, the Korean Film Archive (Seoul, South Korea),
and the Samuso Gallery (Seoul, South Korea) and as indicated in Chapter 3, I visited the
Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial to observe the transient encounters, interactions,
and performances that emerged from the site. Although this chapter explicitly focuses on the
public ceremony and unveiling of the “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial in July 2013, the
participant-observation process included four 2.5 to 3-hour site visits at different moments
throughout the year (July 2013, December 2013, March 2014, June 2014), the writing and coding
of field-notes, and on-site visual documentation (i.e., photography). Although I did not conduct
ethnographic research, my mobilization and integration of a range of historical and qualitative
methods, including participant-observation and visual documentation, emphasizes the
interdisciplinary approach taken in this project and the importance of cultural, historical, and
spatial analyses.

19
CHAPTER 1: Critical Sensing as Methodological Framework
During the summer of 2013, I participated in a peace bus tour of South Korea, organized by the
Alliance of Scholars Concerned About Korea (ASCK). The first of its kind, the trip took place
during the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the Korean Armistice (July 27, 1953),
and included over thirty scholars, filmmakers, activists, and artists from Korea and outside of the
peninsula. Condensed into four intensive days, the trip included visits to militarized sites, such as
the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the bullet-ridden bridge of No-Gun
Ri, the site of a 1950 civilian massacre committed by the U.S. military.
On the last day of the tour, participants visited Jeju-do’s (Jeju Island) April 3rd Peace
Memorial Park, a sprawling complex dedicated to the nearly 30,000 civilians, or one-third of the
total island population, killed during a seven-year U.S.-South Korean military “red cleansing”
(1948-1955) colloquially referred to as the April 3
rd
Incident or “4.3.” As I walked across the
beautiful courtyard entrance into the memorial hall, Soni Kum, a fellow participant of the trip
and zainichi artist, approached me with a concerned look on her face.
1
Are you okay? she asked.
Surprised by her question, I answered, Yes, just tired. Gently nodding, Soni noted, I think you’ve
been touched by something you can’t really see—maybe ghosts? Perplexed by her hokey
response, I laughed and scurried into the memorial building.
Several months following my summer trip, Soni’s remark returned to me in an
unexpected way. While thumbing through a set of glossy photographs taken during a visit to a
village in the southwestern corner of Jeju, I began to feel unsettled by the images before me.
Upon initial glance, the photographs portray pastoral fields and pristine farmland, marked by the
last vestiges of a late potato harvest and framed by the faint outline of Halla-san (Mount Halla)
in the distant background. To those unfamiliar with the history of the island, the photographs

20
reflect a peaceful and an idyllic countryside, a portrayal in line with the South Korean
government’s marketing of Jeju as a desirable tourist attraction and the “Hawai’i of Korea.”
Yet, in a paradoxical sense, the transparency of these photographs mask the violent and
militarized history embodied by the depicted landscape. A former air base originally built by
Korean forced labor under Japanese imperial rule, the fields were then transferred to the United
States Air Force in the afterlife of World War II before returning to civilian control during the
early 1960s. Scattered across the farming fields are decomposing traces of these absent-yet-
present histories, including toxic waste buried in the fringes of the field, dilapidated air hangars
constructed during the Japanese colonial era and unmarked gravesites of civilians killed by U.S.-
South Korean forces during 4.3 and the Korean War (1950-1953).
Marked less, then, by an assured confidence that I had faithfully documented everything
that needed to be captured, and more by an uncanny sense that vital memories were irrevocably
erased or lost from the accrued visual evidence, this re-encounter left me feeling a bit baffled.
Somehow, the pure visibility of the photographs culminated in a flattening of the affective
intensities, conflicting sentiments, and complex histories I had engaged with and immersed
myself in during my time in the peninsula.
I start this chapter with this seemingly meandering vignette because in many ways, it
encapsulates a set of interrelated questions that form the heart of this dissertation. For one, how
does the visual paradoxically embody social residues, discarded memories, and disposable
subjectivities that resist or are strategically occluded from the field of vision? Second, what
methodological framework approach might be utilized to register, even if only for a moment,
these obscured residues and historical traces? Lastly, how might scholarship critically address

21
the limitations of vision and the visual, even as it recognizes the desire to see beyond what is
permitted by visuality?
This project grapples with these key questions by focusing on the historical dynamics,
transnational memories, and profound contradictions underlying the making of a Korean
transnational milieu across the Pacific and the United States (1945 to present). Namely, I explore
the ways in which contemporary Korean/American actors and, to a greater extent, the U.S.-South
Korean binational state draws upon a strategic array of past memories and visual objects,
ranging from documentary photographs and home films to emergent “comfort women”
memorials, as indexical sources that reproduce a progressive narrative of war and forced
migration, tentative settlement, and eventual integration into a liberal “postracial” U.S. nation-
state. Mobilized as mechanisms of visibility, or visual technologies that seemingly reify the fixed
relationship between the visual and the “real,” the constellation of mnemonic visual devices
discussed in this work are deployed by the U.S.-South Korean binational state and other actors to
generate a visible Korean/American citizen-subject. The crystallization of such a formation, I
argue, has been absolutely key to the consolidation of a proper Korean/American subjectivity
wedded to the “Americanized” principles of transparency, truth, and justice.
Yet, such an over-determined narrative is not without slippages or fault-lines. Rather, as
shifting objects encompassing unstable conditions and accumulated encounters, mechanisms of
visibility give way to unforeseen interruptions that potentially fracture progressive renderings of
nation, time and space. Through these fleeting moments of rupture and suspension, mechanisms
of visibility hint at memories of war, violence, and militarization that problematize the “myth of
national identity [and national development].”
2
As most explicitly tackled in the last chapter
(Chapter 4) and the Coda, visual formations, such as Jane Jin Kaisen’s multi-channel video

22
installation, Reiterations of Dissent, and samuso gallery’s annual The REAL DMZ Project,
explicitly seize upon these moments of disjuncture to suggest an alternative genealogy of
memories, histories, and subjectivities seemingly foreclosed by state-produced narratives of
visibility, becoming, and belonging.
Critical Sensing: An Introduction
As briefly discussed in the introduction of this dissertation, I address these primary
questions and interrogate the vexing relationship between visibility and invisibility through a
supple method and reading practice I conceptualize as critical sensing. Threaded through each
chapter yet deployed in very different ways, critical sensing might be defined as a broad and an
overarching method that disrupts the processes in which visual constructions are naturalized as
unmediated, direct, and truthful. A rigorous approach that is more of an unruly composite of
insights and techniques than a refined discursive framework, critical sensing pushes for a
profound encounter with visuality. In other words, a rigorous reading of the visual is not limited
to a mere skimming of the surface, nor is vision a discrete act sutured to the human eye. Rather,
by attending to the contradictory, multi-sensory and experiential dimensions of the visual, I
reconfigure “seeing” from a distinct or an isolated act to an expansive process extending far
beyond the ocular sense.
In the most general sense and as carefully unpacked in each chapter of this dissertation,
the method of critical sensing addresses a central dilemma: the intertwining of vision, the visual,
and visuality
3
within the nexus of modernity, power, and imperialism. That is, vision and
mechanisms of visibility are not fixed or ahistorical constructs, nor are they direct or objectively
“truthful” mediations. Instead, the visual and vision—and more precisely, human vision— are
modern conduits of knowledge, synonymous with the formation of the rational, logical, and

23
empirical subject-citizen. Therefore, this project treats vision, the human eye, and “objective
observer” as epistemological and subjective formations implicated within the desires of
Enlightenment, imperialism, and state governance.
Within such a context, critical sensing offers an alternative way of understanding vision,
de-linked from optical vision. Recognizing the ways in which optical vision has been harnessed
to produce state-implemented narratives of visibility, national belonging, and political legibility,
critical sensing reconfigures vision as a situational, multi-sensory, and distributive process
unfolding across an assemblage of bodies, things, and sites. In doing so, the method unsettles the
human eye as the exclusive generator of sight while re-imagining mechanisms of visibility as
agents of a multi-faceted “vision.” As demonstrated by the shared vignette in the introduction of
this chapter, the uneasy sentiments that materialized as I thumbed through photographs of my
trip surfaced from a place of spatial, geographical, and temporal distance from the people and
things depicted in the images. Although seemingly contradictory, it is this distance and sense of
removal that permitted me to unpack my experiences in a way that was impossible while I was
still in the “thick” of things. My strange re-encounter with these images, then, did not solely
draw upon the ocular or visual. Rather, my orientation toward these images allowed for an
affective and tactile engagement that provoked a more textured reading of these images.
Informed by interdisciplinary frameworks and texts, critical sensing is an exploratory if
not experimental exercise reflective of the objects that constitute the cultural archive explored in
this dissertation: slippery, multi-faceted, volatile. Drawing upon key texts from visual culture
and cinema studies, performance studies, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and queer and
feminist theory, critical sensing might be defined as a “working toolbox” or hybrid methodology
invested in the evisceration—or, as astutely observed by Sarita Eschavez See, disarticulation—

24
of disciplinary form, sensibility, and coherence.
4
It is, therefore, important to clarify my decision
to draw upon the visual as a site of analysis and interrogation, especially as I push against and
contest the logics of visuality.
By drawing upon the visual, I am not positing the “scopic regime” as a privileged site of
subjectivity, power, and knowledge production.
5
Rather, by describing visuality as an extensive
structure that registers how certain subject-positions, narratives, and images are configured as
part and parcel of “official” history, I re-inscribe visuality as a fraught space indelibly informed
by memories, spectral residues, and social dynamics resistant to visualization and transparency.
The mechanisms of visibility explored in this project embody this very conundrum, as visuality
encompasses the conditions that potentially threaten its organizing logics
Building upon these initial observations, I now transition into a discussion of the
complexities of the visual, especially as vision and visuality materialized as modern constructs
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As this literature is quite broad and
unwieldy, I focus on a corpus of scholarship that emphasizes the visual’s relationship to
modernity, imperialism, and biopower, including critical texts by Jonathan Crary, Nicholas
Mirzoeff, Michel Foucault, David Lloyd, and Frantz Fanon.
By offering this condensed overview, it is not my attention to provide an exhaustive
literature review of vision, the visual, and visuality. Instead, by engaging with a strategic
selection of core texts, I locate critical sensing within a particular genealogy of scholarship by
fleshing out the ways in which optical vision has been deployed for the production of legible
citizen-subjects and the surveillance of “othered” or non-normative bodies. Specifically, I
problematize the naturalized linkages between vision and the real, defining optical vision as a
subjective mode of perception. As further discussed in each chapter of this project, the discursive

25
coupling of the visible with the real, or what Peggy Phelan refers to as a “politics of visibility,” is
especially troublesome as it does not consider the terms and conditions of the visual, but traffics
within and reaffirms structures of authority, surveillance, and power.
6

Following this dense yet necessary foundation, I shift to an elaboration of critical sensing.
In operationalizing this methodological framework, I work through an eclectic body of
scholarship within visual culture studies, cinema studies, and new materialism in order to stress
two interrelated dimensions: first, the multi-sensory and multi-determined subject-body and
second, the experiential dimensions of vision. Originating within psychoanalysis, multi-
determinancy refers to the ways in which entities are generated by and encapsulate difference.
However, multi-determinancy does not reproduce a “multicultural” understanding of
subjectivity—a perspective that easily slips into the traps of liberal cultural relativism— but
accentuates the heterogeneous if not contradictory processes that constitute all subjects and
things.
7
Thus, by stressing the central role played by the multi-determined body, critical sensing
destabilizes the a priori logics of Kantian perception in which the eye is privileged as a
naturalized mechanism of vision, cognition, and knowledge. Indeed, this insight is crucial as I
recalibrate mechanisms of visibility— visual objects that traverse a diverse range of contexts,
circumstances, and spaces— as charged formations capable of returning, so to speak, the
desirous gaze(s) projected onto them by the state, institutions, and spectators.
Finally, this chapter concludes by considering the implications of critical sensing,
particularly as this dissertation addresses a cluster of traveling memories, imperial traces and
Cold War compositions that continue to unravel in and decompose throughout the Korean
diaspora. Even as I conceptualize and draw upon critical sensing to explore the violent
underpinnings of the contemporary Korean transnational milieu, the method, I argue, addresses a

26
much broader question concerning the possibility of a decolonized mode of perception, vision,
and “seeing.”
The Problematics of Vision & Visuality
Although certainly not monolithic or uniform, the nineteenth and first two decades of the
twentieth century was a moment of tremendous change, transition, and upheaval. Marked by the
emergence of modern regimes of power, the accelerated expansion of capitalism, and the
invention of modern visual technologies such as photography and cinema, the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries were underscored by seismic shifts within the visual realm and
visuality.
8

For, Nicholas Mirzoeff, visuality refers to the “visualization of history” and is constituted
by the epistemological and ontological.
9
As a discursive system(s) that marshals visible reality
through processes of classification, separation and aestheticization, visuality gives way to a
seemingly objective understanding of material and psychic space.
10
Visuality, in other words, is
not a direct or an unmediated encounter with the “real world,” but a systemic practice with
material ramifications.
11
Within such a context, visuality is produced by and reproduces
structures of authorial power in which certain subjects are inscribed as agents of sight and vision.
As observed in Michel Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon, a Benthamian architectural design
in which a watchman is placed at the center of a circular structure to observe inmates stationed
around its perimeter, visuality is dependent upon a biopolitical array of management
techniques.
12

For Foucault, the biopolitical or biopower is inextricably tied to modern forms of
governance. Focusing on the transition from sovereign rule to the materialization of the modern
nation-state during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Foucault describes the morphing of

27
power from negative forms associated with the sovereign’s absolute right over death to positive
mechanisms tied to the state’s fostering of life. Through modes of governmentality and public
discourse, including state channels aimed at the legislation of life (i.e., medical discourse, sexual
discourse, the census, public health, education, and the modern prison system), the human body
transforms into a productive site of transparency, knowledge and power. Becoming less reliant
upon apparatuses of abject violence, the state produces a visible citizenry through the strategic
management of life—and more precisely, an uneven distribution of resources to cultivate certain
forms of life.
13
As observed by Foucault, "One might say that the ancient right to take life or let
live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”
14

Despite the blind spots of a Foucauldian analysis of power and its primary focus upon
Western forms of governance,
15
the concept of biopower is productive as it tracks the power-
laden logics of visuality. As a discursive structure wedded to the biopolitical, visuality might be
understood as a authorial system(s) of recognition constituted by a hierarchy of disciplined
bodies— those who are designated by the state as citizen-subjects capable of rational vision,
(fore)sight and reason, and others who are deemed as disposable objects existing at the periphery
of bare life. To be recognized as a visible subject by the state, then, is certainly not neutral or
objective, but a process deeply mired in and indebted to modern forms of power.
This complex understanding of visuality is alluded to in Jonathan Crary’s work, which
locates the emergence of the “seeing subject” or “capable observer” within the early-to-mid
nineteenth century.
16
For Crary, the changing definition of vision itself—as a vehicle for
knowledge situated outside of the human body to an internalized mode of subjectivization— is
linked to the human body’s entanglement within systems of management, mechanization, and
scrutiny. By 1840, the observer is implicated in a “confounding of three modes: an individual

28
body that is at once a spectator; a subject of empirical research and observation; and an element
of machine production.”
17
Despite the lacunae within Crary’s work—namely, his failure to tackle
the deeply racialized, gendered, and class-based dimensions of the human observer— he touches
upon a problematic central to the conceptualization of critical sensing: the subjectivity of the
visual and vision.
Framing vision and visibility within the context of imperialism, other scholars, including
David Lloyd, Achilles Mbembe, and Frantz Fanon, explicitly engage with and trace the tender
ties binding biopower to vision and subject-formation. In particular, this body of scholarship
highlights the ways in which the consolidation of (European) imperial rule from the eighteenth to
early twentieth century was dependent upon and wielded a range of visual techniques and
technologies, including racial classification, visual surveillance, and ethnographic
documentation. The mobilization of these mechanisms did not merely justify imperial expansion,
but configured colonial rule as a moral and noble imperative, necessary for the uplifting and
advancement of colonial savages.
18

For instance, Lloyd links the formation of the seeing subject, emergent in the late
eighteenth century within the context of European imperialism, to the Kantian notion of
cognition, reason, and universal perception.
19
Describing such a construction as the “Subject
Without Properties,” Lloyd refers to an “undetermined subject” constituted by a singular
understanding of “common sense.”
20
As emphasized by Immanuel Kant, the shift from the
immediate particularity of an individuated corporeal body to a subject representative of the
whole of humanity and exchangeable with anyone is dependent upon a double-move: first, the
distancing from the multi-sensory and corporeal body and second, a codification of a “formal
generality of the social.”
21
Within this process of abstraction, the eye is universally encoded as

29
an organ of reason; consequently, optical vision is linked to cognition, knowledge, and
judiciousness. In sharp contrast, touch, smell, and taste are conceptualized as carnal senses
indicative of the primitive savage incapable of rising to “the level of seeing.”
22
Optical vision,
therefore, is linked to the condition of the “Subject without Properties” who is “universal where
all others are… partial” and is the “perfect, disinterested judge formed for and by the public
sphere.”
23

Yet, as a historical construct, the “Subject without Properties” is a by-product of and an
embodiment of social difference.
24
That is, to be a subject in/capable of vision and sight is not a
natural formation, but a consequence of the colonial gaze— an unsettling sense that one is
constantly observed and scrutinized through the eyes of an invisible yet omnipresent authorial
force. Subsequently, the colonial gaze generates psychic, somatic, and affective repercussions
that contour understandings of the self. Hence, through mechanisms of governance, surveillance,
and organization, imperialism produces what W.E.B. Du Bois describes as a mode of “double
consciousness” or the “peculiar sensation” that one is “always looking at one’s self through the
eyes of others” (5).
25

Nowhere is the burden of the colonial gaze more pressing than in the work of Frantz
Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon diagnoses a set of symptoms that emerge from
colonial rule, particularly within the context of French imperialism in northern Africa and the
Caribbean. Engaging with Du Bois' concept of "double consciousness," Fanon articulates the
impact of the “white gaze” as an “unusual weight” that has produced the black body as an image
that is solely negating: “in the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in
elaborating his body schema,” as the body transmogrifies into a “solely negating” shadow and
“an image of the third person” that cannot be managed, owned or controlled by the black

30
subject.
26
Colonialism, then, is a hegemonic structure that penetrates the very interior of the
(non)seeing self.
Although Lloyd, Du Bois, and Fanon predominantly attend to the intimate linkages
between vision, the colonial gaze, and subject-formation, this body of scholarship also points to
the material instruments of visuality, especially as visual devices are harnessed to consolidate
state and/or colonial desires. As cultural apparatuses, technologies such as cinema and the
camera are produced by and reproduce dominant ideology, ultimately erasing the material,
ideological, and discursive processes in which such narratives are produced. This triangulated
relationship between power, vision, and visual technology is interrogated in a vast range of
interdisciplinary texts, ranging from the work of Marxist-influenced cinema scholars such as
Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, to critical empire studies scholarship by David Brody,
Sharon Delmendo, Laura Wexler, and Fatimah Tobing Rony.
27
Although these two bodies of
literature are quite distinctive, both emphasize the construction and crystallization of hegemonic
visual narratives through mechanisms of visibility.
For instance, Delmendo, Wexler and Rony each explore how (settler) colonial
governance, state institutions and cultural producers deploy a spectrum of visual mediums,
including domestic photography and ethnographic documentary, to make knowable bodies
designated as non-normative and uncivilized. Configured as mechanisms of the colonial gaze,
these visual technologies are mobilized precisely because of their assumed capacity to truthfully
capture and render the real and authentic. In her work, Wexler describes American white middle-
class women’s deployment of domestic photography as a “soft tool” to embrace the imperial
impulse of the U.S. nation-state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By
analyzing photographs taken by amateur photographers, including Frances Benjamin Johnston’s

31
documentation of Admiral George Dewey's fleet following the 1899 U.S. naval victory in the
Philippines, Wexler describes how domesticated images neutralized U.S. imperial desires in the
Philippines. These “tender” portrayals depict American soldiers as well-mannered older brothers
to the “primitive” Filipino/as, while simultaneously erasing the devastating repercussions of
American colonization and militarized occupation in the Philippines. Wexler, then, draws upon
an intersectional framework to reconsider how colonial desires inform the production of
seemingly indexical and transparent representations.
Critical Sensing As a Methodological Framework
By offering this brief if not cursory contextualization, I do not mean to designate the
visual as a fixed or homogenous system. Rather, this discursive framing unequivocally locates
vision, visuality, and the visual within the complex of modernity, imperialism, and power.
Optical vision, in other words, is not merely indicative of the material, corporeal or
physiological, but are epistemological formations sutured to the emergence and configuration of
the modern legible subject. Indeed, as interrogated in the forthcoming chapters, the reproduction
and consolidation of a contemporary Korean/American subjectivity by the U.S.-South Korean bi-
national state has been indelibly linked to an empirical discourse of truth, visibility, and
transparency.
How, then, does the methodological framework of critical sensing address and destabilize
such a hegemonic discourse? Specifically, how might the conceptualization of critical sensing
allude to a different way of understanding vision?
Critical Sensing as Multi-Sensory
First, critical sensing reconfigures the act of seeing from a purely optical act to a
kinesthetic, sensual, and an embodied process. As observed by Vivian Sobchack and Laura U.

32
Marks, vision is not a discrete mode of access to the world nor is it solely affixed to the naked
eye. Rather, vision is a cross-modal perceptual activity yoked to the aural, olfactory, kinesthetic,
tactile, affective, and proprioceptive.
28
Although Sobchack and Marks primarily draw upon
cinema as their object and site of analysis, their incisive observations regarding the subjectivity
of vision might be expanded to address the heterogeneous dimensions of critical sensing.
Drawing upon phenomenology, Sobchack theorizes the cinematic experience in
relationship to the multisensory body. For Sobchack, a living subject is constituted by corporeal
conditions and contingent circumstances. By re-centering the body through an ontological
approach, Sobchack presses for a sensual understanding of vision as the eye operates among an
array of sensory channels that constitute “one and the same subject.”
29
Yet, these multiple
sensorial registers do not culminate in a singular or coherent experience; rather, information
gleaned through the eye may significantly diverge from or even contradict other sensory
experiences. Hence, the cinematic experience crystallizes as an unstable process in which the
multi-determined spectator or cinesthetic subject “touches and is touched by the screen.” An
encounter with the visual, then, does not passively exist to the “side [of] our bodies,” but accrues
meaning and significance because of our bodies.
30

Simultaneously, Sobchack’s reconfiguration of vision as embodied pushes against the
normative spatial logics of cinema. Historically, the naturalization of cinematic space is closely
affiliated with and reproduces Euclidean perspective, in which a fixed observer is re-inscribed as
the fulcrum of vision. By reconstituting vision as a subjective process, Sobchack argues for a
hyperbolic understanding of space, in which the spatial is “localized” and defined as “living.”
31

In other words, vision is not characterized by a demarcation between the “seeing” self and an
outside space, but is generated through, within, and because of space.

33
Sobchack’s understanding of embodied vision overlaps with Marks’ mobilization of
haptic visuality (in contrast to optical visuality). For Marks, the haptic points to the “combination
of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive functions” and “the way we experience touch both on
the surface of and inside our bodies.”
32
Within this context, the haptic describes the ways in
which the eye functions as a tactile organ that “touches” or “caresses” the image. Through this
framework, touch and kinesthetics are configured as sensorial platforms that enable complex
encounters with the visual; thus, the haptic directs spectators toward a “thicker,” more complex
understanding of the visual. Quoting Henri Bergson,
33
Marks emphasizes that perception is not
merely dependent upon the empirical or cognitive but touches upon an assortment of senses,
percepts, and memories, producing what she describes as “attentive” recognition— or the
vacillation of the perceiver “between seeing the object, recalling virtual images that it brings to
memory, and comparing the virtual object thus created with the one before us.”
34
Here, Marks
gestures toward a nuanced understanding of vision, as sight unfolds as a process rather than
coalescing as a singular act.
Although Sobchack and Marks do not explicitly address the violent politics of visuality
and the implications of the colonial gaze, their work offers two crucial observations that move us
toward a conceptualization of critical sensing. First, by de-centering optical vision as the primary
mechanism of sight, Sobchack and Marks challenge the privileging of the eye as the ideal vehicle
in which to encounter and engage with the world. Subsequently, both scholars push against
Cartesian dualism, or the divide between mind and body, in which the body is deemed inferior to
and demarcated from consciousness. However, by shifting attention to the multi-sensory and
multi-determined self, Sobchack and Marks do not signify the material body as a universal or
natural construct. Rather, by accentuating the epistemological, ontological and circumstantial

34
dynamics of vision, Sobchack and Marks recognize the body as a heterogeneous formation,
contoured by and located within subjective experience.
Second, through their scholarship, Sobchack and Marks, to differing degrees, gesture
toward the “thinness” or impossibility of the optical image. Even as Sobchack and Marks explore
the moving image’s capacity to evoke visceral responses, they also underscore the insufficiency
or poverty of the visible surface. The reduction of the optical vision to truth and transparency,
then, produces limitations on how subjects understand and encounter the visual.
Critical Sensing As Experiential
I emphasize the multi-determined dimensions of vision because it is segues with a second
dimension of critical sensing: the experiential. As offered by the late Miriam Hansen, the
experiential, or an underscoring of direct experience, does not rely on an empirical understanding
of spectatorship. Rather, as a complex theory, the experiential is that which “mediates individual
perception with social meaning, [and] conscious with unconscious processes,” consequently
embodying a “matrix of conflicting temporalities, of memory and hope.”
35
Hence, critical
sensing focuses on how lived experiences and contingent circumstances contour the divergent if
not contradictory dimensions of vision. Indeed, for both Sobchack and Marks, the experiential is
crucial to articulating the cinematic experience as multi-sensory and participatory, rather than
inert and passive. As elaborated upon by Marks, the experiential accounts for the ways in which
circumstantial conditions and discursive context extends the meaning of a visual medium by
folding into and becoming a part of its materiality.
36

However, although Marks and Sobchack discuss the different ways in which spectators
approach and decode the visual, their work falls short of investigating visual objects as
experiential sites of movement and potentiality. Therefore and building upon Hansen’s

35
articulation, I place emphasis upon the animated and affective dimensions of the experiential.
Specifically, by underscoring the contingency and mutability of mechanisms of visibility, critical
sensing considers how visual formations generate unforeseen moments of disruption, unsettling
naturalized narratives of truth, visibility, and transparency.
In attending to the experiential, I would like to briefly elaborate upon my understanding
of animacy and affect, as both of these terms encompass very different meanings. First, I
contextualize animacy as the “quality of agency, awareness, and mobility” projected onto
“things.”
37
By describing mechanisms of visibility as animated forces, I am not conceptualizing
such objects as living or sentient matter. Rather, animacy interrogates and takes to task the very
ways in which matter is recognized as “living” or “dead” and to a greater extent, “human” or
“non-human.” As offered by Mel Chen, these valuations are not arbitrary, but implicated within
systems of power and knowledge that render certain entities as able-bodied and vibrant, and
others, as invisible and disposable.
38

Second, although I am interested in the linkages between affect and emotion, critical
sensing incorporates a distinct articulation of affect— that is, affect as an energetic intensity that
cannot be confined or limited to the human. Affect, in other words, is not synonymous with nor
should it be conflated with human emotion. Rather, affect is the unnamable trace or visceral
intensity that momentarily transpires prior to emotion and the energetic movement before such a
dynamic is located within discourse (as “sadness,” “happiness,” “anger,” etc.). As elaborated by
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, affect, as vibrancy and potentiality, does not terminate within
the human body but flows across different sites and objects. Thus, affect materializes as
“autonomous and sufficient beings,” existing through “themselves” and “outside” of material
forms.
39

36
For Jane Bennett, the Guattari-Deleuzian perception of affect as an energetic intensity,
rather than as a state or an emotion, is central to her theorization of the non-human as energetic
and vital. Specifically, Bennett’s theory of materiality or “vibrant matter” formulates seemingly
“dead” objects, commodities, and things as sites of force and affective charge. Drawing upon the
notion of assemblage, Bennett articulates how non-human and human configurations, contingent
upon material, temporal, and spatial conditions, generate unforeseeable moments that trouble the
division between the living and the dead, and the animate and inanimate. Exploring the transient
if not sporadic clustering of decomposing matter such as trash with humans, animals, and insects,
Bennett does not define discrete objects as agents of change and transformation. Rather, by
paying heed to the transient arrangements of conditions, matter, and intentions that momentarily
transpire and disappear, Bennett focuses on how “human-nonhuman assemblages[s]" generate a
“doing and an effecting” that ultimately destabilizes—or at the very least, challenges— the
absolute binary of the human-as-animate and the non-human-as-inanimate. Therefore, through
the framework of vibrant matter, Bennett presses upon the notion of distributive agency, or a
dynamic form of agency distributed across rather than contained within a network of bodies and
spaces.
40

In particular, I find Bennett’s theorization of contingency, affect, and “vibrant mater”
quite useful as I conceptualize mechanisms of visibility as affective formations that generate
unforeseen meanings and circumstances. That is, by configuring the non-human as sites of
possibility, animacy, and movement, I pay heed to emergent possibilities that exceed intention
and/or expectations. To illustrate this point, I, once again, return to the vignette introduced at the
beginning of this chapter. Following my summer 2013 trip to Korea, fellow participants of the
ASCK bus tour, including myself, exchanged a stream of messages, audiovisual footage and

37
photographs of the trip. Within the course of several weeks, a scattering of my photographs,
including images I had taken in Jeju Island, made their rounds across the Internet, traveling
through e-mail and momentarily landing on a variety of social network sites, such as Facebook,
Twitter, the ASCK organizational website, and personal webpages. Tagged with different titles,
and retouched and modified by a number of people, the digitized photographs accumulated a
range of significations that I, as the “original” image-taker, had not inscribed onto them.
In one example, the previously discussed photograph—the seemingly idyllic farmland in Jeju
Island—was remediated into a flier for an anti-militarization protest. Juxtaposed with two other
photographs portraying a naval base recently built in Guam and the environmental havoc
produced by U.S. military presence in Okinawa, the Jeju photograph took on yet another layer of
meaning, emphasizing the sustained trajectory of U.S.-Japanese militarized occupation beyond
the Korean peninsula. Hence, the discursive residues accrued by the image as it traveled across
electronic circuits expanded my understanding of the photograph, indelibly shaping my re-
encounter(s) with the image. Embodying what Tara McPherson describes as “volitional
mobility,” or a sense of interactivity and undercurrent of (un)stable movement unique to the
medium of the Web, my photograph, through a series of seen and unseen exchanges, took on a
vitality of its own.
41

Critical Sensing: Vision as Relational
In emphasizing the multi-determined and experiential dimensions of vision, critical
sensing reconfigures seeing from a distinct and an isolated act situated in the human body to a
distributive process unfolding across an assortment of bodies and objects. Even if transient or
fleeting, such arrangements produce an array of unpredictable moments that eclipse state
rationale and established narratives of national legibility and visibility. Within such a context,

38
mechanisms of visibility are recalibrated as formations capable of producing moments of
dissonance, disruption, and disjuncture. Vision, then, is not a unidirectional process but a
relational phenomenon that coalesces through and across a social field.
Conclusion: Crow’s Eye View
In June 2014, the Korean Pavilion unveiled its impressive display at the International
Architecture Exhibition in the14th Venice Biennale. Curated by architect and Mass Studies
founder Minjung Cho and representing over forty architecture projects embodying the past,
present, and future, the ambitious exhibition is vast in its scope and utopian in its orientation.
Described as the "First Architecture Exhibition of the [Unified] Korean Peninsula," the Korean
Pavilion destabilizes the Cold War division system that continues to hamper everyday life in
Korea and the Korean diaspora by reconceptualizing architecture of the North and South as an
"agent…for generating alternative narratives capable of perceiving both the everyday and the
monumental in new ways."
42

Inspired by the serial poem, "Crow's Eye View" by Yi Sang (1910-1937), an architect-
turned-poet deeply immersed in the Dada movement and who died under Japanese occupational
rule, the Korean Pavilion is a spectacular if not dizzying assemblage of blueprints, models and
installations, paintings, watercolor drawings, and archival photographs that unsettle bipolarized
views of life, form, and architecture. Designed by a transnational array of architects, writers,
poets, photographers, filmmakers, curators, and researchers traversing temporal, geographical,
and temporal boundaries, the Korean Pavilion is constituted by works that gesture to the
possibility of a demilitarized and decolonized Korea. The works, however, do not materialize as
a seamless or harmonious formation, but as “uncharted patches” that are "intertwined yet in
opposition" and "spill over to each other."
43
Consequently, in lieu of a singular and

39
universalizing “bird’s-eye” perspective, the Korean Pavilion—configured through the imagined
eyes of the three-legged crow, a mythological figure symbolizing divine intervention, fate, and
prophecy— offers a fragmented if not disarticulated reading of the future, emerging from yet
extending far beyond past and present conditions.
I conclude this chapter with a description of the Korean Pavilion as it gestures to the
implications and stakes of critical sensing. As an interdisciplinary and experimental method,
critical sensing tracks the limitations of the visual, even as it strives toward a different
articulation of vision. Specifically, by destabilizing the human eye as the center of sight, critical
sensing considers the potentialities of a circumstantial, momentary, and distributive vision that
crystallizes across a range of bodies and sites. As argued in the remainder of this dissertation,
critical sensing emphasizes the ways in which mechanisms of visibility take on a vitality and
"life" of their own, troubling the intentions in which they are initially produced and legislated
for.
Yet, even as the bulk of this project draws upon critical sensing to track the “accidental”
or inadvertent slippages materializing within state-produced narratives of cultural authenticity,
visibility, and legible citizenship, the last chapter in this work considers the radical possibilities
of a fragmented and multi-sensory vision, especially as critical sensing is suggested as a
decolonial aesthetic praxis. Such a formation is particularly compelling as this dissertation, near
its conclusion, considers the nuanced process of decolonization across the Korean transnational
nexus.
For Nak-Chung Paik, colonialism it not merely indicative of political or economic life,
but is a deeply ingrained structure underlying mundane life, psychic energy, and subject-
formation. Speaking specifically to the modern experience of colonialism, war, and national

40
division within Korea and throughout the Korean diaspora, Paik describes the population’s
embodiment of the Cold War “division system" as it has ‘solidified’… everywhere in the daily
lives of Korean people."
44

Decolonization, then, does not only point to the eradication of tangible structures, nor
does it suggest a romanticized return to an idyllic past. Rather, and as offered by Paik,
decolonization is a multi-scalar process that points to a decomposition of existing social,
politico-economic, and discursive systems through an intensive engagement with different ways
of knowing, processes of becoming, and modes of seeing. Simultaneously, as an ongoing process
of unlearning that contests naturalized or hegemonic frameworks, decolonization does not simply
insert silenced voices into a progressive teleology but gives way to a recalibration of forgotten
bodies, obscured memories, and social fragments—traces that allude to, in the Benjaminian
sense, forgotten social formations that were never seized upon or occluded from the historical
archive.
Within such a context, critical sensing suggests a divergent mode of "seeing” capable of
tracing a genealogy of memories and subjectivities embedded within yet obscured by the visual.
By emphasizing how the visual realm is constituted by socialities, shadow traces, and murky
tensions resistant to or occluded from the field of vision, critical sensing underscores how
residual traces of the past, or things rendered as “dead,” continue to inhabit and dwell within the
everyday. Indebted, then, to Avery Gordon’s framework of “hauntings” and as explored in the
remaining chapters, critical sensing might be understood as a “form of [social] mediation” that
registers how seemingly invisible and undetectable dynamics continue to undergird our everyday
lives.

41
CHAPTER 2: The Unmaking of the Home: Korean/Americans, the Home
Film, and The Politics of Belonging
Across the screen, a projected moving image of a Lurline sea boat approaching a sea harbor
emerges. Taken on 8mm gauge film, the footage is grainy, the colors, cool in tone. As the boat
inches toward the port, the frame suddenly jumps to a different sequence of shots. A young boy
and others congregate in front of a cream-colored house. Women carry trays of food as men
shake hands to greet each other. As the camera tilts to the foreground, the lens captures a
young man, dressed in a khaki-colored military uniform, sitting cross-legged on the lawn.
With an element of surprise in his face, the young man momentarily stares at the camera
before looking away. The scene continues to unfold as adults, children, and babies mingle
around a porch. Amidst the commotion, the camera lingers on an elderly woman seated at the
very edge of the porch stairs. Casting her glance toward the ground, she seems removed from
the boisterous scene. As two teenage boys toss a football, the young man in uniform joins them
in their light- hearted play. This frame shifts to a final sequence of shots. Dressed in dark blue
military attire, the young man strolls along a fence before disappearing into a tunnel.
Shot on a Kodak Brownie in 1951, this footage depicts Irvin Paik and his extended
family as they gather for an impromptu reunion. Part of the tightly knit Korean community
concentrated in South Los Angeles during the first half of the twentieth century, Irvin and his
cousins greet their uncle, Arthur, as he visits home before returning to active duty in the U.S.
Air Force during the Korean War (1950-1953). A snippet from an extensive silent film archive
encompassing family moments between 1940 and 1965, this clip seems to reify, at least upon
initial glance, a constellation of domestic tropes—a large extended family, the suburban home,
family leisure time— commonly linked to the idealized Cold War American family.

42
Although mainstream corporations within the U.S. amateur film industry, including
Kodak and Bell & Howell, have historically targeted the white heteronormative family as the
primary consuming audience for home film technology, contemporary media organizations,
such as the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), have also described Asian/American
home films in relationship to the intertwined projects of U.S. citizenship, democracy, and
nation- building. As observed through CAAM’s Memory to Light Project, a recent initiative in
which Asian/American home films are made available to the public via the Internet Archive,
vernacular images are configured as sources of visible evidence that attest to how
Asian/American families “became American” through a rocky yet linear trajectory of
migration, hardship, and integration. For Stephen Gong, the Executive Director of CAAM, the
home film “is where there is the real record of how life was lived, how we became American,
how this process happened.”
1

Yet, in this chapter, I complicate this singular understanding of the home film by
conceptualizing vernacular moving images, less as truthful sources that render wholly visible
the domestic project of “becoming American,” and more as subjective formations
encompassing complex meanings of home, identity, and citizenship. Materializing as
intercultural formations, the mid-twentieth century home films explored in this chapter
“suggest movement between one culture and another… [and] mediate in at least two
directions.”
2
Understood within this context, Korean/American home films embody unsettling
memories, unstable political conditions, and fluctuating movement across geographical,
political, and social boundaries— the very dynamics underlying the crystallization of the
modern Korean diaspora between 1905 and 1953.
3

Indeed, the historical moment in which Korean/American home films first emerged is

43
pivotal to understanding the obscured complexities embedded within the footage. During the
first half of the twentieth century, Korea underwent extraordinary changes, as it transformed
from a “hermit kingdom” into a geopolitical battleground re-mapped by the imperial desires of
Japan, Russia, China, and the United States. Following a decade of wars with China (1894-
1895) and Russia (1904-1905), Japan officially annexed Korea in 1910 and the country
remained a Japanese colony until the end of World War II in 1945. Within this thirty-five year
period, Korea experienced substantial waves of emigration, with approximately four million
Koreans, or over seventeen percent of the total Korean population, displaced and dispersed
throughout Eurasia, the Pacific, and the Americas, including the U.S., Mexico, and Cuba.
4

Demographic shifts continued to transpire as Soviet and U.S. forces swiftly landed in
Korea in August and September 1945 following the collapse of the Japanese empire. Seizing
the southern half of the peninsula while Soviet soldiers occupied the northern half, the U.S.
military divided the country roughly along the 38
th
parallel, a move that further exacerbated
Manichean tensions that had been percolating among exiled Korean political leaders and anti-
colonial activists for the past two-and-a-half decades.
5
In 1948, two separate elections were
held in the southern and northern zones of the country, with a two-state system formally
implemented by September of that year. On June 25, 1950, the Korean civil war erupted,
propelling, once again, violent waves of forced migration across and beyond the peninsula.
Set against this backdrop of colonization, military occupation, and Cold War division, a small
yet well-organized Korean diasporic nexus slowly emerged in the United States. Between
1903 and 1907, approximately 7,000 Korean laborers were recruited for sugar plantation
labor in Hawai’i, with 1,200 workers gradually trickling into the continental U.S. However,
due to legislative measures enacted by both the U.S. and Japanese governments—including

44
the barring of those identified as “Asian” from U.S. naturalized citizenship (1795, 1882),
anti-immigration legislation (1924) and U.S.-Japanese mutual agreements that restricted
Korean immigration (1905, 1907, 1910)— the Korean population in the continental U.S.
remained under 2,000 until the late 1960s. By 1940, approximately 1,711 Koreans resided in
the United States, with the majority concentrated in California (1,100). With a population of
700 to 800 Koreans, Los Angeles emerged as the cultural heart of the exiled community in
North America.
6

Located at the periphery of an idealized American citizenry popularly imagined as white,
middle-class, and heteronormative, this early Korean presence existed within the very fault-
lines of U.S. exclusionary practices and Japanese colonial policies. National citizenship and
belonging, in fact, were hotly contested among Koreans. With over half of all Korean-
identified subjects residing in the United States recognized as Japanese imperial subjects,
Korean/Americans struggled with the conflicting dimensions of home and citizenship.
Considering themselves as stateless or “homeless” on a national scale, Korean/Americans often
denied their official status as Japanese nationals and objected to the Japanese state’s
intervention in legal matters involving Koreans in the U.S.
7
As observed in a well-documented
case of Korean agricultural laborers driven out by an angry white mob from Hemet, California
in 1913, Koreans relied on the Korean National Association (KNA), a pro-independence
organization founded in 1909, for legal mediation and assistance.
8

For a younger generation born in the U.S., “Korea” evoked a different set of ideals, as it
surfaced more as a liberal symbol of freedom than a literal home. Younger Korean/Americans
during the 1930s and 1940s, for example, attempted to “sink [their] roots into American soil”
by holding English-language Sunday sermons in Los Angeles’ Korean Methodist Church and

45
fundraising for the U.S. military, even while many expressed exilic sentiments and strong
moral support for the Korean independence movement.
9
Although seemingly antithetical, this
braiding of pro-Korean sentiments and American patriotism is not necessarily contradictory.
Rather, the notion of American freedom was strategically mobilized by Korean/American
subjects as they advocated for the nationalistic project of Korean independence based on the
Wilsonian ideals of liberty, democracy, and autonomy.
10
In my engagement with
Korean/American film archives, it is these nuanced accounts home” I am particularly intrigued
with and interested in tracing. As argued in this chapter, the “home” in the home film does not
seamlessly dovetail with an idealized vision of “becoming American,” nor does it make wholly
transparent a singular narrative of national belonging and citizenship. Instead, as shifting
formations, home films function along multiple axes, ranging from the intimate nuclear family,
to collective and transnational articulations of “family.”
Methodology
Before delving into a reading of Korean/American home films, I would like to briefly
touch upon the methodological “toolbox” mobilized in this chapter. As fleshed out in the
previous chapter, I deploy critical sensing as the overarching method to disentangle the
multiple layers encompassed in the home film. Specifically, I draw upon the method of critical
sensing to register the ways in which embodied visual objects are constituted by spectral
dynamics, murky memories, and affective residues that resist transparency. For Sobchack,
“vision” is not a discrete mode of access to the world, but a multifaceted activity yoked to the
aural, tactile, and affective.
11
The articulation of spectatorship as cross-sensory is quite
instructive in my understanding of the home film because I engage with vernacular moving
images as embodied formations. Focusing on how it is intentionally shot by an image-maker,

46
framed for and projected to an intimate audience(s), archived, and re-circulated as a treasured
possession, I articulate the home film as a “living” object animated by desires, social affinities,
and familial expectations that accumulate across space and time. In other words, the different
sites in which objects land and inhabit are folded into its materiality as each reception expands
upon the meaning(s) of the moving image. Subsequently, re-encountering the home film, or
touching and being touched by images that are uncannily familiar and peculiar to the spectator,
is a sensual act that addresses yet extends far beyond the scopic realm.
Yet, whereas Sobchack is primarily interested in the haptic dimensions of the cinematic,
I draw upon critical sensing to simultaneously emphasize the impossibility of the moving
image. That is, even as it evokes a spectrum of sensual memories, the home film is not a
“perfect reproduction machine” that makes legible the political and social conditions that frame
such images.
12
Paradoxically, the visual “readability” of the home film is dependent upon an
obscuration of social, political, and affective dimensions that constitute its very form and
structure. This dialogical relationship between visibility and invisibility— or the ways in which
the home film’s promise of veracity is inexplicably wedded to film’s failure to make
transparent its conditions of possibility —is a pivotal tension unpacked in this chapter. As
observed by Karen Beckman, the significance of film is not the technology itself, but what it
comes to symbolize, or the incapacity of film to “expos[e] and captur[e] an elusive form of
‘truth,’ the possibility of fixing both knowledge and presence.”
13

Second, as an interdisciplinary method, critical sensing does not solely encompass
textual readings of the screen, but draws upon a strategic array of sources, ranging from moving
and still images to existing oral records to “thicken” one’s understanding of the visual. This
approach, I argue, addresses a vexing dilemma that scholars such as Jacqueline Najuma Stewart

47
grapple with in their research regarding the moving image and spectatorship. Scholars invested
in seemingly disposable subjects disappeared by the historical record might
ask: what methods, theories, and unconventional materials might be employed to engage
with these complex subjectivities without relying on the romanticized notions of resilience
and resistance?
14
In what ways might we draw upon existing sources, less as empirical data,
and more as social residues that hint at worldings that extend beyond the pristine borders of
“official” historicist narratives?
In an attempt to tackle these interrelated questions, Korean/American home films are
imagined as part and parcel of a cultural memory archive. Scholars including Joseph Roach,
Grace Cho, and Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, describe cultural memories as shifting
formations that do not simply dwell within the boundaries of institutional documents.
15
Indeed, memories linked to unimaginable violence often resist formal representation or are
strategically expunged from public documents. However, for Guidotti-Hernández, violence
paradoxically “leaves its traces,” fragmented and illegible as they may be, upon an array of
bodies and spaces that intimate its “unspeakability.”
16
In that sense, cultural formations
constituted by the visual, oral, and kinesthetic might be mobilized as mechanisms of memory
making and forgetting, in which distinct memories are re-membered, enunciated, and
performed.
17

Within this context, Korean/American home films are initial points of entry into
profound wells of cultural memory that unfurl, rather than congeal as self-evident artifacts.
18

The memory-archive-as-process not only hints at the violent impulses underlying the untidy
making of the modern Korean diaspora, but gestures to varying conditions undergirding the
material and ideological formation of the all-American home, and to a greater degree, the “home

48
territory” that is the U.S. settler colonial state.

The formation of the modern Korean diasporic
milieu was not an insular phenomenon, but tethered to the intersecting projects of Japanese and
U.S. imperialisms between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century: both states
consolidated its colonial territories through competing and collaborative efforts.
19
However, as
historical subjects, Korean/Americans are not simply victimized pawns or passive bodies mired
within the colliding agendas of two imperial regimes. Rather, they share complicated
relationships with the U.S. state, challenging and partaking in the re-imagining of the American
“home frontier” far beyond the continental U.S. and into the Pacific. Consequently, home films
explored in this chapter, including Irvin Paik’s footage, encompass the differentiated processes in
which Korean diasporics, as biopolitical subjects, were slowly incorporated into and participated
in the remapping of a contemporary “Asia Pacific.”
Lastly, by paying heed to the material and immaterial conditions shaping the moving
image, critical sensing tracks the gaps that emerge between the “actual” and the “virtual.”
20

As explicated by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, the actual corresponds to a fleeting
moment that passes (the “present-that-passes”), while the virtual refers to the preservation of
the past (the “past-that-is-preserved”).
21
As the actual can never be fully recalled, the virtual
crystallizes as the institutionalized record of lived experience. However, the virtual is not a
direct rendering of passing moments, but a reconstructive project propelled by subjective
memories, narrated from particular locales and “retouched” by different audiences. In that
sense, home films are elastic processes in which potentialities coalesce and dissipate.
Critical sensing, therefore, frames my understanding of the home film: rather than as pure
surface, I conceptualize the home film as depth. Rather than as an inanimate object, home

49
films materialize as embodied and animated forces, and instead of flat images, I link the
home film to volatile processes of imagining that traverse spatio-temporal boundaries.
With this elaboration in mind, I transition into the following sections. In the next
segment, I elucidate upon the early history of the home film in the U.S. and the emergence
of modern ocular technology during the early-to-mid twentieth century (1920-1960). The
central purpose of this section is not to provide an exhaustive history of the home film, but
to contextualize the racialized, gendered, and class-based dimensions of home film
practice. From its inception, the U.S.-based amateur film industry promoted home film
technology with a distinct audience in mind: the modern, heterosexual, and nuclear white
family.
Following this foundation, I shift my focus to home film collections belonging to
Korean/American families residing in California during the mid-twentieth century (1940-
1967). Situated in private and public archives, I draw upon these bodies of rare home footage
as cultural sites that adhere to and problematize desires linked to the American nuclear family.
Specifically, Korean/American home films trouble the established demarcations between the
domestic and public, national and transnational, and belonging and unbelonging.
The Emergence of American Home Film Practice
A technology that segued with the invention of cinema in the late nineteenth century,
amateur film, including the home film, shifted from a specialty hobby taken up by the
obscure film enthusiast to a more prevalent social practice in the post-World War II era.
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the emergence of more affordable
consumer-grade film gauges, including 16mm in 1923 and standard 8mm in 1935,
established the blueprint for the post-1950 popularization of the home film. In a broader

50
context, the invention of amateur film in the U.S. overlapped with the ascendancy of
capitalism, modernization, and consumerism in the U.S., exemplified by the growing
prevalence of electric technology, the wide-scale construction of single self-owned family
dwellings, and the promulgation of home ownership through the U.S. federal government’s
Better Homes in America campaign (1922).
22

As the Better Homes movement bolstered capitalism through consumption, purchasing
power became unabashedly aligned with American citizenship itself. The modern home became
synonymous with not only the better consumer-shopper, but with the American citizen par
excellence, depicted in home film advertisements as white, modern, and technically savvy.
While embodying cutting-edge speed and efficiency, home film technology was also affixed to
heteronormative ideals: well-kempt housewives, the moral linchpins of the American family,
operated the home film camera, projector, and screen with grace and ease. From its very
inception, then, the home film was tailored to an audience of consumer-citizens constituted by
heterosexual white subjects.
Following World War II, home film technology’s gradual transformation into a more
affordable middle-class pastime dovetailed with key social and politico-economic
developments. As observed by Patricia R. Zimmerman, America’s postwar economy
aggressively expanded to satisfy consumer demands truncated by shortages and rationing
during the war. Spurred by Fordist processes of mass production, automation, and
commercialism, domestic product capacity and overall national productivity increased, leading
to rising incomes, family-supporting wages, and surplus capital to purchase modern gadgets
for the home. Between 1948 and 1955, the television was installed in approximately two-thirds
of all American homes, and by 1960, over ninety percent of American households owned at

51
least one receiver.
23
Banks also extended credit to middle and lower class families for home
purchases within burgeoning tracts of suburban homes, although Zimmerman fails to
recognize how discriminatory practices, including “redlining”— established by the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC)—
maintained suburbs exclusively for white families and barred families labeled as “colored” or
“non-white” from accessing home mortgage loans.
24

This increased economic productivity and heightened consumerism mapped onto an
emergent ideology of the strong Cold War American family. In the post-1945 era, the U.S.
surfaced in as one of two global powers competing for dominance within a Manichean world
system. Consequently, legible American citizenship was consolidated not only by normative
practices of material consumption, privatization, and family leisure but also by the sentimental
principles of democracy, freedom, and liberty. Yet, even with the U.S. government’s shift
from explicitly exclusionary domestic practices to “softer” policies of racial inclusion and
harmony during the Cold War, this liberal discourse of equality and freedom was strategically
crafted by the U.S. state to strengthen its own global image as a compassionate "leader of the
free world.”
25
The white nuclear family became central to this discourse of benevolence, as it
was imagined as the atomic unit of a robust and humanitarian U.S. nation-state.
However, at least on the ground, the prominence of a consuming American middle-
class did not equate to uniform access to modern luxuries. In 1952, Bell & Howell’s Annual
Report noted that only six percent of American households—more specifically, white
suburban family households— had the financial means to purchase amateur film technology.
26
Even with the popularization of the 8mm film gauge format, the average prices of home film
cameras were still relatively high. In 1950, for instance, lower-end cameras, such as the

52
Brownie 8mm and Revere 50, were approximately 50 dollars (equivalent to a contemporary
price-tag of $435.51), while high-end semi-professional cameras sold for as much as $365
(equivalent to today’s $3,290.92). For the majority of families, notions of disposable income
and family leisure were still lofty ideals that did not align with the material reality of their
everyday lives.
27

Despite the conditional meaning of affordability, the home film camera was still
rigorously promoted by the amateur film industry as a must-have household item suited for
American middle-class life. By the late 1940s, popular discourse in magazines and instruction
books described amateur filmmaking as a necessary commodity for the healthy nuclear family.
As implied by a Ciné-Kodak advertisement for color film included in a 1947 Better Homes &
Gardens issue, the camera was interpreted as a somatic extension of the suburban citizen-body,
or a “third eye” capable of capturing the precious dimensions and minutiae of nuclear family
life (Figure 2.1). In such advertisements, the suburban white nuclear family is visibly featured
as the sole consuming audience, as parents and children gaze upon projected images of a family
vacation within the serenity of their own living room. As a technology that upheld the promise
of transparency, the home film was also constructed as a device that documented authentic
textures of family life, as “real stories from real life” were captured “on full-color Kodachrome
Film” to “tell the whole story” (Figure 2.1, emphasis included in advertisement). Subsequently,
the sedimentation of heterosexual middle-class ideals produced a distinct visual formation
within the popular national imaginary, as tropes of suburban middle-class life, ranging from a
large home with a white picket fence, to marriage, children, and family leisure time, were
visually reproduced as natural life benchmarks.
28
The pervasiveness of such visual themes in
relationship to home film practice generated a familialist ideology or “visual rhetoric of the

53
family film,” in which a single image of a wedding, family holiday, or child’s birthday party
“condense[d] and crystallize[d] thousands of analog images.”
29

Figure 2.1 Ciné-Kodak Advertisement for Color Film and Movie Camera (1947) (Featured in
Better Homes & Gardens)

54
Korean/Americans, Home Film Practice, and Un/Becoming An American
Background, Framing, & Context: Korean/American Home Films
Couched within this context, I now shift my attention to Korean/American home films
belonging to two very different families residing in Los Angeles, California during the early
to mid-twentieth century (1940-1967): the Paik family, briefly described at the beginning of
this chapter (1940-1965) and the family of Reverend Shungnak “Luke” Kim (1948-1967),
the spiritual leader of the Los Angeles Korean Presbyterian Church. Drawing upon the
method of critical sensing, I conceptualize Korean/American home films as intercultural
formations that trace, if only for a fleeting moment, contradictory meanings of home that
reaffirm and destabilize the dominant tropes tethered to home film practice and the U.S.
nation-state.
Currently, there are no contemporary studies that explore home filmmaking among
Korean/Americans. Within the limited body of extant literature focusing on Asian/American
home films, attention is primarily placed upon footage taken by Japanese/Americans of
internment life during World War II, or the remediation of home films within documentary
movies and experimental video essays.
30
Most, if not all of these texts place central
importance upon the seductive discourse of memory recovery. That is, home films are
described as vessels that contain hidden yet intact memories, which are then unearthed and
resuscitated to reveal traumatic truths and silenced life histories.
The dearth of critical scholarship is echoed by the relative absence of Asian/American
home films within public archives. Despite CAAM’s efforts to collect Asian/American home
films made between 1920 and 1980, a prominent portion of films belong to socially and/or
economically privileged families solicited by CAAM, or were produced in the post-1965

55
moment following the invention of super-8mm gauge film. Certainly, as suggested by the
three home film collections maintained at the University of Southern California’s (USC)
Korean Heritage Library,
31
home film technology was only accessible to those who had
extraordinary access to professional, socio-economic, and/or political resources.
32
Although
these privileged subject-positions re-affirm the exclusive conditions linked to home film
technology, the eclectic range of home films also register the heterogeneity of the early
Korean/American community and defy easy containment within white suburban life.
33

The scarcity of surviving Korean/American home films, at least within public
institutions, also raises an array of compelling questions. First, the archiving of or literal
“housing” of home films emerges as a key concern. Here, an elaboration of the term “archive”
is productive, as my analysis of home films is closely associated with the method of critical
sensing—a practice that traces dynamics embedded in yet simultaneously obscured by the
field of vision. As suggested by Ann Laura Stoler, the archive is not a static repository
constituted by an accumulation of truthful facts; rather, it is a “force field” mapped by political
energies and relations of power.
34
In the culling of an “intelligible” archive, a select corpus of
sources are transformed into “qualified knowledge,” while other ways of knowing are marked
as extraneous and inconsequential. Therefore, when scrutinizing the home film archive,
scholars must problematize the surfacing images and the invisible practices that discursively
frame the visual text.
This understanding of the visual memory archive is central to my engagement with
Korean/American vernacular images. As Korean/American home films are not processed or
streamlined through a central cataloguing system, their diffusion across disparate sites and the
arbitrary ways in which they are preserved, “re-discovered,” then digitized, vary greatly,

56
producing unforeseen consequences. In particular, the conversion of 8mm and 16mm gauge
film into digital bytes does not merely affect the visual rendering of images. Spectators’ and
scholars’ re-encounter with the moving image also determine the gamut of meanings
associated with the home film.
Home Footage as Intercultural Formations: Irvin Paik’s Home Films
Originally shot on 8mm gauge black-and-white and color film by his parents, Meung
Sun and Rose Paik, Irvin Paik’s family footage stretches across a twenty-five year period
spanning from 1940 to 1965. Born in Bakersfield in 1940 and now in his early seventies, Irvin,
for the first time in several decades, rummaged through the original film reels stashed away in
old dusty file boxes in 2013. Active in the Los Angeles Asian/American theater troupe, East
West Players, and a television producer in Hollywood for over two decades, Irvin was a
prominent figure within Asian/American independent cinema between the 1970s to late 1990s.
While sorting through his papers, documents, and other primary sources deposited into the
USC Korean Heritage Library, I became aware of Irvin’s life history, his family’s home film
collection, and his early production work with the United States Army Signal Corps Army
Pictorial service, the film arm of the U.S. army and producer of the American documentary
television program, The Big Picture (1951-1964).
In an attempt to preserve the decomposing films, Irvin utilized high-resolution telecine
technology to convert the fragile reels into digitized footage.
35
Chronologically organized and
titled by the category of “house” or the location of Irvin’s family residence during the initial
filming, the Paik family footage is divided into three digital video discs (DVD): “41
st
Street
House” (1947-1952), “Hammel House” (1951-1955), and “39
th
Street House” (1955-est.
1965). Composed of one to three-minute reels, each of the digitized files includes a rough

57
assemblage of over one hour of film footage, or between twenty and twenty-eight separate
reels.
In elaborating upon the decision to thematize the footage by “house,” Irvin noted that
this method of organization was the most logical as it ensured a sense of chronological
progression. However, when viewing each DVD, the stitching of separate reels into a single
digitized file does not culminate in a smooth linear arc. In sharp contrast, the end of each
reel, indicated by an abrupt frame break or spotty light flickering, disrupts any sense of
continuity. Perhaps, this idiosyncratic archiving process is more illuminating when
considering Irvin’s divergent articulations of “house” and “home.” As noted in an oral
history interview conducted for the digitized Korean American Legacy Project, Irvin, more
often than not, seemingly links “house” to “sensible” information, while “home” is
associated with the emotive ramifications of identity-formation. The “home film,” then,
might be conceptualized as an intercultural terrain in which seemingly “factual” elements of
inhabiting a space —the logistics of where his family was able to rent a house, for example,
or the names of streets and neighbors— collide with the affective dimensions of
displacement, belonging, and citizenship.
36

Irvin’s mobilization of industry quality technology is also important to consider.
Despite fading at the filmic edges, the “flattening” or dulling of color, and the appearance of
scratches across the surface, the resultant images show no signs of filmic “burns” or visible
scarring, repercussions of damage sustained during “quick-and-dirty” film-to-digital
conversion processes.
37
For Irvin, the considerable time and energy channeled into converting
the film into a high quality digitized format reflects a pressing urgency to preserve decaying
visual sources. Driven by a strong desire to preserve the past for an imagined future, the

58
digitization process is embedded in and reproduces a field of social relations linked to multiple
temporalities. As a memory object of the past, the analog footage is “passed down” vertically
along a heteronormative social ladder, as subsequent generations and imagined progeny are
bequeathed as the inheritors of the trove of films—in Irvin’s case, his nephews and nieces, as
he has no children. With the conversion of film into digitized files, home films also circulate
beyond the nuclear family unit and across virtual space. Eventually, Irvin hopes to donate
edited versions of his family footage to CAAM’s Memories to Light project. The public if not
unwieldy quality of the Internet produces a range of not-yet-realized potentialities for images
that were originally intended for a much smaller, more intimate audience. The images might
be downloaded, copied through image-capturing programs, edited and re-mixed, and re-
circulated. Even as such processes raise concerns related to image ownership and
appropriation, such actions are also compelling for Irvin, CAAM, and new media scholars
because they contribute to an amorphous web of spectator-driven reception practices that
trouble the fixed notion of the “original,” “authentic,” or “indexical” image, while generating
new and at times, unexpected visual formations.
Through his dual roles of as archivist and family member, Irvin’s re-encounter with the
filmic is, to say the least, complex. Encapsulating material, affective, and spatio-temporal
dimensions, a re-encounter might be described as spectator’s sustained engagement with a
visual formation across different spaces and moments-in-time. However, the significance of
the visual is not invariable, but morphs as the home film accrues different associations and
affective charges over time.
38
Subsequently, a re-encounter with the home film encompasses
both an uncanny sense of repetition and familiarity (“I’ve seen these images before!”), as well
as a sense of novelty (“I don’t recognize the images before me!”). The multiplicity of the re-

59
encounter, therefore, suggests the ways in which the meaning(s) of the vernacular image is
intertwined with the spectator’s location in space and time. With these insights in mind, I
mobilize the notion of re-encounter, rather than recovery or resuscitation, as the latter terms
inadvertently contextualize the home film as a fixed memory object.
As observed in his Legacy Project oral history and e-mail correspondence, Irvin
describes his recollections as tentative approximations rather than truthful depictions
because he himself was not the filmmaker(s) of his family’s footage.
39
Rather, it was his
parents who were the primary filmmakers of the home films. As a working-class family that
often struggled to make ends meet, Irvin’s family initially accessed home film technology
through his father’s professional ties. When asked why it was meaningful for his parents to
maintain an extensive film archive, especially during an era when home film technology
was still relatively new and expensive, Irvin noted that both of his parents shared a
sustained interest in the moving image. A quiet man, Irvin’s father cultivated a passion for
the cinema as he frequented the Chinese Theatre, located on Hollywood Boulevard, with his
children during the rare weekends when he was not working at the family fruit stand. Irvin’s
mother, on the other hand, was adamant about documenting family gatherings and local
events, including the Pasadena Rose Parade, for the purposes of maintaining a family
album.
40

Irvin’s own understanding of his family footage, then, is always already framed by his
parents’ selective choices in image making. Here, I mobilize the method of critical sensing to
emphasize how the filmmaker becomes a critical albeit erased condition of the point-of-view
(POV) shots that appear across the screen. Perhaps, the only tangible trace of the filmmaker(s)
is the shaky handling of the portable camera as all films were captured without a tripod. The

60
absent presence of the filmmaker generates a conundrum for spectators: what possible
motivations compelled the filmmaker(s) to document the moments, people, and details
captured by the movie camera? For Walter Benjamin, this inquiry highlights the status of the
moving image as an exemplary modern medium, as film is de-linked from the authentic and
fixed temporality.
41
Even as popular culture posits the home film as a raw portrayal of
mundane life, home films constitute a curated body of images crafted by the filmmaker, who
ultimately chooses which moments are documented and preserved. Although the filmmaker
remains hidden from the camera lens, s/he is inevitably embossed within the footage as an
authorial “seeing” subject.
42

Given these subjective parameters, what visual tropes emerge throughout the Paik family
films? Tracking Irvin’s development from a child growing up in a low-income, ethnically
diverse neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles throughout the 1940s to a young adult
leaving for artillery training at Fort Still, Oklahoma in 1962, Irvin’s films, on the surface,
generate visual clichés associated with suburban American life. Scattered throughout the
footage are children’s birthday parties replete with elaborate cakes and colorful balloons, high
school football games with blond-haired cheerleaders, family outings to the beach, and well-
manicured front lawns. Additionally, etched onto the faces and movements of filmed subjects
are emotive traces that possibly hint at the pleasures afforded by middle-class domesticity. In
one scene, the air is saturated with electric energy as Irvin and his five sisters frenetically open
presents around a Christmas tree, and in another scene, spectators sense a jocular atmosphere as
uncles, aunts, and cousins playfully gather around an expansive porch during a family
gathering during the 1950s.

61
Yet, upon closer examination, the vivid transparency of these moving images becomes
muddled and murky. Take, for example, the scene described in the beginning of this chapter,
in which family members congregate at Irvin sister’s (Alice’s) home in South Central Los
Angeles to greet Arthur as he returns home for a brief visit.

Upon initial glance, recognizable
signposts of domesticity gesture to a tranquil family gathering. However, in re-encountering
the image, Irvin describes the moment as one of heightened tension. For example, partially due
to Irvin’s inability to communicate in or understand Korean, Irvin’s paternal grandmother
remained a mystery to him for much of his life. As described by Irvin’s aunt, Mary Paik Lee,
in her autobiography, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, Irvin’s
grandmother belonged to the first wave of Koreans who migrated to the U.S. at the turn of the
twentieth century and embodied the intersecting colonial dynamics underlying the formation
of the modern Korean diaspora. Following the removal from her family’s home under the
newly formed Japanese protectorate in Korea and her recruitment for sugar plantation labor in
Hawai’i in 1905, Irvin’s grandmother eventually migrated from Hawai’i to California to join
other family members, including several of her children, residing in the state as seasonal farm
workers.
43

But as a Japanese subject barred from U.S. naturalization, Irvin’s grandmother and
hundreds of other Korean/Americans lived in a moment of uncertainty. Despite anti-colonial
sentiments, Irvin’s grandmother was officially recognized as an “enemy alien” resident of the
U.S. state and was initially slated for “relocation” to an internment camp, a destiny she
avoided due to a series of federal General Orders that intervened on the behalf of Koreans.
44
By the end of World War II, decades of instability, war(s), and displacement produced a
profound sense of desolation among the older members of many Korean diasporic families in

62
Los Angeles.
45
Within such a context, it is important to consider the melancholic residues
quietly hinted by and embodied in the footage: in the handful of scenes in which she appears
within the footage, Irvin’s grandmother materializes as a present-yet-fading body. In most of
the shots, she is pushed or pushes herself to the very periphery of the family circle, almost
vanishing from the screen. Perhaps, the moving images allude to an invisible negotiation
between presence and absence, as the surface-image of Irvin’s grandmother evokes two
conflicting dynamics: a desire to be seen and a desire to disappear.
Uncle Arthur’s involvement in the Korean War also elicited different responses among
family members. During the war, Arthur secured a role as a translator, participating in the
interrogation of North Korean prisoners. Although vague, Arthur is described as a reserved
and solitary man by both Lee and Irvin.
46
It was not until I read Lee’s autobiography that I
became aware of a near fatal accident Arthur had experienced during World War II. Working
as part of the communications branch of the U.S. army, Arthur sustained a gunshot to the head
and medical doctors eventually inserted a metal plate in his head to cover the prominent crack
in his skull. As described by Lee, Arthur never fully recovered from the injury, remaining in
physical pain for the rest of his life.
47
Influenced, perhaps, by the profound silence already
surrounding the Korean War—a war popularly labeled by the American public as the
“Forgotten War,” even as it killed nearly three million civilians and obliterated all existing
infrastructure in Korea— Irvin’s family never approached Arthur about his experiences of the
war.
48

Through the framework of critical sensing, I highlight the oppositional relationship that
crystallizes between the Irvin’s visible footage and an invisible archive of impossible images.
The indexical quality of the family footage —Arthur’s innocent appearance, his playfulness

63
with his nephews, his light-hearted smile—seems incompatible with the conjured images of
his damaged body and his roles as soldier and interrogator. As an observant spectator, I also
became perplexed by this dilemma. In several attempts to address such a disparity, I scoured
the footage for signs and clues suggesting Arthur’s emotional state. Playing the segment
repeatedly on my laptop and using image-capturing software to isolate still frames, the
resultant photographs were disappointingly flat and dissatisfying, as they did not capture the
affective dynamics I had imagined and attributed to Arthur’s psyche (Figures 2.2-4). It was not
until colleagues inquired upon my decision to include these particular images in this chapter
that I became hyperaware of my own relentless yearning for a fixed indexical image, a
singular frame capable of revealing the “real essence” of Arthur’s unspoken tribulations.
49
This steadfast desire does not merely point to the qualitative differences between
photography and film, or the failure of the moving-image to “properly” convert into still
frames. It also speaks volumes to the inferential quality or presumption of transparency
inscribed onto the vernacular image. Even as a trained scholar well versed in the critiques of the
indexical image, I, too, inadvertently searched and sifted through Irvin’s footage for discrete
moments of “truth” and “authenticity.” Much to the chagrin of spectators, these slices of image-
time are part and parcel of a filmic surface that hold no meanings separate from those imparted
by spectators themselves.

64

Figures 2.2-4 Still shots from Irvin Paik’s home films, Arthur returns home (Los Angeles,
1951). Courtesy of Irvin Paik.

65
The aural dimensions of the home films accentuate these contradictions. On the one hand, the
silent footage echoes the family’s own reticence regarding the Korean War, while the pure
visibility of Arthur in military uniform pushes against such silence and secrecy. More
poignantly, the image does not necessarily serve as a mnemonic device, but engenders a quiet
yet determined desire to unremember. Consequently, the pregnant tension between existing
footage and the absent-yet-imagined photoplay remains suspended, resistant to resolution or
cathartic address. The footage materializes as an intercultural formation that embodies the
silenced residues and shadows cast by the interlocking dynamics of Japanese imperialism, U.S.
militarization, and the afterlife of the Korean War.
This gap between the actual (the discomfiting textures embedded in the image) and
the virtual (the carefree atmosphere, Arthur’s playful interactions) is further exemplified by
the paradoxical portrayals of “home” and “house” throughout Irvin’s family films. In a five-
minute segment taken between 1949 and 1950, a choppy stitching of family outings in Los
Angeles’ Exposition Park depicts moments in which siblings are enjoying leisure time
together. In this footage, Irvin and his sisters frolic across a sandy playground with other
children; Irvin’s sister Alice and an unidentified young boy play tetherball in a concrete
court; and Irvin and his sister slowly weave through the park on bicycle, as they happily
wave at the movie camera (Figures 2.5-7).
As his family did not own a functioning car, or, according to Irvin, a car that “actually
worked,” Irvin and his sisters primarily accessed public spaces by foot, bicycle, or cable cars.
At that time, Exposition Park was the only public park within walking distance from Irvin’s
family home, located at the intersection of 41
st
Street and Broadway in South Central Los
Angeles, just on the outskirts of the small Korean community or emergent “Koreatown.”
50
An

66

Figures 2.5-7 Still shots from Irvin Paik’s home films, Family at Exposition Park
(Los Angeles, 1940-1950). Courtesy of Irvin Paik.

67
area bounded by Adams to the north and Slauson to the South, Vermont Avenue to the east and
Western Avenue to the west, this early Koreatown included several key diasporic institutions,
such as the Korean Methodist Church, the Korean Presbyterian Church, the latter attended by
Irvin’s family, and the KNA (Figure 2.8, Map).

Irvin’s outings to Exposition Park, however, were not solely determined by the proximity of the
park to his family’s house, but were also influenced by structural factors underlying the making
of a differentiated cityscape, or a geography of difference, during the first half of the twentieth
century.
51
Due to the prevalence of redlining and racially restrictive covenants in Los Angeles,
or codes inserted into house deeds that forbid “non-white” families from occupying homes in
specific neighborhoods, Irvin’s parents could not choose where they wanted to live.
Consequently, the family resorted to renting small houses in multi-ethnic neighborhoods
Figure 2.8 Map of early “Koreatown” in Los Angeles (1930-1955).

68
produced by accrued segregation policies. Upon initially moving to Los Angeles, the Paik
household of eight lived in a cramped two-bedroom rented house, and between 1947 and 1955,
the family moved three times throughout South Los Angeles.
When asked about the links between home films and the middle-class household, Irvin
scoffed at the idea of his family as middle-class. Since, for instance, the family could not afford
a projection screen, the films were projected against a kitchen wall covered with wallpaper, with
family members either ignoring the wallpaper or discussing how it enhanced the moving
images.
52
Simultaneously, in his descriptions of his childhood, Irvin consistently draws upon
terms such as “property” and “housing,” rather than “home,” to describe his family’s move from
home to home throughout Los Angeles. As intimated by his responses, the notion of “house”
emerges as a distinct concept for Irvin, associated with material wealth (or the lack of),
structural inequality, and temporary status as his family moved from one dwelling to another.
“Home,” in contrast, crystallizes as more complicated and visceral term associated with a deep
yearning to belong.
53

When we scrutinize Irvin’s family experiences of racial exclusion within a broader
Historical trajectory, the normative ideals evoked by the all-American home are
problematized even more. For women of color and indigenous feminist scholars, including
Grace Kyungwon Hong and Joanne Barker, the notions of belonging and subjecthood are
intimately linked to house ownership, as property has been central to the institutionalized
meaning of the autonomous American citizen.
54
For Hong, the U.S. nation-state constructs
the “free” and “equal” citizen- subject vis-à-vis the state discourse of “possessive
individualism,” or the ability to determine and dictate one’s own subjectivity through the
ownership of capital.
55
However, as a structural formation tethered to the logics of white

69
supremacy, heteronormativity, and patriarchy, property has not merely eluded racialized and
indigenous communities. Rather, differentiated subjects, through overlapping yet distinct
experiences of displacement, genocide, indentured servitude, and slavery are violently
legislated as “unfree” objects to own and/or forms of property.
56

This, of course, does not assume that all subjects marked as peripheral to the white U.S.
nation-state have experienced equivalent forms of violence. As cautiously offered by Candace
Fujikane, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, and Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, racialized communities continue to
participate in and enact violence against indigenous peoples. For instance, speaking to the
hierarchical system of settler colonialism and sugar plantation labor in Hawai’i, Saranillio
refers to the systematic oppressions experienced by and complicity of Asian/Americans
within the island economy. Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne also articulates the ways in which indigenous
peoples are treated as “always already dead” by Asian transnational businesses such as
Taiwanese “Indian- themed” restaurants in San Gabriel Valley, a vast stretch of land first
inhabited by the Tongva people and now commonly referred to as an “Asian majority”
enclave within Los Angeles County.
Informed by these critical insights, my underscoring of the ideological and material
formation of the “American home” does not point to uniform modes of violence experienced
by different communities. Rather, I am interested in how varied forms of oppression function
within a U.S. settler colonial state, an overarching system founded upon the principle of
“Manifest Destiny,” a discourse justifying the westward expansion of an already distended
U.S. state. Consolidated by a well-established trajectory of material and discursive violence,
the U.S. settler colonial state has generated an idealized notion of “home” encompassing

70
multiple scales, ranging from the individuated middle-class home to the all American nation-
state.
Situated within this deep reservoir of enmeshed colonial histories and settler violence,
the “home” within Irvin’s family films take on a very different valence of meanings. Namely,
by mobilizing the method of critical sensing, or reading across and beyond the visual frame, the
moving images transform into a discursive space in which contradictory dimensions of house
and home, citizenship, and belonging are vetted. The footage functions as a paradox as it
seemingly reproduces, on the surface, visual signifiers sutured to the American domestic home,
even as they simultaneously index what Irvin’s family could not access. Cataloguing an
impossible desire to belong, the images, perhaps, also substitute or “fill in” for the absence of
material abundance and stability. The significance of these images exceeds the thinness of the
virtual images. Subsequently, Irvin’s experiences of dislocation do not easily graft onto notions
of suburban serenity and social mobility. Rather, Irvin describes the peculiarity of the carefree
footage, as the films erase the discomfiting tensions his family and he managed in a city-space
mapped by racialized exclusion. Yet, Irvin’s affective re-encounter with and understanding of
the home films are inevitably mediated through the spectral lens—even if imagined or
presumed— of his long deceased parents.
The Domestic is the Transnational: Shungnak “Luke” Kim & Home Films
While I draw upon Irvin’s family footage to trace the affective fissures underlying the
seemingly insular American home, I now shift to a very different assemblage of home films to
underscore the intimate intertwining of the domestic and transnational. Drawing, again, upon
the method and framework of critical sensing, I engage with the films of Reverend Shungnak

71
“Luke” Kim—an evangelist and lead minister of the Los Angeles Korean Presbyterian Church
between 1938 and 1959— to track the material conditions and spectral residues embodied
within the Reverend’s expansive visual archive. In particular, I pay heed to Reverend Kim’s
historical subjectivity, and the ways in which socio-political complexities contour the very
images that coalesce and dissipate across the screen.
For a relatively prominent individual in the early twentieth century Korean diaspora,
only pieces and fragments are available on Reverend Kim’s life. A surviving identification card
issued by the U.S. government tells us that Shungnak Kim was born in 1903 in Korea and
arrived in the Los Angeles Port on January 8, 1937, via the SS Taiyo Mura, when he was thirty-
four years old. With his four children and his wife, Reverend Kim, similarly to all Koreans
after 1910, arrived in the U.S. as a subject of the Japanese imperial government. Becoming a
U.S. naturalized citizen in 1954, Reverend Kim then returned to a newly formed South Korean
nation in 1959 where he served as the president of Seoul’s Soong Sil University until 1966 and
continued evangelizing throughout Asia. Eventually, Reverend Kim returned to Pasadena,
California, where he retired and passed away in 1989 at the age of eighty-six (Figure 2.9).
Roughly covering a nineteen-year period (1948-1967), Reverend Kim’s 8mm and 16mm color
and black-and-white silent films include an eclectic range of events, places, and people.
57
Donated by Reverend Kim’s son, George Kim, to the USC Korean Heritage Library in 2009
with limited metadata, Reverend Kim is, nevertheless, identified as the primary filmmaker of
the footage. As intimated by the moving images, Reverend Kim seemed to relish his role as an
amateur filmmaker: not only did he take extensive footage of his life in Los Angeles, but also
frequently traveled with his camera during missionary trips abroad.

72

Due to the relative absence of information provided with the footage and the difficulty
of maintaining communication with the Kim family, the head librarian of USC’s Korean
Heritage Library, initially sorted through the footage himself. Working with limited resources
and a finite budget, the Korean Heritage Library outsourced the digitization process to the
warehouse club, Costco. As Costco utilizes lower-resolution telecine technology in the film- to-
digital conversion process, the quality of Reverend Kim’s digitized films varies greatly, as light
flickering, white lines, and burn marks scar the footage. Yet, these sustained “defects” are also
reflective of the shelf life of the film medium, as its delicacy is susceptible to damage, processes
of aging, and chemical deterioration over time.
Following the digitization process, the Korean Heritage Library then organized the reels
into thirty-four clips, ranging from forty-seven seconds to over just 10 minutes. Categorized
by themes determined by Klein, ranging from church events to South Korean military parades,
Figure 2.9 Shungnak “Luke” Kim, U.S. Immigrant Identification Card, Issued by U.S.
Department of Labor (1937) (USC Korean American Digital Archive)

73
each film segment is preceded by a bright orange title card containing a succinct description of
the segment (“Kay’s Graduation, UCLA”), a date if available (“1956”), and the phrase, “A
Shungnak Luke Kim Film.” As the very first shot that appears on the screen, the title card
situates and frames the moving images for observers. Consequently, even before watching the
footage, spectators are already told and made aware of the content that will unfold across the
screen.
Within this context, the discursive practices of archiving are pivotal to understanding
the ways in which the moving image is re-encountered by spectators. For instance, based on
the strategic titling of the segments, there is a public sensibility to the films. The “home”
within the film archive is linked, less to the nuclear family or American domestic sphere, and
more to the Korean/American community-at-large and an imagined ethno-centric Korean
nation-family. Out of thirty-four digitized segments, twenty-five are related to public life,
including church-related events, while the remaining nine clips are associated with Reverend
Kim’s personal and family life.
Rich with possibilities as they are ambiguous and opaque, Reverend Kim’s moving
images might be conceptualized as intercultural formations that hint at the ways in which the
“over here” of Los Angeles is imagined as part and parcel of the “over there” of Asia. Due to
his occupation as a minister and as an official minister of the American Presbyterian Church,
Reverend Kim had extraordinary access to economic, social, and material privileges that were
beyond the means of most Koreans in Los Angeles, including Irvin and his family. Perceived
as a heterosexual male and proficient in both Korean and English, Reverend Kim also
consistently crossed borders, both national and racial, as he traveled to Korea, Hong Kong,
and the Philippines for missionary obligations and postwar relief work in South Korea. This

74
cosmopolitan subject-position permeates the films: the moving images not only portray Asian
peoples and diverse landscapes, but uncannily resembles, through an assortment of visual
cues, the colonial ethnographic travelogue.
58

In considering this conundrum, I draw upon critical sensing to parse the ways in which
the obscured complexities and striking contradictions of lived experience are subtly embodied
in Reverend Kim’s home footage. That is, the visual connotations within the Reverend’s films
point to the messiness of historical subjectivity. Even as a colonized subject who actively
supported the Korean independence movement against the Japanese empire, Reverend Kim’s
occupation as a Presbyterian minister and his investment in international missionary work also
made him complicit with the colonial motivations of the American Presbyterian Church, a vast
institution associated with the Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Association (HSPA) through actors
such as Horace Allen, a Presbyterian medial missionary and important American diplomat to
Korea. An agent of the HSPA, Allen played crucial roles in the recruitment of Korean,
Japanese, and Filipino laborers for the Hawaiian sugar plantation system, contributing to the
consolidation of a U.S. settler colonial regime already set in motion by the illegitimate
overthrow of the sovereign kingdom of Hawai’i on January 17, 1893.
Within the Reverend’s visual archive, a film clip originally shot during the early 1950s,
entitled “Asian Tour (Including Hong Kong),” provides spectators with an opportunity to
track these perplexing dynamics. At the beginning of the three-minute segment, the camera
captures a medium shot of two women casually conversing and laughing. One of the women
is Chong Ok Yung, Reverend Kim’s wife, who often accompanied Reverend Kim during his
worldwide travels. Within the footage, Chong Ok demurely glances at the camera as if to
silently acknowledge her husband’s presence. Throughout the extensive film archive, Chong

75
Ok, a polished-looking woman with neatly coiffed hair, consistently re-appears as a filmed
subject rather than as the in/visible filmmaker. These dynamics, perhaps, gesture to the
heterosexual norms binding Chong Ok to Reverend Kim, as Chong Ok visibly and primarily
emerges as a housewife, companion, and a mother and grandmother throughout the family
film archive.
Within a minute or so, the frame suddenly jumps to a different sequence of shots as an
ornate façade of a church is shown, along with the banner “Ellinwood Fellowship Order”
placed above the church entrance. The banner provides an important clue to the filmmaker’s
location. Named after Dr. Francis (“Frank”) Field Ellinwood, the Secretary General of the
Presbyterian Mission Board— and, as observed through his monograph Great Conquest,” or,
Miscellaneous Papers on Missions (1876), a fervid supporter of the colonial re-education of
“natives” through evangelization—the Ellinwood Fellowship was part of the Union
Theological Seminary in the Philippines, the oldest Protestant seminary in the country
established in the Cavite province near Manila in 1905.
59

Yet, with the exception of this scene, the remainder of film segment does not visibly
depict identifiable church meetings, religious gatherings, or congregational services. Rather,
as the bulk of the footage is shot from different modes of transportation, including jerky cars
and planes, the POV shots reflect Reverend Kim’s positionality as a traveling image-maker
possibly inspired by the task of evangelizing to an indigenous population. The camera
captures rural surroundings, including dirt and unpaved roads, tropical forests, and farmland
dotted with agricultural laborers and cows. In one frame, the camera offers a jumpy 180-
degree pan of rustic living abodes set against the backdrop of a thick forest. Captured with
limited light, the footage is difficult to make out, but faint outlines of homes with thatched

76
roots, garments dangling from a clothesline, verdant foliage, and an indigenous boy in the
immediate foreground of the screen appear. Attempting to document select details of the
scene, Reverend Kim zigzags the wobbly camera from the left to right, allowing the camera to
linger on particular “objects”—homes, the hanging clothes, and the young boy. The fixation
on the young boy’s face produces a moment of colonial othering, as the filmmaker attempts to
capture the authentic textures of real life among the so-called “natives” (Figure 2.10).

The footage also includes a number of aerial scenes taken from a plane, in which
Reverend Kim captures swaths of ocean and strips of land from a high altitude (Figure 2.11).
The aerial shots, however, are not confined to this particular home film, as aerial imagery is
pervasive throughout
Figure 2.10 Still shot from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home films, Near the Union Theological
Seminary (Cavite, Philippines, 1953-1954, est.). Courtesy of USC Korean Heritage Library.

77

Reverend Kim’s visual archive. To a certain extent, Reverend Kim’s fascination with the aerial
brushes against what Priya Jaikumar and Caren Kaplan refer to as the biopolitical function of the
aerial shot.
60
Mobilized by the state since the mid-nineteenth century for surveying purposes,
cartographic information, and reconnaissance, aerial observation reflects a desire to spatially
map, know, and sense a space from a power-laden position of distant proximity. Taking into
consideration Reverend Kim’s work “on the ground” as an evangelizing minister and
missionary, his preoccupation with aerial imagery might be contextualized within a matrix in
which colonial ambitions, political motivations, and religious convictions converge. Assuming
the “voice and vision of authority,” Reverend Kim encodes “wider socio-spatial relations”
through the footage and illustrates the “politicized nature of framing others.”
61

Figure 2.11 Still shot from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home films, aerial shot of the Philippines
(1953-1954, est.). Courtesy of USC Korean Heritage Library.

78
The significance of travel and the transnational, as well as the fluidity linking seemingly
disjointed sites throughout the home films, do not only portray Reverend Kim’s privileged
subject-positionality. These visual tropes simultaneously register the tumultuous exilic
conditions shaping the lives of Korean diasporics during the first half of the twentieth century
and the early decades of the Cold War. How, then, are these transnational conditions of
displacement, migration, and movement alluded to by Reverend Kim’s films?
To address such a question, I turn to two seemingly unrelated film fragments within the
Reverend’s film archive. In one segment entitled “Bazaar,” footage capturing two different
summer fundraising events organized by the Los Angeles Korean Presbyterian Church (June
1954 and June 1955) is spliced and edited into a three-minute segment. Throughout the
footage, visual tropes related to the domestic family surface, as heterosexual couples with
babies, young children, and extended family members visit booths together, partaking in the
communal activity of eating and sharing food (Figures 2.12-14). However, as briefly
mentioned by church members, Richard and Julia Hahn, in existing oral histories, and as
gleaned from surviving meeting notes of the Korean/American Women’s Service League
(WSL, 1954-1956), monies raised during the bazaars were funneled into supporting the newly
formed Korean Relief Society, established by leaders within the Korean/American
community, including Reverend Kim and Philip Ahn, the son of the anti-colonial activist Ahn
Chang-ho and one of the few Asian/American actors working in Hollywood during the
classical cinema era.
62

Drawing upon lobbying efforts and fundraising as key mechanisms of political
organizing, the Korean Relief Society worked with various political actors in South Korea and
the U.S., religious institutions, such as the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America,

79

Figures 2.12-14 Still shot Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home films, Korean Presbyterian Church Summer
Bazaars (1954 and 1955). Courtesy of USC Korean Heritage Library.

80
and mainstream organizations, including the International Red Cross, to distribute clothing,
goods, medicine, and food among displaced Koreans during the Korean War. The money
raised from these bazaars also partially financed the Orphan Relief Fund, a WSL-coordinated
fund that supported the construction and maintenance of orphanages across the southern half of
the Korean peninsula during and following the Korean War. Closely affiliated with Reverend
Kim, the aforementioned Hahns went as far as selling their belongings to start Isabelle
Orphanage in Pusan, located at the very tip of the Korean peninsula in 1953. Chung-youn
Song, an affiliate of Reverend Kim, joined the Hahns a year later in July 1954, to work with the
“Buddy Home,” an adoption agency that placed “mixed-race” orphans in “stable, Christian
American homes.”
62
In that sense, Korean/Americans, through direct and indirect means,
contributed to a still nascent effort that would eventually evolve into a (neo)colonial
transnational industry overseeing the adoption of nearly 200,000 Korean children—the vast
majority who were not orphans or without families in Korea—to mostly white middle-class
families concentrated in Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and the U.S. between 1950 and
2000.
63

In his scholarship, Richard S. Kim describes these acts of spirited volunteerism among
Korean/Americans, not merely as ethno-centric acts nostalgically mobilized for an
imagined homeland, but as pragmatic actions contributing to the sentimental discourse of
American patriotism.
64
That is, to be a “good” American was to enthusiastically support the
project of building a strong global order premised upon the American ideals of generosity,
freedom, and autonomy. Within this context, Reverend Kim’s footage of the summer bazaars
reflects how the seemingly banal or domestic is always already tied to the transnational. As non-
citizens formally barred from U.S. naturalization until the 1950s, a prominent number of Korean

81
fashioned alternative possible means of “belonging” within the U.S., particularly through a
clientalist political model dependent upon quasi-civic activism, lobbying, and the constant
wooing of powerful U.S. patrons and the general public.
By rigorously engaging this film segment through the lens of critical sensing, we begin
to see the ways in which the bazaar scene encompasses interrelated modes of belonging that
might not be immediately perceptible to the naked eye. Volunteerism, made possible through
platforms such as the Korean Relief Society, allowed Koreans to maintain affective and
material ties to Korea and the United States. Through these mechanisms, the nuclear family, so
palpable in this footage, registers national and transnational sentiments, as the
Korean/American family is affiliated with legible American citizenry and an imagined
diasporic family. However, these actions were not isolated to the Korean/American community,
nor were they without serious repercussions. Under the banner of patriotism, loyalty, and
allegiance to the U.S. nation-state, for example, institutions such as the KNA and Korean
Presbyterian Church produced pins, stickers, and identification cards during World War II to
distance Koreans from and support the state surveillance of Japanese/Americans.
In another, much longer film clip entitled “Korean Army Day,” Reverend Kim’s
camera captures what seems to be the National Armed Forces Day Parade as it runs through
the newly paved thoroughfares of central Seoul on October 1, 1961. Although not an official
holiday in South Korea, Armed Forces Day is annually marked by an elaborate if not opulent
parade, a militarized tradition that continues into the contemporary moment. Within the nearly
eight-minute footage, a spectacle of hypervisible bodies perform gender ideals tied to the
discursive reproduction of a patriarchal South Korean nation-state. Men, impeccably dressed in

82
dark military gear and marching at a perfectly synchronized pace, ride in an impressive
spectrum of army tanks replete with missiles, guns, and other military weapons. Women, on the
other hand, are clad in an array of feminine ensembles including sparkly parade costumes
replete with short skirts, batons, and hats, as well as billowing traditional Korean attire, or
hanbok, as they re- enact the state-prescribed role of proper and virtuous citizen (Figures 2.15-
18).
Although quite distinct, the Armed Forces Day footage is not wholly disconnected
from the clip of the Los Angeles summer bazaars. Both events gesture to celebratory
gatherings infused by the principles of ethnic cohesiveness and familialism, as well as
material and affective efforts channeled toward building a viable trans/national family.
Reverend Kim is, of course, the invisible connective tissue linking these disparate film traces.
As a naturalized U.S. citizen and diasporic subject literally living between the U.S. and South
Korea, his vernacular images signify his own sensibility as to what he perceived as
significant events associated with South Korean nation-building and the Korean transnational
community. One of three lengthy film segments dedicated to the South Korean military, the
Armed Forced Day Parade footage suggests Reverend Kim’s sentimental envisioning of
national belonging, as citizenship is visibly tethered to civic activism, a constellation of
gender ideals, and pronounced militarism.
But in a haunting sense, the hypervisibility of the military parade inadvertently touches
upon a different yet linked nexus of shadowy memories, gendered bodies, and militarized
spaces obscured from the visual frame. Filmed on October 1, 1961, the Armed Forces Day
parade overlaps with the inception of the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee,
implemented earlier that year in May 1961. Ruling with an iron fist for nearly two decades

83

Figures 2.15-16 Still shots from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home film, National Armed Forces
Day, Women in Hanbok and Parade Attire (October 1, 1961, Seoul, South Korea). Courtesy of
USC Korean Heritage Library.

84

Figures 2.17-18 Still shots from Shungnak “Luke” Kim’s home film, National Armed Forces Day, Male
soldiers (October 1
st
, 1961, Seoul, South Korea). Courtesy of USC Korean Heritage Library.

85
(1961-1979), Park Chung Hee ushered South Korea into a remarkable period of accelerated
growth, urbanization, and development, a period often referred to as the “the Miracle on the
Han,” as South Korea evolved into one of the four Asian “tiger” economies and the world’s
fifteenth

largest economy.
Vacated from these spectacular images, however, is the underbelly of the much-lauded
process of “development.” For Seungsook Moon, the South Korean state, under the Park
military regime, was forged within the peculiar cauldron of “militarized modernity.”
65
In other
words, the construction of an advanced capitalist economy and sophisticated state infrastructure
was wholly dependent upon the militarized deployment of necessary yet expendable bodies,
and the manufacturing of, through mechanisms of gender violence, torture, and surveillance, a
docile population. During a two-decade period of intensive industrialization, militarization, and
economic growth (1963-1987), the South Korean state also implemented universal male
conscription for military service and enlisted hundreds of thousands of young men for heavy
industry and military-related work. On the other hand, women, particularly those from rural
areas throughout the peninsula, were aggressively recruited for backbreaking, low-skill factory
work within light industries centered on the production of furniture, electronic appliances, and
other consumer-based goods.
Within the context of a bifurcated gendered economy, another lucrative service
industry, aimed at maintaining the “positive” relationship between South Korea and its
primary benefactor, the United States, took shape from the ashes of the Korean War: the
military sex economy, in which thousands of young Korean women from mostly lower-class,
low-income families were mobilized to provide affective and sexual services for U.S.
servicemen. According to a rich array of government policy documents, briefs, and public

86
health reports, a vibrant militarized sex economy was interpreted by the South Korean
government as essential to maintaining the fiscal health and security of the country, as well as
protecting the virtue and safety of “proper” Korean society. Women, in fact, were told that
they were crucial “foot soldiers” participating in a state mandate to transform a seemingly
vulnerable South Korean state into a formidable world leader and self-sufficient competitor
on the global stage.
66

If read through the practice of critical sensing, Reverend Kim’s film catalogues a
central contradiction constituting the accelerated making of a modern South Korean nation-
state—that is, the ways in which the grand architecture of freedom is simultaneously
engineered by and premised upon erased acts of gender and sexual violence. The shine and
glimmer that pervades Reverend Kim’s gendered imagery of the National Armed Forces Day
Parade hints at this paradox, even as it banishes these complexities from plain and visible
sight. As an annual performance reenacted along the central boulevards of Seoul, the parade
perpetually unfolds within and through militarized spatial logics. Literally framing the borders
of yet invisible from the depicted parade are the material by-products of state militarization,
including the Yongsan military garrison housing the U.S. Eighth Army, tortured civilian
bodies dumped onto sidewalks by the military state police, and makeshift kijichons or
camptowns encompassing the cobbled homes of sex workers and their families, pimps, and
other laborers, and a mix of sex and massage parlors, seedy restaurants, and bars hastily built
for the U.S. military.
Conclusion
In scratchy, black-and-white footage that lasts only a handful of seconds, Irvin, as a
young boy, and his older sister, Alice, emerge around a building corner. Pulling a heavy

87
wagon filled with bags of groceries, the children cautiously approach the movie camera.
Even as the details of their facial expressions are blurred and difficult to make out, one can
trace the general lines of Irvin’s face: the widening of his eyes, the elements of a toothy grin.
As he quickens his pace toward the camera, Irvin shrugs and turns to Alice as he mouths
inaudible words. In the very last shot, he laughs as he waves at the camera.
As this chapter opened with a visual fragment from Irvin’s home films, it now closes
with a scene from his family’s visual archive. Depicting the moment in which Irvin
encounters, for the very first time, the home film camera as a seven-year old, the filmic
segment signifies a poignant moment that continues to linger with Irvin. A moment filled
with surprise, awe, and wonder, Irvin recalls his first engagement with the movie camera as
magical if not surreal. It is an encounter that changed my life. Yet, as cautiously advised by
Irvin, film is a deceptive and discriminating medium because it is selective in the pictures it
chooses to unveil to spectators. Consequently, as a remembering and forgetting device, the
home film reveals as much as it obscures particular details, sentiments, and textures
embedded within the visual frame (Figure 2.19).
In this chapter, I have contemplated upon this central dilemma, or the slippages that
percolate between the visible and invisible. Specifically, through the method and theoretical
framework of critical sensing, I engage with Irvin’s family films and Reverend Kim’s home
footage as cultural sites of possibility and contingency, configured by the visible and invisible.
By treating these moving image collections as dense sites of memory-making and forgetting,
my rigorous exploration of home films extends beyond an idealized reading of the visible
filmic surface. Such a process, I argue, not only loosens the absolute linkages between the

88

“home film” and popular ideals attached to the proper American nuclear family, but
contextualizes the ways in which the imaging and imagining of the ideal American suburban
home is tied to the logics of American settler colonialism, which lies at the center of the U.S.
nation-home. Simultaneously, as intercultural formations contoured by dislocation, movement,
and migration, Korean/American home films point to the triangulated conditions of U.S.
exclusionary practices, Japanese imperialism, and postwar Korean division. However oblique,
these dynamics produce a ghostly shadow presence upon the vernacular image, leaving a sticky
affective residue.
Figure 2.19 Still shot from Irvin Paik’s home films, Irvin’s first encounter with the movie
camera (Los Angeles, 1947). Courtesy of Irvin Paik.

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Yet, the mining of home films, or the culling of a memory archive, is not a simple or discrete
act. Rather, it is a discursive process that acknowledges, on the one hand, the ways in which
the archive is sutured to acts of knowledge production, power, and making visible discrete
moments in time, while also recognizing how particular histories, subjectivities, and memories
elude the visual frame. Such occlusions trouble the very ways in which we understand the
seemingly fixed demarcation and dialectical relationship between the visible and invisible,
knowable and unknowable, and recorded and undocumented. Filmic fragments, therefore,
embody obscured moments that resist seamless translation into the visible register, even as
these pasts continue to decompose in and impinge upon the contemporary moment.
Within this context, a careful rumination of Korean/American home films does not
simply reify liberal narratives of U.S. citizenship and belonging. Rather, as a profound form of
re/encounter, a critical engagement with the home film contends with the violent sentiments,
contradictions, and socialities encompassed within the politics of unbelonging in the U.S.

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CHAPTER 3: American Humanitarianism: Memory, Justice, and The
Glendale “Comfort Women” Memorial

In the previous chapter, I touch upon the ways in which a trove of early-to-mid twentieth
century Korean/American home films encompasses obscured dynamics that constitute its visual
and material structure. By drawing upon critical sensing as the primary method in which to re-
encounter the home film, I emphasize the dialectical relationship between invisibility and
visibility. On the one hand, Asian/American actors, such as the Center for Asian American
Media (CAAM), configure vernacular moving images as truthful evidential objects that attest to
the promise of U.S. citizenship. Yet, by treating home films as transnational formations
contoured by contradictions, accrued memories, and obscured subjectivities, critical sensing
offers an alternative reading that exceeds the framework of national citizenship and destabilizes
the universalizing narrative of “becoming American.”
Building upon these crucial insights, this chapter shifts its focus to a very different visual
formation: the “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial of Glendale, California (the Peace Memorial
or “comfort women” statue hereafter). Erected under the organizational, financial, and
administrative support of the Glendale City Council, the Glendale Sister City Program, and the
non-profit organization, the Korean Americans for Justice (KAJ)
1
on July 30, 2013, the Peace
Memorial symbolizes the violent history of the “comfort women” (jugan ianfu in Japanese,
wianbu in Korean), a euphemism for the nearly 200,000 young Asian women forcibly
conscripted as military sex laborers by and for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Asia-
Pacific War(s) (1938-1945). Recruited in mass numbers from countries colonized by Japan,
including Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, a sizeable contingent of the women—
between seventy-five to ninety percent—were from Korea.
2
As established in a genealogy of

91
critical historical scholarship by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Chungmoo Choi, Seungsook Moon and C.
Sarah Soh, the mobilization of gendered bodies as “comfort women” was a normative
undertaking by the Japanese government, reflective of imperial logics and the country’s
territorial conquest of contiguous countries.
3

By describing the Glendale “comfort women” statue as a site-specific formation vitalized
by spoken and unspoken histories, I conceptualize the Peace Memorial as a condensation point
in which conflicting intentions, desires, and memories are summoned and forgotten. In
particular, the method of critical sensing is useful as I trace the experiential and contingent
dimensions of the Glendale Peace Memorial. That is, rather than describing the monument as a
discrete and an inanimate object, I conceptualize the statue as part and parcel of a shifting
assemblage of moving bodies, intentions, and affect that momentarily transpire and dissipate.
Framed within this context, I draw upon critical sensing to describe the Glendale
“Comfort Women” Peace Memorial as an animated site embodying accrued socialities, tensions,
and memories that are not immediately perceptible to the human eye or ear. Although fleeting,
these accumulated moments provide differentiated meanings to the memorial, transforming the
site into a “generator” of affect.
4
As elaborated by Jill Bennett, affect is not synonymous with
emotion nor does it remain lodged within distinct bodies. Rather, as potential energy that ebbs
and flows across bodies, affect is the capacity to invoke an array of visceral, sensory, and
cognitive responses. In that sense, cultural formations are not “truthful” representations of
experience, but are transactive mediums informed by local context and emergent conditions.
5

Hence, by configuring the “comfort women” monument as an always already shifting formation,
I describe the encounter(s) between audience and memorial as a performance extending beyond
the visible surface.

92
Although encompassing a myriad of meanings, Diana Taylor’s articulation of
performance is especially illuminating as it tracks the multiple dimensions and layers
encapsulated by the term. For Taylor, performance functions as a discrete object or process of
analysis—including dance, theater, or ritual, and different forms of cultural expression, such as
public testimonials and ephemeral interactions— as well as a methodological lens in which to
analyze mundane and/or transient events (i.e., “civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender,
ethnicity, and sexuality identity”).
6
Such an understanding is pivotal to the conceptualization of
critical sensing in this chapter, as performance functions as a vital act of transfer, transmitting
social knowledge, memory, and identity traces through ephemeral practices that are intelligible
in “the framework of the immediate environment and issues surrounded them.”
7
In discussing the
Glendale Peace Memorial, I pay particular heed to a chain of spoken testimonies and ephemeral
interactions that crystallize on site—performances that reproduce and undermine the narrative of
American justice.
“Comfort Women” Discourse: U.S. Citizenship, American Civic Duty, & Strategic
Forgetting

Although certainly not monolithic, “comfort women” discourse in the United States,
especially within activist circles, has primarily centered on and reproduced a politics of voice,
transparency, and human rights. Within the dominant vein of the “comfort women” redress
movement, this rhetoric of voice has depended upon two linked assumptions: first, the
equivalency of voice or “breaking the silence” to pure transparency, universal truth, and
empowerment; and two, the designation of the U.S. nation-state and its citizens as exemplary
mediator(s) of human rights.
As initially articulated by Lisa Yoneyama, Kandice Chuh, and Laura Hyun Yi Kang in
the Journal of Asian American Studies (Special Issue, February 2003), this coupling of voice and

93
American citizenship is reflective of a broader effort to “Americanize” the “comfort women”
issue, or the arbitration and adjudication of Japanese war crimes explicitly through American
channels such as U.S. legislative measures. Subsequently, the subject-position of American
citizen crystallizes as the ideal agent to secure visibility, voice, and justice for the “comfort
women.” Indeed, within the past two or so decades, “comfort women” have transformed into a
lightening rod of activism, protest, and heated discussion among self-identified
Korean/Americans. Initially materializing as a concern within the international stage during the
early 1990s, activists, scholars, and laypeople from (South) Korea, the United States, and
elsewhere have pressed Japanese politicians to offer an unequivocal apology for Japan’s role in
the establishment of “comfort women” stations across Asia and the Pacific.
8
Still unraveling,
such processes have been anything but seamless or amicable.
Guided by these insights, this chapter addresses two crucial questions: first, what are the
repercussions of a “comfort women” rights-based discourse narrated through the intertwined
lenses of American citizenship, human rights, and voice—a discursive rendering I refer to as
American humanitarianism? Second, how might the methodological framework of critical
sensing—functioning less as a coherent method and more as a constellation of key insights and
techniques—facilitate a more versatile reading of the Glendale “comfort women” statue in which
a multiplicity of memories, histories, and subjectivities are conjured?
In order to address these questions, this chapter is organized in the following manner. In
the next section, I offer a historical contextualization of the “comfort women” issue as it emerged
during the early-to-mid 1990s. As emphasized in this segment, the public attention secured by
the “comfort women” issue was not isolated to Korea and Japan, but indicative of a broader
international movement that took shape during the early-to-mid 1990s. Eventually absorbed into

94
a platform of “women’s rights as/are human rights,” the “comfort women” became closely
associated with the principles of voice, visibility, and transparency— or more aptly put, the
necessity to expose “comfort women’s” silenced memories to an attentive and a listening public.
As addressed later in this chapter, this particular figuration has had a significant impact on the
cultural and political representations linked to the “comfort women” in the United States.
Following this foundation, I shift to a discussion of “comfort women” discourse as it has
surfaced in the United States within the past decade. Specifically, by drawing upon critical
sensing as a central reading practice, I discuss the ways in which “comfort women” rhetoric,
configured within the parameters of American humanitarianism, is mediated through the city-
space of Glendale. This emergent discourse, however, is not wholly stable or totalizing, but is
problematized by narrative practices and interactions that momentarily surface at the memorial
site. Although these moments cannot be contextualized as performances of critical knowledge,
they subtly gesture to a corpus of “othered” memories that exceed the neoliberal discourse of
voice, visibility, and transparency. Hence, while I am interested in how the memorial signifies
the precarious terms of visibility, or the disciplining and discursive conditions deemed necessary
for the official recognition of “comfort women” by an American audience, I am more intrigued
with the memorial’s capacity to “accidently” summon a discomfiting genealogy of militarized
and violent memories that trouble the perception of the United States as the ultimate enforcer and
embodiment of human rights. A site-specific analysis, then, unhinges the universalizing
tendencies of “comfort women” discourse and emphasizes the ways in which knowledge
production “cannot be divorced from the contexts in which retrospections on the past occur.”
9

95
Motivations & Insights

Before elaborating upon the “comfort women” and the Glendale Peace Memorial, I
would like to clarify my own motivation for addressing this subject matter in this dissertation.
Within the past decade or so, knowledge production addressing the “comfort women” has
accumulated at an impressive rate, generating what is now commonly referred to as a “‘comfort
women’ canon” within Korean/American and Korean diasporic studies. Public interest in
“comfort women” in the United States and South Korea has also given way to an ever-growing
archive of films and artwork, producing a booming “memory industry” encompassing texts with
sensationalistic titles (Keith Howard’s True Stores of the Korean Comfort Women: The Korean
Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery, 1996), documentary films (Byung
Young-joo’s The Murmuring, 1995), photography projects (Yunghi Kim’s Forgotten Women
series, 1996), and artwork (Chang-Jin Lin’s Comfort Women Wanted, 2009). Within this
expanding body of scholarship, “comfort women” are often deemed as always already silent
figures in need of voice and visibility or are appropriated as signs of an effeminized and a
victimized South Korean nation-state.
Keeping these observations in mind, this chapter does not offer an exhaustive or a
definitive historical account of the “comfort women.” Instead, I draw upon the Glendale Peace
Memorial as a poignant case study that highlights prominent policy, advocacy, and
representational tactics mobilized on the behalf of the “comfort women” in the United States. By
conceptualizing “comfort women” as a term of analysis rather than as a fixed subject-figure
conflated with a singular and an authentic social identity, this chapter disentangles the
complicated ways in which cultural representations function as discursive constructions
contoured by power, knowledge, and desire. In other words, narratives of gender and sexual

96
violence do not exist in a social, cultural or political vacuum, but are situated within a matrix of
institutional, political, and social structures.
Simultaneously, by offering what might be construed as a skeptical commentary, it is not
my intention to undermine or denigrate all cultural representations of and grassroots efforts
linked to the “comfort women,” nor am I denying the unimaginable violence inflicted upon those
deemed as disposable by and to the Japanese imperial state. Yet, as a concerned scholar, I have
become increasingly wary of the ways in which selective renderings of the “comfort women
experience” are constructed as fixed indices of historical truth and objectivity.
10
Such acts do not
offer nuanced forms of knowledge nor do they generate rigorous and thoughtful analyses.
Rather, as measures located within the established parameters of American civic obligation,
duty, and citizenship, these processes are generally more revealing of the underlying motivations
that impel state legislation and policy advocacy.
Although useful in certain ways, state mechanisms of redress and rehabilitation remain
tethered to the logics of the U.S. governmentality, embodying a level of strategic forgetting
resulting in the endorsement of the U.S. nation-state as an exemplary symbol of justice. Thus,
and as poignantly offered by Peggy Phelan, a political agenda dependent upon voice and
visibility, or the “binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of invisibility,” is
quite limiting as it does not address the skewed biopolitical dynamics and assumptions
undergirding the very conditions of representation and recognition.
11

With these insights in mind, I now transition into an elaboration of “comfort women” as
the contentious matter crystallized within a triangulated context during the early 1990s: South
Korea, Japan, and the United States.

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“Comfort Women,” Women’s Rights as Human Rights, and U.S.-Based Advocacy

“Women’s Rights as Human Rights”: Voice, Visibility and Truth

In December 1991, three elderly Korean women identifying as surviving “comfort
women” filed a class-action suit against the Japanese government in the Tokyo District. Within
the suit, the women, including Kim Hak-sun, demanded an official apology and financial
compensation from the Japanese government for heinous war crimes committed against them
and thousands of other women during the Asia Pacific War(s).
12
Following her public testimonial
given at the Korean Church Women United (KCWU) in August 1991, Kim stated during a
nationally televised interview given to NHK (the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation): “I wanted
to sue for the fact that I was trampled on by the Japanese military and have spent my life in
misery. I want the young people of South Korea and Japan to know what Japan did in the past.”
13

Following Kim’s initial public testimonies and the 1991 “comfort women” court filing, a
vigorous wave of grass-roots activism, protests, and organized testimonials emerged throughout
South Korea. In response, then Japanese Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro, in 1993, addressed
Japan’s “war of aggression,” characterizing it as a “mistaken war,” and former Chief Cabinet
Secretary Yohei Kono acknowledged the Japanese Imperial Army’s involvement in the tactical
establishment of an extensive network of “comfort women” stations.
14
Although advocates and
survivors of the “comfort women” system stressed the shortcomings of these government
actions, the momentum gained from these statements eventually culminated in the establishment
of the controversial and now defunct Asian Women’s Fund (AWF),
15
a reserve created from
private donations from Japanese citizens and dedicated to compensating surviving “comfort
women” and their families.
16

98
Since the flurry of these early actions, the “comfort women” issue has garnered public
attention beyond South Korea and Japan, morphing from a grassroots issue mobilized by
feminist activists, local community leaders, and informed scholars to an international effort
primarily coordinated by non-governmental agencies (NGOs), civic rights organizations, and
international entities such as the United Nations (UN). Most noticeably, the international
network, Violence Against Women in War, organized a series of meetings and founded local
chapters in Tokyo, Seoul, Washington D.C., and Geneva throughout the mid-to-late 1990s. In
December 2000, activists from Korea, Japan, Indonesia, China, Taiwan, and the Philippines,
bolstered by advisory support from NGOs in the United States and the United Kingdom,
organized the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery.
Framed as a people’s court, the Women’s Tribunal took place in Tokyo between December 8 and
12, with sixty-four women from nine countries, including Korea, giving public testimonials
regarding their experiences of sexual and colonial violence during the Asia Pacific War(s). A
year after in December 2011, a judgment, detailed in a two hundred-page document, was issued
at The Hague, with all ten of the charged defendants convicted of war crimes.
17
Although a
largely symbolic gesture, the Women’s Tribunal is often credited for spurring the formation of
transnational coalitions, partnerships, and actions addressing “comfort women.”
18

In part, the significant public attention garnered by the “comfort women” lawsuit in the
1990s was fueled by two simultaneous developments: first, the end of the military dictatorship
and the inception of procedural democracy in South Korea during the late 1980s, and second, a
heightened focus placed upon “women’s rights” within an international legal context. For Alice
Miller, Ratna Kapur, and Chandra Mohanty, universal women’s rights crystallized as a
prominent concern during the early 1990s as (Western-based) institutions, including Amnesty

99
International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN vigorously pushed for the passage of symbolic
declarations and the adoption of the motto, “women’s rights are/as human rights.”
19
Following
the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights (1993), the UN General Assembly passed the
Declaration of Violence Against Women, which complemented the already existing Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
20
Based on these
developments, the UN organized its Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1994), and
following the conference, Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy was appointed as the first U.N. Special
Rapporteur on Violence against Women in 1995. By the late 1990s, the “women’s rights as/are
human rights” platform gained international traction and secured widespread recognition.
21

Despite the early victories claimed by activists and scholars in regards to the
normalization of the “women’s rights as/are human rights” platform, such a process was not
uniform nor was it without its fair share of problematic assumptions. For instance, throughout the
1990s, “women’s rights as/are human rights” became largely synonymous with efforts
combating “violence against women” (VAW), with a prominent percentage of inter/national
investment and resources channeled into VAW programming and organizational development.
22

Despite the framing of VAW discourse as universal and collective, the emergent discourse
explicitly catered to heteronormative, middle-class, and Western feminist principles, as the
“Third World Woman,” cast as “non-white,” uneducated, and rural, materialized as a universal
sign of victimhood, in need of voice, visibility, and protection.
23

Simultaneously, advocates conspicuously drew upon the public testimonial as a primary
tool to make excavate and make transparent hidden memories of sexual violence and trauma. As
noted by Miller, the public testimonial is a potent vehicle wedding two “classic [Western]
feminist tools”: “ending silence” and intimate story telling by individual women.
24
Within such a

100
context, silence and voice are configured as abstract principles located along a continuum: by
placing their experiences into a dialogical frame for a listening audience, women are endowed
with a sense of empowerment and enabling power— to speak is to be heard, and to be heard is to
secure justice vis-à-vis the truthful telling of a silenced life history. In sharp contrast, silence is
rendered as a fixed condition of oppressed subalternity, materializing within a double-frame: it is
reinforced by the community and passively embodied by female subjects.
25
Subsequently,
women are transformed into disempowered victims, unable to intervene on their own behalves.
Glendale and the Korean Americans for Justice (KAJ)

Although seemingly tangential, tracing the historical emergence and consolidation of
“comfort women” discourse offers three compelling insights in relationship to redress efforts and
memory practices in the United States.
First, the filtering of “comfort women” discourse through the “women’s rights as/are
human rights” platform, as well as an emphasis placed upon binaries such as “silence/voice,”
“empowered/disempowered,” and “visibility/invisibility,” has culminated in a dilution of social,
cultural and historical specificity. Within such a context, the universalizing inscription of voice,
or “breaking the silence” as an enabling decision not only elides the socio-economic, political,
and cultural structures that structure narrative performances, but also reifies a neoliberal
articulation of the independent, autonomous, and self-determining speaking agent. In other
words, to speak is a “choice” made by and indicative of the liberated and enlightened subject. As
discussed in the last segment of this chapter, such a perception has had devastating repercussions
for those who choose not to speak about, or mobilize other platforms to address, their
experiences of war. Consequently, the consolidation of a totalizing “comfort women” discourse
in the United States—one intimately linked to notions of voice, visibility, and agency— has

101
resulted in an erasure of complex dynamics and political motivations, including the continued
complicity of the U.S.-South Korean binational state in the obscuration of Japanese war crimes.
Nowhere is such a lacunae more evident than in the work of Korean Americans for
Justice (KAJ), the organization largely responsible for coordinating the construction of “comfort
women” memorials across California, including Glendale and a pending memorial in Buena Park
in the county of Orange. Within the past seven or so years, KAJ has been active in establishing
an annual “Comfort Women” Day in Glendale (July 30) and securing the passage of U.S. House
Resolution 121 (July 30, 2007), a government resolution first introduced by Japanese/American
Congressman Mike Honda, which calls for the Japanese government to offer an unconditional
apology to the “comfort women” and to include, in Japanese educational curriculum, atrocities
committed by the Japanese imperial army during the Asia Pacific War(s).
A volunteer-run, non-profit organization formally established in 2012, KAJ initially
appeared in the mid-2000s as an informal network of concerned Korean/American attorneys,
activists, small business owners, and other professionals scattered across Los Angeles County.
Following the emergence of “comfort women” memorials and monuments in Palisades Park,
New Jersey (2010) and Westbury, New York (2012), as well as the erection of the “Comfort
Women” Peace Memorial in Seoul, South Korea (2011), KAJ has channeled the bulk of its
resources and energy into establishing memorials throughout California. Imagined as mnemonic
devices and pedagogical tools, memorials, for KAJ, serve as visible traces of a silenced history
yet to be fully exposed or divulged to the American public.
According to Esther Kong,
26
the spokesperson and publicity coordinator of KAJ, the
selection of the city of Glendale to house the West Coast’s first “comfort women” memorial was,
to a certain extent, serendipitous. Following the passage of U.S. HR 121, core members of KAJ

102
coordinated an array of educational and cultural events, including an art exhibit held at the
Glendale Central Library, in 2012. Following the unexpected success and press attained by the
“comfort women” art exhibit, KAJ lobbied the Glendale City Council to establish a permanent
memorial in the city. Despite protest from local residents, the Japanese Embassy in Los Angeles,
and Japanese politicians, KAJ received tentative approval from the city council to construct the
memorial in March 2013; the memorial was then formally erected and unveiled to the public in
July 2013.
In a general sense, KAJ’s “comfort women” advocacy and lobbying work is centered
upon a core framework of principles. For one, the “comfort women” matter is not designated as a
Japanese-Korean bilateral issue, but as a human rights atrocity relevant to all people, regardless
of cultural, racial, or religious affiliations. As reflected in KAJ’s rigorous support of international
efforts such as the “Bring Our Girls Back” campaign, a media-coordinated effort to safely locate
and return the over 200 school girls kidnapped from the Chibok Government Secondary School
in Nigeria during June 2014, the “comfort women” is part and parcel of a broader collective
effort to stop all “crime[s] against women and children during wars.”
In relationship to the Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial, KAJ’s deployment of
a human rights discourse has taken a particularly idiosyncratic tone, one inevitably channeled
through and mediated by Glendale, a suburban sprawl of 200,000 residents located nine miles
due north of the City of Los Angeles and lying along the eastern fringe of the San Fernando
Valley. Long inhabited by the Tongva people before their displacement and systematic dispersal
by Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century, Glendale is a racialized landscape with a
protracted history of conquest, dispossession, and loss. Initially established as a Spanish colony,
then transforming into Mexican territory and part and parcel of the Rancho San Rafael in the

103
eighteenth century, Glendale was eventually annexed by the United States in 1848 following the
U.S.-Mexican War. Experiencing accelerated urbanization during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Glendale was formally incorporated as an American city in 1887. Popularly
advertised by ambitious boosters as a sun-kissed valley and an uninhabited land with “only a
scattering of Indians,” Glendale expanded as a settler colonial space with the establishment of
the Los Angeles Interurban Railroad in 1904 and the subsequent arrival of over twenty thousand
settlers, the vast majority Anglo farmers from the rural Midwest, between 1920 and 1930.
27

Similarly to other rapidly expanding cities in Los Angeles County, Glendale implemented a
range of practices— ranging from racially restrictive covenants to “sundown” policies, which
forbid subjects identified by city officials as “non-white” from inhabiting the city after sunset—
producing a deeply segregated cityscape. During World War II, Glendale emerged as an ardent
supporter of the deportation and internment of Japanese/Americans and until the early 1980s,
remained as the West Coast headquarters of the American Nazi Party.
Yet, in its contemporary formation, this extensive archive of racialized histories,
precarious memories, and fraught tensions are largely forgotten or actively unremembered by the
city’s current inhabitants. Strongly identifying as an anti-racist city and idyllic haven for
persecuted peoples such as the Armenian population—currently constituting approximately
thirty-three percent of Glendale’s total population—local politicians have pegged the city as
quintessentially American, committed to middle-class values, multiculturalism, and freedom.
28

Within such a context, and bolstered by prominent support from the Armenian/American
political elite, “comfort women” discourse in Glendale has becomes strategically intertwined and
affiliated with both the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust.
29
As noted by Esther
Kong and Frank Quintero, a former Glendale City Council member and a zealous supporter of

104
the “comfort women” memorial, KAJ draws upon the work of local Armenian cultural
organizations as an exemplary model for the organization of “comfort women” educational
initiatives and policy campaigns. As offered by Kong:
As a Korean/American, to educate our fellow Americans on our past history...
This is not just a painful history, it becomes a legacy that we bring into American
history so we learn about each other's history, we [can] learn about genocide... I
became educated about the Armenian genocide after I came to Glendale... They
[the City of Glendale] commemorate Armenian genocide here… every April,
so they have a series of lectures, they show movies, and that's how we learn about it.
Otherwise, I would have not known. So we should do the same thing and be more
proactive so people can learn about our history.
30

Upon closer examination, KAJ’s consistent usage of the Armenian and European Jewish
genocides as anchoring points is tactical, as the organization conveys “comfort women” as a
modern genocide that “should never to be repeated again.”
31
Consequently, the crafting of
“comfort women” through the lens of genocide places such experiences within an American
narrative of empathy, affiliation, and justice, in which radically different subjectivities and
phenomena are configured as equivalent formations existing within a multicultural nation-state.
Conversely, a critical engagement with or sustained objections to the deployment of such a
singular narration is rendered as explicitly un-American and/or self-serving:
I’m not sure if you’ve heard that there are some scholars in the United States
that have this view that [the] “comfort women” atrocity was in part attributed to the
Korean patriarchal society and social system… I think… we need to be very
careful in making those arguments and I’m not sure what you think based on your
research, but I think, that you now, it’s really important for scholars to straighten
the history.
32

As further developed in the discussion of the Glendale Peace Memorial, KAJ’s
positioning within the U.S.-based “comfort women” redress movement is especially troublesome
as it mimics the very logics of U.S. neoliberal multiculturalism. That is, an essentialized
discourse of identity is celebrated and mobilized to consolidate a state-instituted discourse of

105
racial harmony, equality, and liberation, whereas radical critiques of and alternative readings to
such rhetoric are silenced or deemed as unpatriotic.
33

Simultaneously, as the “comfort women” matter has shifted from a grassroots organizing
campaign to an institutionalized initiative, advocates have increasingly pursued redress and
rehabilitation for “comfort women” vis-à-vis state and legislative channels, particularly in
conjunction with the U.S. government. Due to the 1965 South Korea-Japan normalization treaty,
which served as the final war settlement between the two nations and included an $800 million
U.S. dollar Japanese financial aid package, South Korean citizens are effectively blocked from
pursuing individual war reparations through the South Korea government.
34
Therefore, through
policy advocacy campaigns coordinated by Korean/American civic organizations, adjudication
through U.S-based legislation has become an especially seductive tool, culminating in the
authorization of state measures in California (i.e., amendment to Code of Civil Procedure 354.6
and the passage of the Assembly Joint Resolution 27 in 1999) and more recently, HR 121, which
I will return to shortly.
However, the harnessing of the United States as a privileged location from which to
agitate for “comfort women’s” rights is not simply an issue of legal restitution. Rather, it is
sustained by both the popular understanding of the United States as a global economic
powerhouse and committed humanitarian liberator. KAJ has been especially adamant in stressing
the United States’ role in advocating for “comfort women’s” rights. As noted by Kong, the
United States is an ideal mediator for obtaining ultimate justice for “comfort women” because it
is a free and liberal democracy, shares intimate politico-economic alliances with (South) Korea
and Japan, and is largely responsible for “stabilizing” and “rebuilding” East Asia during the post-
World War II era.
35
The United States, then, is imagined as the only viable force capable of

106
holding Japan—or a nation seemingly indebted to the United States for its post-World War II
reconstruction— accountable for wrongs committed against its former colonial subjects.
Inadvertently, Kong’s description indexes three significant developments: first, the
emergence of the United States as one of two imperial powers during the Cold War; second, the
pivotal role played by American militarized occupation in the creation of pro-U.S. satellite states,
i.e., South Korea and Japan, in East Asia; and third, the array of capitalist principles (i.e., wealth
accumulation, resource extraction, and privatization) undergirding U.S. political interests in
Asia. These three interlocking dynamics—power, militarization, and advanced capitalism—have
been absolutely integral to the composition of a post-1945 “American Asia-Pacific.” Indeed, as
fleshed out in the following section, ephemeral encounters and narrative practices materializing
at the Glendale Peace Memorial hint at the ways in which American freedom is brokered by the
institutionalization of militarized violence across Asia, the Pacific, and Oceania.
Lastly, in inextricably linking the discourse of global human rights to the United States,
or what might be aptly described as American humanitarianism, self-identified Korean/American
subjects, due to assumed ethnic, cultural and/or gender affiliations, position themselves as the
principal agents of voice and visibility as they pursue justice on the behalf of the “comfort
women.”
36
The accentuation placed upon and the intertwining of American citizenship, voice
and visibility are particularly prevalent within the discursive strategies utilized by KAJ: for the
organization, it is the claim to ethnic sameness and a cautious distancing from “comfort women”
vis-à-vis the privileged status of American citizenship that ultimately endows Korean/Americans
with a sense of justice and civic duty, not only toward the “comfort women” but toward fellow
Americans. Conversely, as law-abiding and legible citizens, Korean/Americans are obligated to
learning about other cultural histories:

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We educate Korean/Americans about what it means to live in America, to be an
American, to live in a diverse immigrant society. We are now asking other communities
to pay attention to this piece of history [“comfort women”], and in turn we have this
obligation to pay attention to other people's history. What people have gone through in
order for us to enjoy what we have now…other immigrants who came before us and
fought and suffered and achieved all of the rights that we so naturally enjoy. I think this
is an opportunity for us to talk about this too, open up a discussion about not only our
own stories, but to talk about other peoples’ histories.
37

Paradoxically, through the process in which Korean/Americans are inscribed as visible
and vocal agents of global justice, “comfort women” become a transcendent symbol embodying
both survival and inevitable death. Within this framing, “comfort women” are described, more
often than not, as deceased or elderly women on the verge of passing due to illness and/or age.
38

To a certain extent, the popular name bestowed upon “comfort women” quietly alludes to this
status of disappearance: halmoni or “grandmother.”
39
Although advocates deploy the familial
term halmoni to communicate a sense of urgency to the public and to affectionately configure
“comfort women” as warm, maternal, and relatable figures who could be “anyone’s
grandmother,” the moniker also gestures to the looming passing of “comfort women” and a
pending void of presence and voice.
This suturing of presence with absence has culminated in a “double-voicing” effect: on
the one hand, “comfort women” are imagined as always already disappearing and spectral
figures, while Korean/Americans, on the other hand, transform into sympathetic subjects who
take on and address the demands of historical justice. In more extreme contexts, advocates
envision themselves as empathetic proxies capable of channeling the authentic voices of the
“comfort women.”
40
Such sentiments are subtly embedded in a statement offered by Dongwoo
Lee Hahm, the Chairwoman and President of the prominent lobbying group, the Washington
Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc. (WCCW):
The urgency of the situation increases daily. Sadly, like Kim Hak-sun who passed

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away in 1997, the ‘comfort women’ and their stories are dying. These aged and infirm
women provide the only link to these horrendous crimes … Kang Duk-kyung and
Moon Ok-ju have passed away since the time I interviewed them. In another place
or time, any one of us could have been one of these women, and their stories could
have been ours [emphasis is mine].
41

Glendale “Comfort Women” Memorial, Critical Sensing, and the Politics of Memory

Although seemingly monolithic, “comfort women” redress discourse, uttered through the
frame of American humanitarianism, is not without its gaps and slippages. A complex set of
transnational memories, historical conditions, and subjectivities, “comfort women” do not
remain within the domain of nor are they faithful to the boundaries of national citizenship.
Rather, the performance of “comfort women” discourse in radically different spaces produces an
array of consequences that reify and problematize hegemonic articulations. In that sense, the
articulation of American exceptionalism produces its own blind spots, gesturing to alternative
possibilities that potentially destabilize totalizing narratives.
In order to provide a nuanced analysis of these potentialities, I offer a series of
observations from and vignettes that touch upon the celebratory unveiling of the Glendale
“Comfort Women” Peace Memorial on July 30, 2013, a ceremony I attended and participated in.
By elaborating upon my interactions with and observations of the memorial, I am not providing
an ethnographic account or an “objective” impression of the memorial. Rather, through the
method of critical sensing, I conceptualize my own presence as part and parcel of the shifting
ecology of intentions, affect, and “things” that inject meaning and form to the Glendale Peace
Memorial. In particular, by drawing upon the contingent and experiential dimensions of the
memorial, I track contradictions, conflicts, and discrepancies that momentarily crystallize and
dissipate. Although transient, these moments of disjuncture register or “sense” an assemblage of

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“othered” histories and productive frictions that puncture the framework of American
humanitarianism.
Glendale “Comfort Women” Memorial

Adjacent to the Glendale Central Library and nestled in the leafy northern corner of the
Glendale Central Park, the “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial depicts a young girl seated on a
chair. Placed on a slightly elevated concrete platform, the life-sized bronze memorial, on most
days, is surrounded by vases or bouquets of freshly cut, colorful flowers (Figure 3.1). To most
who pass by the memorial during early morning jaunts or eat their lunch on nearby picnic tables,
the statue seems both pleasant and innocuous.

Figure 3.1 Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial (Photo taken by author, June 2014)

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However, upon closer examination, other details slowly materialize. For instance, one
notices that the statue is bare-footed and dressed in a hanbok or traditional Korean attire. Seated
with clenched fists stiffly resting against her lap, there is also a small bird perched over the
statue’s left shoulder (Figures 3.2-3). Flanking the young girl on the right-hand side is an empty
chair and two plaques (Figure 3.4).

Figures 3.2-3 Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial (Photo taken by author, June 2014)

Figure 3.4 Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial (Photo taken by author, June 2014)

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One plaque provides a brief description of the history of the “comfort women,” while the
other painstakingly details the intended meaning of each feature of the statue. The clenched fists,
for example, represent “the girl’s firm resolve for a deliverance of justice” while the “bare and
unsettled feet represent” symbolize the girl’s abandonment by a “cold and unsympathetic world.”
Arching just below the young girl across the platform is a dark mottled shape resembling the
profile of an elderly woman, representing the passing of time in silence; a white butterfly,
located directly above her heart, symbolizes hope, compassion, and rebirth (Figures 3.5-6). For
Un-seong and Seo-gyeong Kim, the commissioned sculptors of the Glendale memorial, the
literal rather than abstracted representation of “comfort women” experiences is an attempt to
truthfully reflect the agonizing lives of the “comfort women.” Indeed, as offered by Un-seong,
the idea for the memorial design emerged as the sculptors visualized a cadre of “young [Korean]
girls being dragged away” from their families and homes.
42

Within the past five years, the Kims have been active in the movement to build “comfort
women” memorials across South Korea and more recently, in the United States. The Glendale
Peace Memorial, in fact, is a carbon copy of the “comfort women” statue erected in Seoul, South
Korea. However, the striking resemblance between the Glendale and Seoul memorials
accentuates the key differences, rather than similarities, between the two statues. Located in the
heart of the South Korean capital in a publicly accessible site, the Seoul “comfort women” statue
is a politicized formation energized by its location. The site of the prominent Wednesday
Demonstration, a weekly protest held against the Japanese government every Wednesday since
January 8, 1992, the Seoul “comfort women” memorial generates lively performances, public
testimonials, and other cultural events.
43
During my own visit to the memorial, a Japanese anti-
war men’s group visiting from Hiroshima participated in the Wednesday protest to show

112
solidarity with “comfort women” activists and to urge the Japanese government to reckon with
its imperial past.

Figures 3.5-6 Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial (Photo taken by author, June 2014)

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Yet, beyond the scheduled Wednesday demonstrations, the Seoul “comfort women”
statue remains a controversial site of activity and commotion. Located directly across the street
from and facing the Japanese embassy, the bronze statue is a constant reminder of Japan’s
colonial past and a haunting presence that places its perpetual gaze upon the embassy and its
employees. Loyal visitors serve as the memorial’s custodians, treating the bronze statue as if it
were a sentient subject: during harsh Seoul winters, the statue is often provided with warm
jackets, shoes, and scarves. Other times, visitors leave plates of food and fruit by the girl’s feet,
and more often than not, the empty seat adjacent to the seated statue is filled with stuffed animals
and other sentimental objects.
In contrast, the Glendale “comfort women” memorial is located in a relatively isolated
corner of the Glendale Central Park. Tucked into a corner by the Adult Recreation Center, the
memorial is initially difficult to access unless approached from the south end of the park. Beyond
the circle of participants who gather at the memorial during special ceremonies, or visitors who
curiously glance at the statue during walks in the park, the Glendale “comfort women” memorial,
despite the controversial publicity it has garnered within the past year, does not seem to attract
sizable audiences on a daily basis. In visiting the site during a handful of occasions, several
questions came to mind: who is the memorial’s imagined audience(s)? If intended as a
pedagogical tool, how does the memorial reach a broader audience? Which narratives and
memories are shared— and who are the primary speaking agents?
I offer these observations and a comparative description of the Glendale and Seoul
memorials to stress the significance of location and context in the production of meaning and
memories. Although the Glendale “comfort women” statue is a replica of the Seoul statue, the
energies and meanings evoked by each memorial are not identical. This observation is productive

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as it leads to a deeper probing and unpacking of the memories that coalesce at each site. As
mnemonic traces of war, imperialism, and violence travel across geographical, national, spatial,
and temporal borders, they do not remain intact or monolithic. As observed during the memorial
unveiling ceremony, memories are filtered through and shaped by divergent temporalities and
spaces, giving way to moments of dissonance and difference.
Dovetailing with Glendale’s “Korean Comfort Women’s Day” and the fifth anniversary
of the passage of U.S. HR 121, the memorial unveiling was preceded by a brief ceremony held at
the Glendale Central Library. Sponsored by an impressive coalition of organizations and
institutions including the KAJ, the Glendale Sister City program, the South Korean embassy, a
local Armenian civic rights organization, the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, and the
Glendale City Council, the hour-long ceremony commenced with a performance of the United
States national anthem and a joint-prayer offered by a Korean/American Presbyterian reverend
and rabbi. Although seemingly arbitrary, the day’s carefully crafted agenda and the array of
selected speakers— including Zareh Sinanyan, a city council member who spoke at length
regarding the perishing of his family members during the Armenian genocide; Mike Kodama, a
Japanese/American entrepreneur and successful businessman; and Kim Bok Dong, a halmoni
visiting from South Korea and invited to participate in the day’s festivities—framed the
ceremony as an explicitly American humanitarian event, impelled by the principles of liberation,
civic obligation, and justice.
For instance, Kodama’s testimonial lays claim to a narrative of U.S. citizenship and
assimilation as he describes the fruitful partnerships between Korean/Americans and
Japanese/Americans as part of American civic life. For Kodama, whose grandparents passed
away in an internment camp during World War II, the bond between Korean/Americans and

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Japanese/Americans is a testament to the American dream, as past wrongs and painful memories
are rectified through the forging of new and previously impossible friendships. New
opportunities, then, are afforded through the promise of these new affiliations. As remarked by
Kodama during the ceremony, unity among “Americans of Asian descent” is necessary and
crucial, as “Japanese and Korean descendants are all American.”
44
In contrast, the media and
local politicians, including members of the Glendale City Council, describe the dissenting voices
of the “comfort women” memorial as belonging to Japanese nationals and/or immigrants who
have no particular allegiance or loyalty to the United States.
45
As noted by Quintero, “We took
criticism from Japanese nationals that I term ‘nationalist right-wingers in Japan,’ but the bulk of
the Japanese-American population supports us.”
46

Following the brief ceremony, those in attendance—approximately three hundred local
residents, scholars, politicians, religious leaders, advocates, and laypeople—walked to and
assembled by the memorial located in the nearby Glendale Central Park. While waiting for the
displaying of the memorial by members of the city council and KAJ, several obscured tensions
began to surface. For one, conspicuously missing from the visible partners, colleagues, and
affiliates present at the ceremony were prominent transnational activists, including members
from the NABI (Korean term for “butterfly”) coalition. A recently formed network of activists,
students, and scholars from South Korea, Japan, and the United States, NABI is committed to
addressing the unresolved history of the “comfort women” by interrogating the broader history
of gender and sexual violence in East Asia, including the continuing ramifications of U.S.
military presence in and occupation of Okinawa, the Philippines, and South Korea.
Attending the event with an acquaintance and a member of the NABI coalition, I inquired
about the lack of involvement of Korean transnational organizations in the coordination of the

116
memorial event. Perhaps, KAJ’s quiet distancing from NABI is partially due to the latter’s
critical analysis of militarized sexual violence in Asia— and more specifically, its recognition of
the United States as a colonial aggressor in, rather than a liberator of Korea. Such a stance, as
described by the NABI activist, is counter to the sentiments of American humanitarianism and
the core principles of KAJ’s work. As offered by Na-Young Lee, a South Korean-based feminist
scholar and co-founder of the NABI coalition, remnants of Japanese militarized sex labor were
not merely maintained in the southern half of the peninsula following World War II, but
flourished under the command of the United States Military Government in Korea (USMGIK,
1945-1948). In certain cases, the U.S. military took over “comfort stations” previously controlled
by the Japanese Imperial Army, using such facilities as military “rest and relaxation” centers or
“venereal disease control centers” to monitor and maintain surveillance over Korean military sex
workers.
47

Today, with a continued occupational force of approximately 30,000 in the Korean
peninsula and Jeju Island, the U.S. military maintains a hypervisible presence in Korea and has
generated a makeshift network of kijichons—military camptowns housing a burgeoning sex
economy—catering to U.S. soldiers. Refraining from simply equating the experiences of the
“comfort women” with those of U.S. military sex workers, Lee, nevertheless, emphasizes the
inextricable connections between Japan and the United States in the Cold War formation of the
“Asia Pacific”— a historical link that Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho contextualize as an
enduring “transpacific alliance.”
48

Shortly following this conversation, members of KAJ greeted the audience and provided
introductory remarks regarding the founding of the memorial. Touching the hand of Kim Bok
Dong halmoni and occasionally touching the shoulder of the bronze statue, a KAJ member

117
referred to the passage of U.S. HR 121, a congressional resolution commonly described by
redress advocates as the primary impetus behind the movement for “comfort women” memorials
across the United States. I offer a prominent excerpt from the resolution below:
Whereas the United States-Japan alliance is the cornerstone of United States
security interests in Asia and the Pacific and is fundamental to regional stability
and prosperity, whereas, despite the changes in the post-cold war strategic
landscape, the United States-Japan alliance continues to be based on shared vital
interests and values in the Asia-Pacific region, including the preservation and
promotion of political and economic freedoms, support for human rights and
democratic institutions, and the securing of prosperity for the people of both countries
and the international community.
49

Albeit fleeting, the assemblage constituted by the mentioning of U.S. HR 121, the
presence of Kim Bok Dong halmoni, and the “comfort women” bronze statue—a formation
symbolizing structural violence perpetrated against young women by an imperial military force
—generated a moment of profound disjuncture and contradiction. In an uncanny sense, the
emphasis placed upon HR 121 unintentionally calls forth a spectral history that KAJ has actively
and disavowed. For Takashi Fujitani, Lisa Yoneyama, and Geoffrey White, the inextricable
United States-Japan alliance in the post-World War II era is formulated upon a double-sided
logic of indispensability and disposability.
50
That is, the securing of economic and social
“prosperity for the people of both countries [Japan and the United States]” and the “United States
security interests in Asia and the Pacific” are not merely dependent upon a strategic forgetting of
Japanese war crimes, but upon the production of expendable spaces and bodies across Asia, the
Pacific, and Oceania.
Reflected by the devastating accumulation of repercussions linked to U.S. military
presence in South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawai’i, American
national security often translates into a projection of “necessary” violence toward those deemed
as threatening to and/or existing outside of the racialized and heteronormative boundaries of the

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U.S. nation-state. Indeed, as embodied in the U.S.-South Korean Status of Forces Agreement
(SOFA), an extraterritorial security arrangement that governs the U.S. military presence in
Korea, national security is configured as a non-negotiable measure wedded to the inevitable
production of disposable sites. Currently, eighty-three U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)
facilities spread across 34,011 acres of land in Korea.
51
Additionally, South Korea boasts one of
the largest standing armies in the world, with approximately 3.5 million citizens in active
service, including a small contingency of KATUSA soldiers (Korean Augmentation to the U.S.
Army) or South Korean citizens who serve as appendages to the U.S. army in and beyond Korea.
The costs associated with this security arrangement have been, to say the least,
astounding. Consequences range from the clandestine dumping of Agent Orange in rural
communities and the perpetual displacement of farmers due to base expansion, as most recently
observed in Waegwan and Pyeongtaek, respectively,
52
to normalized acts of sexual violence
committed by U.S. soldiers.
53
Although these specific incidences have spurred the most visible
media attention in South Korea and the U.S., such accidents are not anomalies. Instead, they
reflect the precarious social environment produced by U.S. military presence. According to
South Korean National Assembly member Kim Tae-won, 377 U.S. soldiers were arrested for
heinous crimes in 2011 alone, while the number of rapes has doubled, and thefts and assaults
have tripled since 2008.
54
Subsequently, the procurement of national freedom and security is
intertwined with the projection of necessary violence upon seemingly expendable sites and
subjects, or what geographer Sasha Davis describes as “sacrifice zones.”
55

With this elaboration in mind, a different understanding of American humanitarianism is
evoked. As articulated by Chandan Reddy and Mimi Thi Nguyen, the calculus of American
freedom is determined by a spectrum of violent “unfreedoms,” such as war, militarized

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occupancy, and physical, sexual, and psychic violence, systematically waged against and
inflicted upon seemingly “ungrievable” bodies.
56
In other words, the United States’ mediation of
“comfort women” justice is only possible by an active disremembering of a well-established
trajectory of American imperial conquests, militarized occupation, and violence in Korea and
across Asia. As embedded in the very textual body and utterance of U.S. HR 121, the poetics of
“comfort women” redress unfolds within a state-instituted discourse, in which humanitarianism,
liberation and restitution are brokered by the logics of national security—or what Reddy
succinctly refers to as “freedom with violence.”
57

Following the recitation of U.S. HR 121 by KAJ, several other speakers, including Kathy
Masaoka, a Sansei (i.e., third-generation Japanese/American) and long-time civil rights activist
affiliated with the Japanese/American organization Nikkei For Civil Rights & Redress (NCRR),
provided prepared testimonials and comments. In her testimonial, Masaoka draws upon her
family’s experience of internment during World War II and contextualizes Japanese/American
internment and the “comfort women” system as parallel violations, both occurring under the
aegis of patriotic national security. Masaoka continues by describing the passage of the
American Civil Liberties Act (1988), which culminated in the U.S. government’s public
recognition of injustice against the 110,000 Japanese/American incarcerated and interned during
World War II and the rewarding of $20,000 in reparations to every living internee.
By offering this account, Masaoka’s testimonial frames the U.S. state as the primary
platform in which to secure justice, truth, and healing:
When the U.S. government passed the Civil Liberties Act twenty five years ago,
it helped to heal the pain of those who had suffered in America’s concentration
camps and showed that a country can admit its mistakes. When Japan sincerely
apologizes and pays reparations to each of the comfort women before it is too late, it
will help these survivors heal and show that Japan has learned from its past.
58

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Situating redress efforts within a progressive narrative encompassing the linear
movement from violence to atonement and closure, Masaoka’s utterance obliterates the historical
and social specificities of Japanese/American internment and “comfort women” recruitment,
bringing to relief several problematic assumptions. For one, “reparation” and “forgiveness” are
not singular terms, but highly controversial concepts that highlight the constraints of state
recognition. As emphasized by Chungmoo Choi, the very meaning and possibility of
“acceptable” compensation— whether symbolic, monetary, or both— is bitterly contested among
advocates, as the resuscitation of “comfort women’s” memories is a contradictory process
located in and shaped by structures of power. Although women's rights activists in the United
States and South Korea have agitated for an official apology from the Japanese government for
the past two-and-a-half decades, they themselves have appropriated women’s memories for
particular principles, including that of national honor.
59

As described by Choi, the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF), a NGO that drew upon private
donations from Japanese citizens to provide reparations for surviving “comfort women,”
epitomizes the problematics of a “memory politics” centered on national pride and/or the state.
Pegged as sympathy money and a ploy crafted by the Japanese government to avoid direct
compensation, the AWF was dissolved in 2007 after disbursing approximately $15 million U.S.
dollars to women in South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, either
in the form of direct payments or in providing for medial and housing support. Activists in South
Korea and the U.S., however, have described women who accepted payments from AWF as
silent and disgraceful traitors, and advocated for penalizations by “petitioning the South Korean
government to stop its monthly living cost assistance payments, which the ‘comfort women’
[have] received since 1993.”
60

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Second, the significance placed upon national reparations exclusively situates the
subjectivities of Japanese/Americans and the “comfort women” within a fixed temporality and
national frame, obscuring social, psychic, and material traces that eclipse linear temporality and
the boundaries of the nation-state. For instance, attending the “comfort women” memorial
ceremony were several surviving children of the hibakusha, a Japanese term referring to those
who survived the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the closing
of the ceremony and dispersal of the crowd, several of these individuals touched and interacted
with the statue.
61
Despite decades of seeking reparations and attempts to secure medical
assistance, the grievances of Japanese/American hibakusha have yet to be addressed by the state
and were explicitly excluded by the American Civil Liberties Act, as their experiences of war,
illness, and death exceed the national framework of American redress, rehabilitation, and
rectification. Masaoka’s linking of Japanese/American internees and the “comfort women,” then,
unintentionally evokes a differentiated nexus of transnational experiences and memories of war
that “are never fully in alliance with the dominant national history and memory.”
62

Although far from a practice of critical knowledge, Masaoka’s testimonial, nevertheless,
hints at the dual-sided logics of American humanitarianism. For example, Masaoka does not
simply contextualize the United States as a mediator of justice and rights, but identifies the U.S.
nation-state as an agent of humiliation and violence. Throughout her testimonial, Masaoka
performs a historical genealogy, tracing the arc of state violence enacted against non-normative
bodies, ranging from the exclusion of Asian/Americans from the project of U.S. citizenship to
surveillance practices explicitly targeting those visibly identified by the state as Muslim in the
afterlife of the September 2001 World Trade Center collapse in New York City.

122
Such a narration troubles the modern temporality of development and progress, as a
seemingly enlightened U.S. nation-state has not only failed to “learn from its past,” but has
actively preserved and expanded upon the underlying structure of racialized oppression and
violence. Near the end of her narrative performance, Masaoka states, “For me, this is not an issue
between Japan, Korea, China or any other country but an issue between the comfort women, no
matter what country.”
63
Although vague and unclear in its motivations, Masaoka’s concluding
statement, at the very least, leaves open the possibility of critically examining the “comfort
women” issue through mechanisms that cannot be confined to or delimited by the nation-state.
Conclusion

In this chapter, I have attempted to provide a careful analysis of the “comfort women” as
it has emerged in the United States—and more specifically, as a complex of transnational
memories, social tensions, and histories are shaped and filtered through the site-specific
formation of the Glendale Peace Memorial. By drawing upon critical sensing as an overarching
method—or emphasizing the local, experiential, and contingent dynamics of an encounter— I
engage with the ways in which the “comfort women” memorial reifies and troubles the
problematic dynamics underlying the discourse of American humanitarianism. The memorial,
then, is not an inanimate object that embodies a homogeneous cluster of “truthful” memories.
Rather, as a formation contoured by local and historical context, spectral dynamics, and
emergent conditions, the Glendale Peace Memorial inadvertently gestures to a body of obscured
memories and subjectivities that are actively occluded from state-instituted narratives of
visibility, transparency, and social viability.
For Marita Sturken and Joshua Inwood, acts of remembering, both private and public, are
never objective, neutral, or impartial, but are dialectical processes produced by and that produces

123
structures of power and knowledge.
64
Within such a context, memorials are not synonymous
with nor do they encompass “what has happened in the past.”
65
Rather, as subjective modes of
representation, memorials are often built to validate and give credence to a set of politicized
agendas, ideals, and needs credence. Yet, as sites of “collected memories” rather than “collective
memories,” memorials are immersive spaces that do not merely reflect but generate
heterogeneous and differentiated memories.
66
Attempts to know the past, then, are never far
removed or “divorced from the contexts in which retrospections on the past occur.”
67

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CHAPTER 4: Unfaithful Returns: Jane Jin Kaisen, Jeju-do, and Reiterations
of Dissent
A breathtaking vista of a crater lake pierced by echoing sounds of crows. The
ceremonial wails of a mudang as he calls forth and conjures the dead. Muted sounds of military
planes as they fly across the horizon.
These are some of the elegiac image-sounds that momentarily appear, then fade, in
Jane Jin Kaisen’s Reiterations of Dissent (2011), a five-channel video installation that engages
with the tumultuous modern history of Jeju-do (Jeju Island), a seemingly idyllic island located
at the southernmost maritime border of South Korea (Figure 4.1). Initially showcased as part
of a solo exhibition entitled Dissident Translations in Denmark, Reiterations of Dissent
encompasses five looped video fragments,

including “Ghosts,” “Lamentation of the Dead,”
“Jeju Airport Massacre,” “Politics of Naming,” and “History of Unending Rebellion.”
1

Simultaneously playing across five different screens, these video fragments track the violent
history of militarization of Jeju-do and the ways in which memories of war, occupation, and
colonialism continue to decompose in Korea and the Pacific.
In this last and final chapter, I draw upon Kaisen’s Reiterations of Dissent as a critical
aesthetic project that recalibrates the past in order to ruminate upon and destabilize the
contemporary moment. By remediating an array of objects, including archival images and
disinterred bone fragments, Reiterations of Dissent alludes to social traces excluded from the
field of vision, even as they continue to dwell in and inhabit the everyday. How, then, does
Kaisen’s work hint at these invisible residues that elude the naked eye? Simultaneously, rather
than articulating history as a calcified narrative, how does Reiterations of Dissent generate
differentiated bodies of knowledge foreclosed by the teleological narrative of accelerated

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development, progress, and freedom— principles that have been absolutely central to the
tender militarized ties between the U.S. and South Korean states in the post-1945 moment?
2

Figure 4.1 Reiterations of Dissent (2011), Installation View, Århus Kunstbygning, Photographer
Guston Sondin-Kung. Courtesy of Jane Jin Kaisen.

Building upon core themes already explored in this dissertation, I address these
questions and disentangle the layers embedded in Reiterations of Dissent through the method
of critical sensing. Elaborated in previous chapters, I conceptualize critical sensing as a multi-
faceted method that indexes the invisible dimensions of colonial occupation and lived
experience. However, in distinction from and sharp contrast to preceding examples, this final
chapter strategically draws upon Kaisen’s Reiterations of Dissent as a critical memory
technology. That is, whereas previous chapters focus on mechanisms of visibility that
inadvertently hint at a corpus of obscured memories, militarized histories, and subjectivities, I
contextualize Reiterations of Dissent as a mnemonic device that explicitly mobilizes the visual
with the aural, kinesthetic, proprioceptive to momentarily sense social fragments that remain
outside of the scope of visibility.

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This last chapter, therefore, gestures to the possibility of conceptualizing critical
sensing as both a methodological framework and a decolonial aesthetic praxis. As emphasized
in throughout this dissertation, critical sensing does not define the act of seeing as a discrete
phenomenon solely tied to the optical, but as a phenomenological process sutured to other
senses that constitute the one and the same subject.
3
Such a visceral understanding of
perception, or the notion of the “tactile eye,”

addresses how viewers touch upon and are
touched by affective dimensions, such as unresolved grief, which remain traceless in public
memory but are still felt in intimate social life.
4

In order to address these concerns, this chapter is organized in the following manner. In
the first half, I contextualize the appearance of a global network of social activism and cultural
production among Korean transnational adoptees during the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s.
Although seemingly tangential, this historical background is key to understanding Kaisen’s
body of works. Affiliated with abstract works by other adoptee visual artists, Kaisen’s oeuvre is
part and parcel of a growing nexus of adoptee cultural formations that puncture the seemingly
truthful depiction of Korean transnational adoption as a purely altruistic enterprise. The
troubling of such a visual narrative, or what Laura Briggs describes as the “visual iconography”
of rescue and humanitarian aid, points to a primary tension explored in Reiterations of Dissent:
the ways in which specific memories, narratives, and bodies are occluded from or exceed the
historical record.
5

Building upon this discussion, I then segue into a reading of Reiterations of Dissent.
Drawing upon the framework of critical sensing, I discuss the installation’s recalibration of
seemingly disposable spaces in Jeju Island, such as unmarked execution and burial sites. Hinting
at memories obscured from the visual frame, Reiterations of Dissent reassesses these obscured

127
spaces as productive sites of subaltern knowledge. Simultaneously, by locating Jeju within the
broader militarized history of the “Asia Pacific,” Reiterations of Dissent recalibrates the island
as a site of radical possibility, as the video installation offers futures glimpses of a demilitarized
Korea and Pacific.
Korean Transnational Adoptees, Cultural Production, and the “Counterpublic”
In November 1989, Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine, a visual artist and experimental
filmmaker from Belgium, unveiled Adoption (1988), a 7-minute, 30-seconds film short (super-
8 mm, color), at the Brussels International Film Short Festival. In the video, the film’s central
figure, a woman who identifies herself as a Korean living in Belgium, reads from a letter in
French, addressed to a “mommy dearest.” However, as the film continues, the summoned
mother fails to materialize on the screen. As the protagonist traverses different spaces, ranging
from the quietude of her bedroom to a sprawling urban square, Adoption proves to be a
challenging text to decipher. Who, exactly, is this young woman and to whom is she
speaking—an estranged mother? An imaginary mother? Why does the film abruptly end with
the protagonist tearing the letter in half, as she quietly exits her bedroom with two suitcases in
hand?
While I do not linger on these questions in this chapter, I offer this brief description of
Lemoine’s work for two primary reasons. First, the conjuring of, yet refusal to make
transparent seemingly spectral figures, is a pivotal practice utilized by Korean transnational
adoptee filmmakers and experimental visual artists in their works, a point I return to and
elaborate upon in the second half of this chapter. Second, the appearance of Adoption in
festivals and public screenings organized in Brussels (1989), Los Angeles (1990), Seoul
(1996), and Minneapolis (1998), is reflective of a particular moment in time, in which cultural

128
works by Korean transnational adoptees gained public attention and traction.
6
Often cited as
the first conceptual work addressing Korean transnational adoption, Lemoine’s Adoption
signaled the materialization of a now impressive transnational archive of adoptee visual works
that includes experimental videos, animated films, biographical documentaries, and public
performances.
When considering such a history, several sites are especially important to consider. As
the region with one of the highest concentrations of Korean transnational adoptees in the
world, Scandinavia, for instance, has emerged as a crucial node of social activism, political
mobilization, and cultural production among Korean transnational adoptees.
7
In 1986,
Mattias Tjeder founded the first known Korean transnational adoptee association, Adopterade
Koreaners Förening (i.e., Association of Adopted Koreans, AKF), and in 1988, Korean
Klubben in Malmö, Denmark was officially established. Spaces of gathering, camaraderie,
and critical discussion among adoptees, these early organizations preceded the formation of
overseas adoption social networks in the United States, and served as blueprints for umbrella
adoptee associations, including the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA), which
now coordinates the annual adoptee gathering in Seoul.
8

In Copenhagen, a number of key transnational adoptee artists have also emerged in the
past decade, including Kaisen, Jette Hye Jin Mortensen, and Trine Gleerup. In addition to their
creative works, these artists joined two other adoptee artists from Scandinavia, Anna Jin Hwa
Borstam and Charlotte Kim Boed, to form the Unidentified Foreign Object Laboratory, or
UFOLab in 2004. Although now defunct, the UFOLab was a radical feminist political project
that addressed the problematics of “Nordic racialized othering” among Scandinavians and the
Korean transnational adoptee community, a global network dominated by young adults raised in

129
the United States. During its brief existence, the UFOLab provided a much-needed platform for
anti-colonial and feminist engagement with international adoption in Scandinavia, and did so,
not only through cultural production but also through the sponsorship of lectures, publications,
and “city interventions,” or impromptu performances in a myriad of public spaces.
9

Several key factors might be linked to the emergence of visual works and social activist
practices by Korean transnational adoptees during the 1990s. For one, the vast majority of the
160,000 Korean children, mostly baby girls, adopted in the past sixty years occurred during
two decades— the 1970s (46,035 children) and 1980s (65,511 children)— with over 100,000
children adopted by U.S. families and nearly 25,000 adopted by families in Denmark (9, 297),
Sweden (9051), and Norway (6,293).
10
As argued by Kim Stoker and Eleana J. Kim, a
prominent proportion of adoptees came of age during the 1990s and early 2000s, attending
college or leaving their primarily rural and suburban homes for urban centers. Subsequently,
many, for the first time, came into contact with other Korean students and adoptees, while
others educated themselves on the causal factors of the overseas adoption industry in South
Korea, initially established by the U.S. military and Western evangelical organizations during
the Korean War. These experiences outside of the home also allowed adoptees to explore and
navigate, through political and imaginative means, a sense of personal deracination and
structural displacement caused by transnational adoption. For Kaisen, her training at the Royal
Danish Academy of Fine Arts was a formative period that allowed her to “question things by
using other channels of communication besides spoken or written language.”
11

Secondly, due to the end of military dictatorial rule in South Korea during the late
1980s, as well as the scathing international media critiques aimed at South Korea’s
“transnational adoption business” during the 1988 Seoul Olympics,
12
the South Korean

130
government began to publicly address transnational adoption within the context of the state goal
of democratization. Starting from the early 1990s, the South Korean government coordinated all-
expenses paid “homecoming trips” for diasporic adoptees while also sponsoring reality television
programs, such as the popular weekly forum I Want to Meet This Person (1996-2007). These
media outlets and programs provided national venues for transnational adoptees, as they
publicized their searches for birth parents and biological families.
13

Such conditions, coupled with the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s, gave way to a
burgeoning nexus of public forums, cultural formations, and politicized discourses related to
Korean transnational adoption, or an-ever expanding adoptee “counterpublic.” Constituted by
a proliferating number of meetings and conferences, film festivals, and art exhibitions, as well
as regional adoptee associations and Internet-mediated social networks, Kim describes the
adoptee counterpublic as a differentiated global milieu that exists in “the shadow of the
cultural dominant.”
14
The “cultural dominant,” in this case, refers to hegemonic practices,
government policies, and political discourses that configure transnational adoption as a
humanitarian gesture— a moral stance long taken up, although certainly not evenly or
monolithically, by the U.S. and Western European governments.
15

For Briggs, Christina Klein, and Susie Woo, popular media, including the television
show The Big Picture (1951-1964), Hollywood films such as The Battle Hymn (1957), and
nationally circulating periodicals, played a pivotal role in contouring the public face of the
“poor orphan,” especially during the Cold War.
16
These mediums did not only produce a highly
sentimental visual iconography of “the destitute orphan,” but also generated a discourse of truth
and objectivity regarding abandoned children in need of safe American homes. Such rhetoric
was not arbitrary, but as argued by Jodi Kim, overlapped with Cold War ideology and the

131
United States’ evolving role as a global power committed to the principles of unfettered
capitalism, democracy, and neoliberal freedom.
17

Central to this visual iconography was a constellation of racialized and gendered tropes
that surfaced during the early 1950s in the U.S. Published in periodicals such as Newsweek,
National Geographic, and The New York Times, emotionally-laden photographs of Asian
children amidst ruin and rubble, and romanticized depictions of Hollywood stars, including Rock
Hudson— the star of The Battle Hymn, a film based on the life of U.S. Colonel Dean E. Hess and
his “rescue” of orphans during the Korean War— generously feeding “Asian waifs” circulated
widely in the United States. A 1953 Life feature story offered one of the first in- depth glimpses
into the life of a Korean “urchin,” Lee Kyung Soo, and his adopted father, Vincent Palladino, a
U.S. naval officer stationed in Korea during the early 1950s. Replete with glossy black-and-
white photographs depicting the odd pair bonding as father and son—the tall, lanky, and
masculine Palladino is coupled with a diminutive and an effeminized Lee—the “heart-wrenching
story” obscures the darker dimensions of transnational adoption, including Palladino’s eventual
abandonment of Lee once he was brought to the United States.
18

As cautiously argued by Klein, this emergent save-and-rescue iconography was not an
isolated narrative, but a carefully crafted visual trope engineered by popular media in order to
suture American anti-communist military forays to the intimate reproductive sphere of the
American family. During the Cold War, the nuclear family was epitomized as the foundation
for a robust U.S. nation-state. Within this context, cultural values and practices associated
with U.S. citizenry, including patriotism, loyalty, and civic participation were aligned with the
capacity to generate a heteronormative, non-deviant family. Conversely, “Oriental” countries,
according to U.S. state reports, had an enormous surplus of orphaned children in desperate

132
need of loving homes and families. Despite initial controversies linked to the racialized bodies
of Korean children, discourses of assimilation and liberal multiculturalism endorsed by the
U.S. government vis-à-vis foreign policies gave way to the metaphorical absorption of bi-
racial and Asian children into the idealized paradigm of the “All American family,” coded as
white, middle class, and heterosexual. Indeed, as an effective means of containing the spread
of communism and maintaining the national security of the U.S., the Truman administration
actively encouraged the U.S. public to reject isolationism, and to embrace the U.S.’s new role
as a global leader. The sentimental language of familial and unconditional love, then, emerged
as a significant political language for U.S.-Asian relations, as everyday Americans were called
to develop positive outlooks of and deep friendships with Asia.
19

Although not invariable or without controversy, the ideals of humanitarianism,
freedom, and compassion are still linked to popular visual discourses concerning
contemporary transnational adoption, not only in South Korea, but in other prominent sending
countries, such as China, Latvia, Russia and Peru. Over the past two decades, the “orphan-
cum-adoptee” visual iconography has been contested by activists, scholars, and cultural
producers, not only because of its high degree of sensationalism, but because such media-
generated images erase the troubling contradictions underlying the very making of the South
Korean overseas adoption program. These inconsistencies do not merely point to the uneven
power differentials that continue to inform the South Korean state’s “always already
indebted” relationship with the U.S. government, but reflects upon the South Korean state’s
wielding of transnational adoption as a biopolitical mechanism of social management and
state rule.
20

133
Since the late 1950s, the vast majority of Koreans adopted by Western European and
American families have not been orphans, but are children placed into orphanages due to
structural causes, including overwhelming poverty and strategic domestic policies. In the
immediate afterlife of the Korean War, the still nascent South Korean government, under the
administration of President Syngman Rhee, employed overseas adoption as an efficient tool to
excise “undesirable” children—that is, the thousands of “mixed race” babies born to U.S.
white and African American soldiers and Korean women— from the proper ethno-centric
South Korean nation-family. Subsequently, the crystallization of overseas adoption as a mode
of governance under the Rhee administration killed two birds with a single stone. For one, it
paved the way for the implementation of President Rhee’s ideology of “one nation, one race”
(ilguk, ilminju) as reflected in the postcolonial discourse of Korean ethno-nationalism (tangil
minjok chongsin), and two, it allowed for the South Korean government to evade its
responsibility of developing a sustainable social welfare infrastructure.
21

Even in the contemporary moment, the legacy of the South Korean state’s dogged
focus on accelerated development and economic progress, succinctly captured by the state
motto of “development first, social rights later” under the Park Chung Hee military regime
(1961-1979), remains a specter in South Korean society, shaping social attitudes and state
policies toward single working-class mothers who constitute over 90 percent of women
giving birth to children placed in orphanages.
22
Today, transnational adoption in South Korea generates an estimated $35 million
dollars in revenue and taxes per year, with each individual adoption costing approximately
$15,000 to $20,000.
23
In contrast, the South Korean government, through social services and
legislation, provides an unwed mother approximately 50,000 won ($48 U.S. dollars) per

134
month for childcare, and allocates 0.09 percent of its annual fiscal budget to supporting
economically struggling families, women and children. As poignantly observed by Jennifer
Kwon Dobbs, “The money from one overseas adoption would pay an unwed mother’s family
subsidy for 25 years of her child’s life.”
24

“Freedom is not Given Freely”: Reiterations of Dissent & Critical Sensing
I offer this historical backdrop of Korean transnational adoption, the visual
iconography of the “orphan waif,” and the adoptee “counterpublic” because it is crucial to
understanding the conceptual underpinnings and stakes of cultural works by Korean
transnational adoptees, including Jane Jin Kaisen. Embedded within a constantly evolving
milieu of cultural and aesthetic practices, Kaisen’s oeuvre is indelibly tied to her own
subjective experiences, even as her work evades essentialized notions of self and identity.
Born to a family from Jeju Island in 1980, Kaisen was adopted by working-class
parents from Denmark shortly following her birth. Raised in a small suburban town outside of
Århus, Kaisen received her arts education in Denmark (Royal Danish Academy of Arts) and
the U.S. (UCLA and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program).
Currently, she resides in Copenhagen. In addition to her participation in Scandinavian
feminist and “orientity” collectives such as the UFOLab, Kaisen is the co-founder of the
collaborative project, Itinerant_sends_for _Itinerant, an artistic space and program that
explores displacement resulting from war, division, and colonial occupation.
25

In many ways, Kaisen’s shifting subject-location informs the pivotal themes of her
work, ranging from dislocation, forced migration, and gender violence, to fragmented
memories and conflicting histories. In the experimental film, Tracing Trades (38-minute
single channel narrative, 2006), Kaisen interrogates the official history of international

135
adoption in Scandinavia, while questioning Scandinavia’s self-produced identity as
progressive and anti- racist. In another feature-length and multi-vocal film, The Woman, the
Orphan, and the Tiger (72-minute single channel narrative, 2010), Kaisen tracks the
intertwined histories of three gendered constituencies linked to the colonial making of a
modern Korea: Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Dutch “comfort women” forced
into sex labor by the Japanese Imperial Army between 1930-1945; multi-ethnic sex workers
living in kijichons or camptowns located on the outskirts of U.S. military bases in South
Korea; and transnational adoptees from Western Europe and the U.S.
As a transnational subject who constantly crosses and negotiates different cultural
spaces, Kaisen also takes a keen interest in the notion of translation. As elaborated upon in a
2010 interview conducted by curator Cecilia Widenheim, Kaisen describes her aesthetic works
as “dissident translations.”
26
That is, Kaisen is not interested in an immaculate preservation of
documentary sources of evidence, but in the revisions, ruptures, and contradictions generated
by the act of translation.
27
A dissident translation, therefore, remediates the original in order to
trouble notions of the authentic and accurate.
28
By interpreting translation as a politicized
performance, rather than a perfunctory act, Kaisen configures Reiterations of Dissent as a
rigorous undertaking that destabilizes official historical narratives. Such a reading is informed
by Kaisen’s own ambivalent relationship with Korea, a discomfiting link that is marked more
by difference, discordance, and distance than by sameness, harmony, and proximity.
Consequently, her dissenting readings of Korean modern history push against fixed notions of
the heteronormative family, blood ties, and ethnic homogeneity, cultural concepts that have
been central to anti-colonial activism during the Japanese colonial era (1905-1945), South
Korean nation-building (1950-1980), and the contemporary discourse of danil minjok (“one

136
people”), a patriotic narrative embraced by several prominent Korean/American civic rights
organizations.
29

Simultaneously, Kaisen’s investment in performing and enacting dissident translations
must be linked to her commitment to a decolonial aesthetic. For Frantz Fanon, colonialism is
a “psychological–economic structure” or an “epidermalization of… inferiority” that contours
the social and psychic life of the colonized subject and colonizer.
30
Within this context,
colonialism is not merely a politico-economic system, but a psychic process underlying
subject-formation. Consequently, decolonization does not only point to the eradication of
tangible institutions, nor does it suggest a return to a romanticized past. Rather,
decolonization challenges naturalized subject-locations and disinters seemingly forgotten
social formations eclipsed by national memory. Through a deep engagement with social
residues, or what Herman Grey and Macarena Gómez-Barris posit as the “sociological trace,”
the past becomes a critical paradigm that gestures to radically different genealogies of cultural
practices, memories, and histories.
31

As evident through decomposing lines, fractured narratives, and multiple perspectives,
an aesthetic rendering of the decolonial is threaded throughout Kaisen’s oeuvre and might be
tracked through critical sensing. As a methodological framework, critical sensing points to the
disintegration of established histories, fixed points-of-view (POV), and the Euclidean
perspective. In other words, critical sensing does not only gesture toward social traces that
evade vision, but reconstitutes the act of seeing as a phenomenon linked to the experiential,
aural, kinesthetic, tactile, and proprioceptive. Namely, by “fleshing out” vision as a multi-
sensory process that is not necessarily equivalent to— in fact, exceeds— the visible, critical
sensing captures how visual objects momentarily “sense” ghostly elements that resist total

137
transparency. Such an understanding gives way to what Sarita Echavez See posits as the
“decolonized eye,” or a slippery method and aesthetic practice that not only hints at divergent
subjectivities, but also contests notions of “wholeness” and “completeness.”
32

Reiterations of Dissent can also be described as a decolonial project that traffics within
and dismantles the system of visuality. As observed by Nicholas Mirzoeff, visuality cannot be
narrowly defined as a physiological process solely tied to the optical. Drawing upon modern
institutions of power as key sites of investigation, such as the slavery plantation system and the
U.S. military industrial complex, Mirzoeff defines visuality as a matrix of knowledge,
violence, and surveillance operationalized through processes of classification, delineation, and
aestheticization. Through such enmeshed processes and as discussed at length in Chapter 1,
visuality distinguishes between modern “seeing” subjects from “gazed upon” objects.
However, visuality is not merely informed by the dominant and hegemonic, but embodies
elements and dynamics resistant to transparency.
Functioning within this context, Reiterations of Dissent destabilizes visuality by
troubling the very demarcation between the visible and invisible. A five-channel video
installation, Reiterations of Dissent addresses a seven-year joint U.S.-South Korean military
communist “red” cleansing (1948-1955), simply referred to as “4.3” by Jeju civilians, which
resulted in the deaths of 30,000 to 60,000 island inhabitants—or nearly one-third of the island’s
total population.
33
By conceptualizing 4.3 as a living memory rather than as a tragedy of the
past, Reiterations of Dissent links the Cold War massacre to the recent construction of a $970
million, 123 acre South Korean naval base complex in the rustic seacoast village of
Gangjeong.
34

138
Namely, Kaisen tracks the unsettling ties between 4.3 and the contemporary moment by
deploying a strategic set of formal and conceptual practices. First, it is important to underscore
Kaisen’s use of the multi-channel video installation as the primary format for Reiterations of
Dissent. An aesthetic platform historically linked to corporeality, the body, and the Fluxus
movement of the 1960s, video installation emerged as a hybrid technology encompassing
several mediums, including performance, photography, film, animation, and virtual art.
Consequently, it is often referred to as a “moving” practice with no methodological center or
essence.
35
The absence of a unified core of principles has produced a rich array of works that
are not only dependent upon the auditory or visual, but also draw upon the sensorial,
kinesthetic, and affective. Conceptualized as a dynamic process of exploration and expansion,
the immersive encounter between video installation and the public draws upon heightened
sensations of sight, touch, and movement. As a three-dimensional sculptural object marked by
materiality and spatial depth, the multi-channel video installation can also be approached from
a number of different perspectives: spectators might observe the screens from a distance,
circumambulate the installation(s) while momentarily glimpsing at the monitors, or consume
image-sounds that appear and dissolve across the screen(s). The variety of possible interactions
brings into relief an array of contingencies, as a spectator’s shifting orientation produces
different interpretations or disparate forms of knowledge.
36

Consequently, the sensorial fragmentation that emerges as one approaches
dissonant sounds and images across multiple screens reflects the subjective ways in which
historical narratives are constructed. The kaleidoscopic arrangement of multiple screens
forces spectators to acknowledge the multiple dimensions of narrative making, as any
single standpoint permits only partial or limited views. Each monitor reaffirms,

139
contradicts, or detracts from images and sounds that surface across other screens,
simulating the distinct yet intertwined processes of memory-making and forgetting.
37
The
multiple-screen configuration of video installation, then, works against the logic of the
classical filmic diegesis because individual frames to do not fuse into a coherent narrative.
Rather, the mobilization of fragmentary pieces in Reiterations of Dissent shatters the
possibility of a complete narrative, as the installation disarticulates the multiple desires and
contradictions that culminated in the colonization of Jeju-do and Korea in the first place.
Take, for instance, two different scenes embedded in “Lamentation of the Dead” and
“the Politics of Naming,” video fragments that simultaneously play across two adjacent
screens. In “Lamentation of the Dead,” a shamanistic ritual performed by a wailing mudding
(shaman) transforms into an avisual performance, or a mechanism of “sightless vision,”
38
as
the resplendently dressed shaman names and channels the dead in order to quell their
melancholic spirits (Figure 4.2). Taking place in an unmarked execution site cloistered in the
mid-mountain range of Halla-san, or Mount Halla, the gut (shamanistic ceremony) is attended
by only a handful of witnesses. Such a scene diverges from the elaborate, nationally televised
state ceremony depicted in “Politics of Naming,” organized each year by the South Korean
government since the early 2000s. In the video fragment, then South Korean President, Noh
Moo-Hyun, offers the first official acknowledgement of the government-sponsored massacre in
2005, and describes Jeju as a symbol of human rights and an island of peace. As hundreds of
Jeju civilians gather at the national public cemetery on a grey and dreary day, the South Korean
national anthem plays softly in the background as mourners gently lay wreathes and white
flowers on the gravesites of the dead.

140

Figure 4.2 Still shot from “Lamentations of the Dead” in Reiterations of Dissent (2011). Courtesy of Jane
Jin Kaisen.
Upon closer examination, President Noh’s anointment of Jeju as an ideal site of human
rights dovetails with the South Korean government’s recent efforts to endorse Jeju Island as an
alluring tourist site and vacation spot. Popularly heralded as the “Hawai’i of South Korea” by
the South Korean government and National Tourism Organization, Jeju is cosmetically
transformed into a warm tropical island de-linked from the horrors of the past and modern urban
life. Ironically, the intimated relationality between Hawai’i and Jeju uncannily evokes a very
different overlapping history as both islands share a modern history of U.S. colonial rule, the
decimation of the indigenous population, and their transformation into Pacific military outposts.
Inadvertently, the allusion to Hawai’i conjures a violent colonial specter that mars the verdant
landscapes of Jeju and Hawai’i.
Simultaneously, Noh’s apology and the official state motto of “straightening up” the
country’s sordid past are at blatant odds with actual state practices.
39
Even sixty-five years

141
following the massacre, the remains of the most prominent resistance youth leaders remain
suspended between here and the afterlife, as they are prohibited from receiving proper burials
in public cemeteries and excluded from state-sponsored commemorations. In lieu of
government- organized burials, shamanistic rituals have become alternative requiems for those
who are indefinitely barred from the state economy of official memorials and memory
practices. As poignantly offered by Heonik Kwon, shamanistic rituals play a vital role in
public, political, and intellectual life in South Korea because they mediate unresolved pasts
and colonial legacies unaddressed by the state.
40
In that sense, the gut emerges as a social
justice practice that not only invokes the dead, but also reconstitutes execution sites as spaces
of contestation, remembering, and resistance.
As further illustrated by the video fragment, “Politics of Naming,” state policies and
practices of publicly recognizing 4.3 remain in constant flux. Despite the establishment of a
truth commission in 1999 (i.e., the Special Law for the Historical Truth Clarification of the
Jeju Incident), the South Korean state’s official stance on 4.3 has depended on the government
and administration in power. As the camera in “Politics of Naming” captures silvery tendrils of
incense smoke uncoiling from a copper vessel placed at the center of the 4.3. Peace Memorial
Park Altar, an invisible narrator offers the following description:
If you go to the memorial hall of the Jeju April 3 Incident, you can see a
sign that says ‘blank memorial stone’ on it. The memorial stone has
remained without anything carved on it. It means the people have not named
the incident yet.

The absence of a proper name provides sober commentary on the South Korean and the
U.S. states’ wariness of recognizing the 4.3 atrocities as a military-sponsored cleansing. Within
the past two decades, the U.S. government has refused to acknowledge the American military’s
role in the killings, while the official name of 4.3 in South Korea has shifted from a

142
“communist rebellion,” to the “People’s Uprising” to the “Civilian Massacre.” As portrayed by
the recent actions of the Lee Myung-bak (2008-2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013- current)
administrations in South Korea, the 4.3 Massacre is configured as an unfortunate yet necessary
counterinsurgency military campaign deployed against a communist revolt.
41
Hence,
conservative state discourse crafts the rampant killings as a terrifying yet necessary step taken
in the hard road toward recovery, emancipation, and liberation from North Korean communist
influence.
42
Linked to the humanist tropes of freedom, progress, and rescue, state-sanctioned
violence is galvanized as an essential mechanism of national security.
However, video installation practice does not merely point to the destabilization of
singular historical narratives.

Rather, the animated quality and “liveness” of video
installation practice points to the variegated and at times, unanticipated interactions that
materialize between audience and installation. This sense of unpredictability is evident in
the past several showings of Reiterations of Dissent in Denmark and Jeju Island. During the
fall of 2011, Kaisen’s solo exhibition, Dissident Translations, was initially unveiled at the
Kunstbygning (Art Building): Centre for Contemporary Art in Århus, the second largest
metropolitan center in Denmark, located approximately three hours by train from
Copenhagen. The expansive layout of the Kunstbygning permitted each of the four
installations of the exhibition, including three video installations (Reiterations of Dissent,
Island of Stone and Retake: May Day) and one multi-media installation (Light and Shadow),
to be placed in separate rooms, or in, the case of Reiterations of Dissent, in an airy room
separated by a prominent divider (Figure 4.3).

143

Figure 4.3 Layout of Dissident Translations at Kunstbygning (Art Building) in Århus, Denmark (Fall
2011). Courtesy of Jane Jin Kaisen.

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Depicted in the video documentation of the exhibition opening, audience members
entered into different rooms at their leisure, and lingered in dimmed rooms in order to consider
a particular installation. The video installations, however, were accompanied by sets of
headphones that muted the cacophonous sounds emerging from the works, detracting from
the artist’s intention to produce a sensory overload— or a wall of discordant images and
sounds intended to overwhelm spectators. In Jeju City’s Art Space C, a more modest gallery
that includes a single viewing room divided by a partition, the reconfiguration of
Reiterations of Dissent was even more drastic, as the installation was reformatted into a
single-channel installation inserted into a room corner where viewers were unable to move
around the screen (Figure 4.4). Originally conceived as a multi–channel experience, the
restructuring of Reiterations of Dissent into a one-channel format influenced the encounter
between the audience and visual work. For Kaisen, the video fragments do not include a
dominant narrative voice, nor are they constituted by POV shots that tell a story from a
single perspective. Consequently, the reconfiguration of the videos into a sequential format,
with one fragment playing after another, produced unexpected effects, as audience members
were unclear as to whether the videos were intended to form a single unabridged narrative,
or were part and parcel of an experimental non-narrative film.
Audiences located in different social, cultural, and political locations are also exposed
to and experience the video installation in quite different ways. In fact, the public showings of
Reiterations of Dissent in Denmark generated radically different interpretations than when
showcased at Art Space C Gallery and the 4.3 Peace Memorial Park in Jeju Island. As
explored by Kaisen in her experimental films, Tracing Trades (2006) and The Woman, the
Orphan, and the Tiger (2010), Korea is configured as a distant object of curiosity within the

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popular imaginary of Denmark. Although Scandinavia boasts one of the highest
concentrations of transnational adoptees in the world, overseas adoption is largely conceived
as a humanitarian project by the popular Danish media and until recently, adoptees remained
peripheral to national discourses of race, migration, and citizenship.

Even now, race is often
described as a “non-topic” in Denmark, as the country self-identifies as an educated and a
liberal state committed to the principles of freedom and equality. Described by Kaisen in an
interview conducted by Laura Kina in 2010:
In Europe, it’s been very much the assimilation model. If you possess the
language or the culture, then you can be considered a Dane. But only to a certain
extent. You still have this racial displacement. In general, Europeans don’t want
to talk about race… [but] with adoption, it becomes complicated [emphasis is
mine].
43

Figure 4.4. Reiterations of Dissent at Art C Gallery in Jeju City, Jeju Island, August 2013. Courtesy of
Jane Jin Kaisen.

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Accordingly, when shown in urban avant-garde art spaces in Denmark, Reiterations of
Dissent is perceived by the general public as a pedagogical tool designed to educate
exhibition attendees on the twentieth century trajectory of Jeju-do, a history that only a tiny
fraction of the Danish public is aware of or familiar with before encountering Kaisen’s work.

As observed in the Århus Art Building’s advertising for the exhibit and the reception of
Reiterations by prominent independent curators, including Stine Kleis Hansen of the
Skribent: Ny Dansk Kunst, Kaisen’s work is described as an “eco-aesthetic” project that
engages with issues of sustainability, the environment, and ecology within the context of Cold
War geopolitics.
44

In contrast, during the opening reception of the exhibit at Jeju City’s Art Space C on
August 8, 2013, the majority of audience members who attended the event were young
relatives or descendants of the deceased, aging survivors, and witnesses of the 4.3 atrocities, or
concerned journalists, activists, and locals of Jeju City. Although I myself did not attend the
opening, Kaisen, during an interview, described her intensive engagement with the audience.
When asked by Kaisen why they attended the event, spectators responded that they were
intimately aware of or felt uncomfortably close to the 4.3 atrocities. Due to paralyzing feelings
of fear, embarrassment, and shame, most exhibit attendees could not speak with loved ones,
family members, and friends about 4.3. This is the case with Kaisen’s own biological parents
and family, who, as long-time residents of Jeju Island, have complicated ties with the 4.3
Massacre. In a general sense, spectators who attended the exhibition’s opening night at Art C
Gallery interpreted the event as a rare opportunity to participate in a multi-generational
dialogue regarding a taboo topic that has, nevertheless, informed the public identity and
culture of Jeju.

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Within this context, audience members engage with Reiterations of Dissent as an
aesthetic praxis that pushes against South Korean and U.S. nationalistic narratives of peace,
resolution, and forgetting. In his October 2013 review of the exhibit in the Jeju Weekly, Tom
Willis-Jones describes Kaisen’s work as a sobering project that addresses “the lack of
accountability for those responsible” for 4.3, and explores “island’s [Jeju’s] identity as a place
of resistance.”
45

By offering these observations, I do not mean to essentialize Kaisen’s work, nor am I
interested in purely empirical notions of the audience. Spectators, regardless of geographical,
social, or cultural locale, encounter a visual object with divergent expectations, investments,
and emotive ties. Rather, I focus on the specifics of location and exhibition space, as well the
different encounters between audience and aesthetic objects, in order to describe video
installation as a subjective and socially contingent medium that activates diverse, if not
contradictory, responses across transnational sites and spaces.
In addition to the use of video installation as the primary platform for Reiterations of
Dissent, Kaisen destabilizes linear temporality to underscore the uncanny elements that
continue to fester in Jeju. In the opening scene of the video fragment, “Ghosts,” an overhead
camera provides an extreme wide shot and impressive vista of Jeju-do’s majestic geography,
replete with the snow-capped mountaintop of Halla-san, a luminous crater lake and a
screeching crow fluttering in the distance (Figure 4.5). A seemingly tranquil depiction, the
frame unexpectedly jumps as it shifts into a second sequence of medium-shot scenes depicting
a desiccated, windswept forest hidden in a cavity of Mt. Halla. Captured by a shaky portable
camera, a sense of spatial disjuncture materializes as the sudden change in scale places the film
viewer from an “impossible” place of aerial observation, to a more intimate location that

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transforms the camera lens into the spectator’s eye. The forest scenes remain stitched to the
aerial frame through a single ominous figure: a black crow, which, by the second sequence of
scenes, has multiplied into a rapturous flock.

Figure 4.5 Still shot from “Ghosts” in Reiterations of Dissent (2011). Courtesy of Jane Jin Kaisen.

Amplified by the quivering movement of the handheld camera, the frenetic movement
of crows in the forest materialize in different tempos, ranging from slow motion to normal
time, back to slow motion. Characteristic of Reiterations of Dissent as a whole, this sense of
plural time alludes to the multiple temporalities that dwell in the seemingly picturesque
landscape of Jeju. Hence, Kaisen recalibrates Jeju as a heterotopic space, in which different
temporalities exist and unfold within bounded sites.
46
During the height of the 4.3 Massacre,
the cavernous tunnels, forests, and open meadows of Mount Halla were particularly macabre
sites, as the South Korean Interim Government (SKIG) and the Northwest Youth Alliance
arbitrarily executed rebels and villagers in mass numbers.
47
In the following passage, the

149
narrator of “Ghosts,” who remains outside of the frame for the duration of the video,
remembers such a scene from his childhood days as the camera continues to document the
flying crows:
Sometimes, a crow alighted on a branch of the persimmon tree near my
house. It dropped something out of its beak. I saw that it was a piece of
human scalp. There were some hairs on it. Because outside Jeju City it was
a battlefield and target area of subjugation, people everywhere. So the crows
gathered around to feed on the corpses, and flew up the sky like crazy.

Through the method of critical sensing, the omnipresence of massive black crows on
Jeju might be read as an uncanny reminder of the deteriorated bodies that have melded and
become one with the landscape. Momentarily captured in fuzzy, black-and-white archival
images remediated in “History of Endless Rebellion,” hundreds of bloated bodies were left to
disintegrate in public spaces and the open air. As depicted in the fragment, “Jeju Airport
Massacre,” nearly 400 bodies were discovered on the grounds of the Jeju International Airport
during a massive excavation in 2007, coordinated by the Jeju 4.3 Research Institute, family
members, and Korean peace-workers.
48
In the video, anguished family members and elderly survivors anxiously peer over the
excavation site, as workers gingerly locate and disinter matted hair, teeth, and femur bones from
the freshly dug site (Figure 4.6).
The delicate act of exhuming thousands of bone shards hidden within the earth’s
surface and their sudden exposure to the public’s gaze generates a glaring tension between
silence and disclosure. Actively suppressed by the U.S. and South Korean governments for
decades, a formal investigation into the 4.3 atrocities was finally launched in the late 1990s due
to escalating pressure from survivors, pro-democracy groups, journalists, and academics.
Nevertheless, despite rigorous efforts to make perceptible the violence that erupted in the

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island, the 4.3 Massacre remains a peripheral event within South Korean public memory. To
this day, 4.3 survivors, bystanders, and witnesses live side-by-side with former paramilitary
officers and participants who perpetrated or benefited from the atrocities. In that sense,
Reiteration of Dissent’s documentation of the exhumation process registers a core contradiction
within South Korean political discourse: the state’s proclamation of 4.3 as part and parcel of a
reconciled past.

Figure 4.6 Still Image from “Jeju Airport Massacre” in Reiterations of Dissent (2011). Courtesy of Jane
Jin Kaisen.

Situated within a historical context, 4.3 is also interpreted by scholars as an early
manifestation of and precursor to the Korean War, a bloody struggle portended by the
arbitrary division of Korea by two junior U.S. colonels, Dean Rusk and Charles H. Bonesteel
III, on August 11, 1945. While the camera offers a pan of pristine farmlands and green

151
hillside slopes dotting Jeju in “History of Endless Rebellion,” an invisible narrator describes
how the 4.3 Massacre served as a harbinger to the unimaginable pain and agony unleashed
during the Korean War:
[The Jeju Massacre] is the prelude and the beginning and the microcosm of the
massacres that occurred throughout South Korea. If we look at the Jeju Massacre, we
can understand what the state violence and the state terror was like before and during
the Korean War [emphasis added].

Today, the insidious secrecy associated with 4.3 is hauntingly echoed by the pervasive
silence surrounding the Korean War. In both the United States and South Korea, dominant
memory discourse configures the Korean War as a necessary measure taken to contain the
spread of communism in Asia. Contemporary politicians in both countries often describe the
United States as the “big brother” liberator who not only emancipated Koreans from the
onerous claws of Japanese imperialism but from the evils of communism. Although South
Koreans and Korean diasporics contest such a perspective, official state memorializing
practices overwhelmingly reflect such a singular position.
49
These sentiments, perhaps, are
most visibly reflected in the National War Memorial of Korea located near Yongsan Garrison,
the current headquarters of the United States Forces of Korea (USFK) in Seoul. Before
stepping into the impressive complex, an ominous phrase is etched across the staircase leading
to the domed memorial hall: “자유는 거저 주어지는 것이 아니다.” Although the War
Memorial loosely translates this phrase as “Freedom is not Free,” the literal Korean-to-English
translation reads as, “Freedom is not Given Freely.” The latter translation provides a much
more accurate picture of how freedom is conceptualized by the South Korean government: as a
benevolent act bestowed upon the Korean people by a liberating American force.
Against this backdrop of amnesia, the image-sounds of Reiterations of Dissent
transform into a decolonial practice, as the multi-vocal, non-linear video fragments offer a

152
critical genealogy of Jeju Island’s history that pushes against the seemingly impervious wall of
silence. Throughout “History of Endless Rebellion,” multiple voices describe Jeju’s uneasy
ties with the Korean “mainland” since the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910) and its emergence as a
bastion of rebellious anarchy against Japanese imperialism and U.S. militarization. During the
May 10, 1948 elections in the Korean peninsula, Jeju emerged as the only distinct region in
Korea that resisted plans for separate presidential elections in the north and south, with over
eighty percent of the population voting against separate elections. Jeju civilians also organized
a demonstration on March 1, 1947, protesting the upcoming elections and the presence of the
United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), an occupational ruling body
that remained in official control of the southern half of Korea from September 8, 1495 to
August 15, 1948. For historians, this demonstration is often cited as the beginning of the 4.3
Massacre, as the South Korean police, under direct surveillance of the USAMGIK, opened fire
upon the crowd, killing six and critically wounding six others.
50

As the different voices conceptualize 4.3 as a “continuation of [Jeju’s] traditional
resistance,” black-and-white moving images unfurl across the screen. Grainy footage reveals
a multi-generational mass of marching protesters carrying a banner etched with the words,
“Immediate Withdrawal of U.S. and Soviet Armies,” civilians clashing with police officers,
and demonstrators dragged and beaten by USAMGIK-trained police. The protest against
both U.S. and Soviet occupation point to Jeju civilians’ recognition of Korea as a tactical
geopolitical location within the emergent Cold War, and their desire to imagine an otherwise
deemed impossible by a Manichean world order. The violent skirmishes between the local
police force and Jeju inhabitants also gesture to the ultimate responsibility of the U.S.
military government, as this ruling force maintained careful tabs on and surveillance of the

153
4.3 atrocities.
51
Taking stock of the presence of the U.S. military government in Jeju Island
during the 4.3 Massacre, the narrators of “History of Endless Rebellion” clearly name the
U.S. government as the primary perpetrator of crimes during the tragedy: “[4.3] was before
the establishment of South Korea. It occurred under the American occupation forces.”
Reiterations of Dissent, however, does not simply “sense” or render visible these ghostly
remains and erased memories. Rather, through performances of decolonial knowledge, the
installation recalibrates sites of violence in order to trace different narratives and histories
deemed unthinkable by the U.S. and South Korean governments.
52
Here, I draw upon the
method of critical sensing to unpack the incongruent elements embedded in the mise-en-scène
of “Ghosts.” As the camera offers a close-up tracking of a genteel landscape carpeted with
swaying strands of golden grass and large porous rocks, a solemn voice pierces the frame and
offers the following description of the terrible killings he was privy to as a child:
When I was little I saw those things and my heart felt sad. During the Korean
War, the slaughter of 4.3 continued because war itself is killing. Thus we never
talked about 4.3. In my childhood, I did not hear much about 4.3. I just heard
adults who gathered around in their spare time, or on someone's sacrifice day,
whispering about the 4.3 victims.

Such a narration produces a sense of disassociation, not only between the aural and
the visual, but between discrepant forms of knowledge negotiated by 4.3 survivors and
witnesses. Although the speaker readily points to the regime of silence imposed upon of 4.3
(we never talked about 4.3, I did not hear much about 4.3), s/he also provides alternative
memories that rupture such silence (when I was little I saw those things … the slaughter of
4.3. continued, I… heard adults… whispering). The divergent impressions make perceptible
the unbearable pressure points that impinge upon the speaker. On the one hand, the narrator,
now an adult, is able to speak of and make audible the secrets s/he was forbidden to know as

154
a child. On the other hand, decades of enforced silence have produced unsettling tensions
that are not easily discarded or forgotten. Consequently, in an attempt to recount the horrors
witnessed as a young child, the narrator’s uneasy testimony transforms into an unsettling
hermeneutics, or a politics of refusal that contests repressive measures implemented by the
South Korean government.
53

Considering the continuing ramifications of Jeju’s past upon the present moment,
Reiterations of Dissent’s pairing of 4.3 to the contemporary construction of the Gangjeong
naval base symbolizes, quite concretely, how “peacetime” South Korean build-up is affixed to,
rather than distinct from, U.S. geopolitical desires and investments. Although the Gangjeong
naval base is under the official aegis of the South Korean state, the base’s designation as a U.S.
“cooperative security location” (CSL), or a facility that is “not technically ‘American’… but
gives [the U.S. military] political cover in localities,” places Gangjeong squarely in the hands
of the U.S. military.
54
Under the current iteration of the Mutual Defense Treaty and Status of
Forces Agreement (SOFA), the U.S. maintains wartime command of the South Korean army
and is able to mobilize the ROK military facilities at its own discretion.
55

Subsequently, the high stakes of U.S. involvement in the Gangjeong naval base
construction is evident. When completed at its projected date of 2014, the base will be
outfitted with an Aegis ballistic missile defense system, including twenty warships,
submarines, and an American-designed missile intercepting system. According to a 2011
statement given by Ellen O’Kane Tauscher, the former U.S. Under Secretary of State for
Arms Control and International Security Affairs, the new naval base in Gangjeong addresses
the American request for the South Korean military to create an integrated regional missile
defense system as a means to maximize “allies’… strategic flexibility,” most likely referring

155
to U.S. efforts to monitor the North Korean state, and contain China’s growing economic and
political power.
56

Reiterations of Dissent senses these geopolitical investments as U.S. military archival
footage, still images, and truncated clips from South Korean national television are
remediated by Kaisen. This aesthetic practice of incorporation, however, does not result in a
perfect preservation of primary sources, but generates a critical re-encounter.

In the final
sequence of scenes in “History of Endless Rebellion,” for instance, a moving collage of
black-and-white archival film footage, rendered in slow and normal motion, slowly
crystallizes. The images depict SKIG armed vehicles barreling through Jeju’s narrow streets;
army raids and the burning of hanok-style homes; Jeju-do civilians frantically fleeing from
their villages; and barely discernible footage of SKIG soldiers or executing civilians as hazy
trails of smoke emerge from motionless bodies strewn across a hillside.
Bookending these grainy images is contemporary colored footage of rust-colored,
corporate Daewoo bulldozers tearing into a rocky shoreline, and images of Korean diasporic
activists and Jeju civilians, including Gangjeong Mayor Kang Dong- Kyun, clashing with
riot-clad police (Figure 4.7). A wavering voice pierces these images as it clarifies the ties that
link the United States to 4.3 and the Gangjeong naval base: “Standing at a distance, the
United States subjugated without getting blood on their hands at all, that was 4.3. The naval
base is a continuation of this.”
The camera’s lingering on Mayor Kang’s expressive, pain-stricken face is particularly
moving as he has played an increasingly significant role in challenging the established pattern
of imperialism across the Pacific. That is, the militarization of Gangjeong Village does not only
revive obscured memories of 4.3, but evokes Korea’s location within the enmeshed histories of

156
Japanese and U.S. imperialism.
57
As observed by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho, the
Japanese and U.S. states played intersecting roles, through military invasion, conquest, and
occupation, in constituting the vast region we now acknowledge as “Asia and the Pacific.”
58

Figure 4.7 Still shot from Reiterations of Dissent (2011), archive footage provided by Yang Dong-Kyo
and used in “History of Endless Rebellion.” Courtesy of Jane Jin Kaisen
These intertwined dynamics manifest in very concrete ways in Korea. With the formal
end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Koreans started to organize provincial branches of the
Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence (CPKI), a leftist-leaning civilian
network aimed at decolonization, self-rule, and self-determination. Yet, following the
September 1945 arrival of American troops, the U.S. military built upon the existing colonial
infrastructure, ranging from the retaining of colonial officers to the preservation of key elements
of the Japanese military prostitution system, including the maintenance of brothels for the U.S.
army.
59

The tactical location or “geopolitical curse” of Korea is accentuated by contemporary

157
U.S. policies, exemplified by the Obama administration’s “pivot” or realignment of politico-
economic resources toward Asia. For the former U.S. Secretary of State, Hilary Rodham
Clinton, the U.S. government’s commitment to constructing a “more mature security and
economic architecture” in the Asia Pacific is directly tied to American stability and prosperity,
as continued U.S. investments in Asia and the Pacific, including militarized presence, will “pay
dividends for continued American leadership.”
60
Inscribed as Pacific sacrifice zones, it is
island-spaces such as Jeju, as well as the Philippines, Taiwan, Okinawa, Hawai’i, and Guam,
that have endured the toll of U.S. militarization and/or settler colonialism, including the seizure
of indigenous land, destruction of the local ecological system, the housing of vast military
bases, and the installment of live-fire military training sites.
The heightened focus placed on the Pacific, however, has not only generated a
hypervisible web of military bases, but also produced an array of unexpected transnational
alliances and critical partnerships. Despite distinct modes of oppression experienced by distinct
island communities, the sweeping militarization of the Pacific has generated a wave of
organized resistance, including direct actions, letter-writing campaigns to the U.S. and South
Korean governments, collective hunger strikes, and coordinated solidarity protests in Jeju.
61
As
observed in the “Save Jeju Now” social justice campaign, shared experiences of war,
colonialism, and displacement have cultivated an affinity-based understanding of security as
Jeju civilians work closely with civilian activists from the western U.S., Guam, Hawai’i,
Okinawa, and the Philippines to rigorously contest U.S. military occupation.
62
Deploying “the
scales of the (civilian) body” as a set of metrics,
63
an affinity-based security accounts for the
literal safeguarding of human life and the natural environment; the procurement of basic needs,

158
including food, shelter, education and health; and the preservation of dignity and cultural
identities.
64
As pithily offered by Mayor Kang at the Moana Nui 2013 Conference in Berkeley,
California, “Peace should be kept by peaceful means.”
65
Affinity-based security, then,
prioritizes demilitarization rather than militarization, indispensability rather than
expendability, peace rather than war.
Situated within the Pacific, the jarring juxtaposition of disparate images from the 4.3
Massacre and recent anti-military protests in Reiterations of Dissent gesture to the
“exemplary forms of memory,” or the ways in which the past and its lessons are reappraised
as principles in the struggle toward demilitarization.
66
Rather than interpreting the past as a
foregone era, it is conceptualized as an ethical set of principles that inform contemporary
strategies of opposition taken up by Jeju civilians and Korean diasporic activists. For the
multiple narrators of “History of Endless Rebellion,” the Gangjeong villagers’ mobilization of
the term, “Peace Island,” is calculated because this practice conceptualizes the 4.3 Massacre
as a living presence rather than a dead memory: “To truly pacify those who were killed under
false accusation and to console the spirit of the deceased there should be no more war on the
island. Longing for those things, we chose the name ‘Peace Island.’” Despite the usurping of
the name for entrepreneurial or political purposes, Gangjeong villagers draw upon “Peace
Island” as a principled everyday practice that allows them to push for demilitarization in Jeju
and Korea.
Alluding to the sentiments and antagonisms negotiated by different constituencies,
including the ghosts of 4.3, contemporary Jeju civilians, and transnational adoptees,
Reiterations of Dissent traces the heterogeneous memories rendered invisible by the South
Korean and U.S. governments. Yet, through the method of critical sensing, Reiterations does

159
not make wholly transparent these seemingly forgotten memories. Instead, through the
engaged processes of recognition, reencounter, and destabilization, Reiterations of Dissent
offers a decolonial praxis that, at the very least, disrupts the discursive binaries of “North and
South, confinement and freedom, totalitarian and neoliberal.”
67

Conclusion
I close this dissertation with the work of Jane Jin Kaisen, as her video installation,
Reiterations of Dissent, mobilizes critical sensing to hint at the possibility of a decolonized
and demilitarized Korea and the Pacific. Namely, through the method I conceptualize as
critical sensing, Kaisen interrogates the fissures that are part and parcel of knowledge
production. Simultaneously, by recalibrating seemingly disposable spaces and bodies,
Reiterations of Dissent gestures to “othered” lives excluded from national historical narratives
and public memory. Kaisen, then, suggests the insufficiency of “visible evidence” and
unsettles colonial articulations of life, security, and sustainability to generate a decolonial
mode of “seeing.”
Most poignantly, perhaps, Reiterations of Dissent intimates the ways in which
moments rendered to the past continue to dwell in and haunt the contemporary moment.
Taking both material and immaterial forms, this spectral past materializes as indefinite
obligations and costs endured by marshal subjects within and beyond Jeju’s borders. In other
words, although Reiterations of Dissent focuses on the horrors inflicted upon Jeju Island, the
primacy of Kaisen’s subjective experiences in the conceptualization of the video installation
alludes to the ways in which seemingly distinct events and phenomena—the 4.3 Massacre,
the contemporary remilitarization of Jeju Island, and Korean transnational adoption– fall
within the domain of U.S.-South Korean militarization.

160
Here, I turn to Ji-Yeon Yuh’s notion of “refugee migration” as the term is particularly
helpful in unpacking the obscured layers of U.S.-South Korean militarization, especially among
those who seem unscathed by war, violence, and colonialism. For Yuh, thousands of Korean
“refugee migrants,” indelibly marked and impacted by the Korean War, are folded into and
hidden within recognizable immigrant categories, such as white-collar workers, spouses of U.S.
citizens, students, and agricultural laborers.
68
Yet, most Korean/Americans refrain from openly
speaking about the ramifications of militarization and colonialism because such an act
“violate[s] a pervasive popular culture [in the United States] that renders the Korean War as
‘forgotten’…”
69
In considering the precarious relationship between the visible and invisible, I think of
my own mother and her family, all who immigrated to the U.S. in the post-1965 era as
educated medical students or through immigration policies privileging heteronormative family
reunification. Although my mother rarely speaks of the Korean War, I have collected a string
of passing accounts provided by one of her sisters, including a story about the family’s
“extended vacation” away from Seoul during the war and another regarding a U.S. military
raid, in which my grandmother carried my mother, then a toddler, on her back as they quietly
slipped away from a U.S. military police interrogation.
I also think of the toxic traces that my mother’s family was most likely exposed to in
the afterlife of the Korean War—a relatively healthy family with no previous history of
cancer before my grandparents, both who passed away from rare forms of cancer, along with
an aunt who passed away from bone cancer, and an uncle in remission from prostate cancer.
During the 1960s, the U.S. military dumped between twenty-five to 100 gallons of leftover
herbicide agents and defoliants, including Agent Orange, into major waterways in Korea,

161
including the Imjin River, a water source that hugs the North-South Korean border and joins
the Han River downstream of Seoul.
70
As recalled by my mother, her family frequently
picnicked along the contaminated Han River with other families and children. I think, then, of
my family’s exposure to invisible modes of slow violence that take decades to surface, but
often materialize in fatal forms.
71

Therefore, by considering these less visible conditions of U.S.-South Korean
militarization, Reiterations of Dissent contextualizes Korean diasporic subjects as militarized
migrants. This multi-faceted understanding of the Korean migration histories allows for more
nuanced readings of the Korean diaspora, as it tracks the undetectable militarized traces that
indelibly bind divergent subject-bodies to each other. Subsequently, the untidy dynamics of
militarized migration do not neatly fit within the parameters of the nation-state, nor can they
be resolved through the progressive narrative of U.S. immigration, citizenship, and state
benevolence. Indeed, Reiterations of Dissent explodes the very meanings of violent freedom,
as it disassembles and pulls apart, rather than consolidates, the militarized impulses that
constitute the very heart of U.S. empire building.

162
Coda: Possibilities and Future Iterations

In this dissertation, I offer critical sensing as an interdisciplinary and experimental
method to address the problematics of optical vision and the affixation of the visual to notions of
transparency, objective truth, and justice. Namely, by contextualizing optical vision and visuality
as subjective constructs indelibly linked to a matrix of power, surveillance, and imperial logics,
critical sensing describes how an array of mechanisms of visibility are strategically deployed by
the U.S.-South Korean bi-national state and Korean/American actors to reproduce a neoliberal
narrative of proper citizenship, national belonging, and becoming. Yet, as stressed throughout
this project, critical sensing also seizes upon the messy gaps and slippages of visuality to point to
alternative articulations of vision and an “otherwise.” That is, by reconceptualizing mechanisms
of visibility as affective and agentive formations, I attend to the animated encounter(s) between
spectators and mechanisms of visibility, as “human/non-human” assemblages—or the shifting
composition of human bodies, intentions, desires, and objects at a particular moment-in-time-
and-space—generate moments of profound disjuncture, unsettling the dominant discourse of
visibility, transparency, and social viability. Informed by these observations, this project engages
with and expands upon Jacques Ranciere’s call for a “theatre without spectators,” especially as
spectators are defined as alert and active, rather than passive or inert, participants who “learn
from as opposed to being seduced by images.”
1

Simultaneously, as registered by these fleeting moments of (re)encounter, mechanisms of
visibility hint at different subjectivities, memories, and socialities resistant to or occluded from
the visual frame. The visual objects explored in this project, then, are inscribed as volatile
formations that potentially return and/or rupture the state’s authoritarian gaze. Hence,
mechanisms of visibility do not necessarily abide by the rules and conditions in which they are

163
initially imagined or appropriated for. By de-centering the naked eye as the exemplary and
exclusionary vessel of sight, critical sensing also offers a different understanding of the visual, as
“vision” is reassessed as a multi-sensory, experiential, and relational process that unravels across
and beyond the human body.
Yet, even as I primarily utilize critical sensing in this dissertation as a discursive
framework to track and illuminate these moments of interruption and break, the last chapter
(Chapter Four) offers yet another possible dimensions of critical sensing. Indeed, as discussed at
length in Chapter Four, the configuration of critical sensing as discursive method and aesthetic
praxis suggests more compelling and arresting insights. That is, projects such as Jane Jin
Kaisen’s video installation, Reiterations of Dissent, deploy a fragmented vision or mode of
“seeing” to disarticulate state-crafted narratives of liberation, autonomy, and freedom. In other
words, Kaisen’s work does not “accidentally” hint at the ways in which invisible residues of the
past continue to decompose in and inhabit the contemporary world. Rather, her nuanced work
purposefully recalibrates haunted and militarized spaces as potential sites of disjuncture, radical
possibility, and decolonization. Within this context, I describe Reiterations of Dissent as a visual
technology embodying a fragmented mode of perception that touches upon or “senses” a
multitude of tensions, residues, and memories elusive to the human eye.
It is significant that I close this dissertation with an intensive engagement with Kaisen’s
corpus of works, as the next iteration of this project will certainly tackle— in a much more
sustained, vigorous, and strategic manner— the incisive linkages between decolonization,
aesthetic practice, and radical vision. This work, then, is an exploratory exercise that offers a
rough formulation of a method that has inevitably generated its own set questions and
assumptions.

164
For instance, it is my sincere hope that the next phase of this project will involve a much
more rigorous unpacking and elaboration of decolonization—a complex, ever-shifting, and to a
certain extent, amorphous process—in relationship to the Korean transnational milieu, the
Pacific, and Asia. Simultaneously a broad and localized project, decolonization addresses the
identity-formation of a modern “Korea” and Korean diaspora, as these terms signify a material
and geographical location(s), as well as imagined spaces and communities inextricably tied to
Western discourse, cartographic and mapping practices, and imperial logics. As expressed in the
works of Takeuchi Yoshimi, Gayatri Spivak, Kandice Chuh, and Wang Hui, the very notion of a
“modern Asia” is a colonial formation indebted to European Enlightenment and Cold War
American disciplinary knowledge (i.e., “Area Studies”).
2
As observed by Wang, “Historically
speaking, the idea of Asia is not Asian but, rather, European.”
3
When first reading Wang’s work,
he seems to problematically reify or reinscribe an essentialist notion of “Asia” as well as a “West
vs. non-West” dichotomy. However, as painstakingly detailed in his scholarship, Wang actually
points to the symbiotic relationship between Europe and Asia, as “both [discursive renderings]
were constituted as part of the process of the construction of new knowledge [European
Enlightenment and colonial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth century].”
4

Hence, the process of (en)visioning a decolonized Korea and Korean transnational
milieu explicitly fleshes out the epistemological and ontological dimensions of “division,”
particularly as the concept is sutured to bi-polarity, de/militarization, and de/imperialism. As
offered by Nak-Chung Paik in relationship to the “division system” in Korea, division does not
merely refer to a fixed political and/or economic system, but encompasses ways of living,
knowing, and being. In that sense, “division” coalesces as political, social, cultural, affective, and
psychic formations, as Korean transnational subjects contemplate and negotiate the material and

165
immaterial ramifications of national, cultural and familial division. Future elaborations of critical
sensing, therefore, will point to the ways in which cultural producers incisively interrogate,
rupture, and reconfigure the very notion of “division” to order to imagine different modes of
vision, sight, and seeing, and new ways of encountering and inhabiting the self and space.
A number of imaginative projects that address such possibilities already come to mind,
including the dizzying assemblage of utopian architectural projects included in the 2014 Korean
Pavilion featured at the Venice Biennale (as briefly discussed in the conclusion of Chapter 1), as
well as The REAL DMZ Project, an annual and a multi-sited public exhibition first implemented
in 2012. Directed by the South Korean curator, Sunjung Cho and Seoul’s Samuso: Space for
Contemporary Art, The REAL DMZ Project is an extraordinary exhibition produced by a
different constellation of transnational researchers, scholars, curators, filmmakers, performers,
and artists each year. A collaborative art and an interdisciplinary research project, The REAL
DMZ Project draws upon the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone (Korean DMZ)—a
belt of land (2.5 miles in length, 154 miles in width) that acts as the official “buffer zone”
between the South and North Korean states—as its living if not unpredictable canvas. A chain of
ephemeral performances, installations, and still and moving images staged along the outskirts of
the DMZ, The REAL DMZ Project mobilizes seemingly defunct bodies and sites, ranging from
abandoned railroad stations to the odd assemblage of residents, animals, and vegetation
inhabiting the precarious “border” cities between the north and south, to track and destabilize the
toxic ramifications of U.S.-South Korean bi-national military occupation.
However, the recalibration of these seemingly expendable and disposable bodies, objects
and spaces does not give way to humanist or liberal reading of the DMZ. Rather, curators, artists,
filmmakers, and performers reconfigure such formations as mechanisms of visibility that

166
embody memories, histories, and imperial residues imperceptible to the naked eye. Specifically,
by paying heed to the particular conditions, unforeseen encounters, and contingent dynamics that
percolate across these haunted and spectral spaces, the participating artists and cultural producers
generate a new if not utopian way of “seeing” landscape and space, as these militarized sites are
re-imagined as ground-zero for the intensive project of decolonization.
Take, for instance, Sylbee Kim’s multi-media work, Friendly Fire, showcased during the
first year of The REAL DMZ Project (2012). Constituted by a single-channel video installation,
an assortment of artifacts, and an aural component— a fabricated North Korean “radio show”—
Friendly Fire was staged in the now defunct Wolijeongri Train Station in Cherwon, DMZ, the
northernmost train terminal in South Korea, originally built under Japanese colonialism, then
briefly taken over by the United States Military Government in Korea (USMGIK). Upon initial
observation, Friendly Fire is a science fiction narrative of queer love, kinship, and tragedy, as
two brothers and lovers accidently kill each other. Yet, upon closer examination, Friendly Fire is
a remediation of the most popular and recognizable memorial in South Korea: the sprawling and
grandiose National War Memorial, just adjacent to Seoul’s Yongsan Garrison (the current
headquarters of the United States Armed Forces in South Korea). Portraying two brothers who
meet in battle during the Korean War, the War Memorial depicts an effeminate and a frail-
looking North Korean soldier falling into the protective and loving arms of a seemingly robust,
strong, and hypermasculine South Korean sibling. Controversial in its queer conceptualization
and subversive critique of the patriarchal logics underlying the design of the two-brothers statue,
Kim’s work does not merely destabilize national discourses of war, memory, and patriarchy.
Rather, by reconceptualizing a disposable site located near the most heavily fortified border in

167
the world, Friendly Fire reconstitutes Wolijeongri Station as an unlikely space in which queer
desires, futuric visions of reunification, and the process of decolonization collide and converge.
Kim’s stunning work, perhaps, provides poignant commentary on the contradictory
dynamics that constitute the Korean demilitarized zone, a no-man’s land and deserted landscape
that Suk-young Kim describes as “cartography of paradox” or a theater that stages the
“immanent absurdities of the Korean partition.”
5
As a dramatic fortified border-space filled with
invisible land mines and ossified human remains, access to the DMZ is extremely limited, as
only a handful of military officials, elite politicians, and scientists have been able to enter the
buffer zone within the past sixty years.
Yet, this limited access has also produced an extraordinarily rich and vibrant geography:
described as one of the most well preserved wild refuges in the world, the Korean DMZ is an
(un)natural landscape teeming with abundant forms of life and marked by different “ecosystems
including forests, mountains, wetlands, prairies, bogs and estuaries.”
6
Paradoxically, it is the very
conditions of militarization that have made the crystallization of a utopian landscape possible—a
sprawling and wild landscape that pushes against the discomfiting tensions, unimaginable
violence, and disposable logics embodied by the U.S.-South Korean military arrangement. It is
my hope, then, that the method and praxis of critical sensing seizes upon these moments of deep
contradiction, dissonance, and disjuncture to forge new visions, potentialities, and a decolonial
future deemed “impossible” by the U.S.-South Korean bi-national state.

168

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181
CHAPTER NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1
Paul M. Taylor, “Snapshots from A Korean American Century” in KoreAm Journal, Volume
14, Issue 5 (May 2003), 52.

2
Taylor, “Snapshots from A Korean American Century” 51 & 54.

3
Refer to Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002) and David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American:
Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

4
Refer to Laura U. Marks, Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000) and Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects,
Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2013).

5
Refer to Catherine Luz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the
Current Crisis” in American Anthropologist Volume 104, Issue 3 (September 2002): 723-735
and The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts (New York: New
York University Press, 2009). Also refer to Sasha Davis, “The U.S. Military Base Network and
Contemporary Colonialism: Power Projection, Resistance and the Quest for Operational
Unilateralism” in Political Geography Issue 30 (2011): 215-224 and “Repeating Islands of
Resistance: Redefining Security in Militarized Landscapes” in Human Geography Volume 5,
Issue 1 (2012): 1-18. Quotation is from Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States,” 726.
6
Lutz, The Bases of Empire, 7.

7
My dissertation engages with the spatial and epistemological configuration of the “Asia
Pacific” as a knowable and transparent block region. This engagement builds upon current
literature in critical Asian studies and Asian/American studies, which critiques the Cold War
production of the American discipline of “area studies.” Christina Klein (2003), Kandice Chuh
(2005), Gayatri Spivak (2007), and Naoki Sakai (2012), converse with and expand upon Edward
Said’s notion of “orientalism” by focusing on the discursive dimensions and (neo)colonial
motives of area studies: as a region strategically constructed as both singular and seamless, “Asia
and the Pacific,” or the “East,” is assumed as the “recipient” of important knowledge that
originates in the “West” (refer to bibliography for exact references). In that sense, my
dissertation emphasizes the importance of linking U.S. military interventions across Asia and the
Pacific, to the discursive configuration of the “Asia Pacific” region, especially as the US
“pivots,” or reallocates its military, political, and economic sources to Asia in the early twenty-
first century.

8
Refer to Höhn, Maria & Seungsook Moon. Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire
from World War Two to the Present (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010). Also,

182

as emphasized by Kuan Hsing Chen (2010) and Charles Armstrong (2001), the South Korean
state has greatly benefited from U.S. political and economic support—even as such support is
tied to the subordination of South Korea to American dominance. A prime example is the
Vietnam War; according to Armstrong (2001), the South Korean military served as a sub-
military force for the U.S. army in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. As a military deployment under
the official command of the U.S., South Korean units were configured as “cheap” and disposable
surrogates for American soldiers in battlefields. However, South Korea also transformed into a
“national mercenary,” as the Park Chung Hee government received lucrative financial aid
packages, construction contracts and other forms of economic aid from the U.S. government in
exchange for military services. By describing the atrocities committed against the North
Vietnamese by South Korean units, such as the notorious “Blue Dragon” Marine Brigade,
Armstrong notes, with sad irony, how recent disclosures regarding U.S. massacres of Koreans,
such as the 1950 massacre of Nogun-ri villagers, continue to obscure the ROK military’s role in
Vietnam, as South Korean war atrocities remain “a forgotten, even forcibly suppressed,
experience in South Korea” (2001: 530).

9
Lisa Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice: Americanization of Japanese War
Crimes at the End of the Post Cold War.” Journal of Asian American Studies Volume 6, Issue 1
(February 2003): 57-93.
10
Refer to Christine Ahn & Sukjong Hong, “Bring War Dollars Home By Closing Down Bases,”
Foreign Policy in Focus, Published on March 31, 2011 and accessed April 15, 2011.
http://fpif.org/bring_war_dollars_home_by_closing_down_bases/. Also refer to the U.S.
Department of Defense Base Report (2013), 7 and 79.

11
Refer to Katherine Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations.
(New York: Columbia University, 1997); S. Moon & Höhn, Over There; and Jin-kyung Lee.
Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

12
Refer to Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea.
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005).

13
Refer to John Lie. Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial
Identity. (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008); Ryang, Sonia. Writing
Selves in Diaspora: Ethnography of Autobiographics of Korean Women in Japan and the United
States (Lantham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008); and Ryang, Sonia & John Lie. Diaspora Without
Homeland: Being Korean in Japan (Los Angeles, Berkeley, & London: University of California
Press, 2008).

14
Refer to Tobias Hübinette, Comforting an Orphaned Nation (Seoul: Jimoondang, 2006);
Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010) and Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian
American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

183

15
Ji-Yeon Yuh. Beyond the Shadow of Camptown (New York: New York University Press,
2002).
16
I am grateful for Sarita See’s suggestion to refer to this work for the framing of my
understanding of the U.S-South Korean political alliance. Refer to Jason Luna Gavilan, “The
Politics of Enlistment, Empire, and the ‘U.S.-Philippine Nation’: Enlisted and Civilian Filipino
Workers in and beyond the United States Navy, 1941-1965” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
Michigan, 2012).

17
Refer to Lisa Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice: Americanization of
Japanese War Crimes at the End of the Post Cold War.” Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 6, Issue 1 (February 2003): 57-93 and Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War,
Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2012).

18
“A New Kind of Missionary Work: Christians, Christian Americanists, and the Adoption of
Korean GI Babies, 1955-1961." Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 33, Nos. 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter
2005): 165.

19
With the exception of scholarship that focuses on the pre- and post-World War II continuity of
institutionalized sexual and gender violence in Korea. Refer to Na-Young Lee, “The
Construction of Military Prostitution in South Korea during U.S. Military Rule, 1945-1948” in
Feminist Studies Volume 33, Issue 3 (Fall 2007): 453-481 and Grace Cho, Haunting the Korean
Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Korean War (Minneapolis & London: University of
Minnesota, 2008)

20
Refer to Sakai, Naoki & Hyon Joo Yoo. The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary,
Culture, and Society (Hackensack, New Jersey: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2012).
21
Refer to the “Introduction” in Yukiko Koshiro’s Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S.
Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University, 1999).

22
Refer to Wayne Patterson, The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawai’i, 1903-
1973 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), and Richard Kim, Quest for Statehood:
Korean Immigrant Nationalism and U.S. Sovereignty, 1905-1945. New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011.

23
Refer to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]),
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2010), and Nak-Chung Paik, The Division System in Crisis: Essays on
Contemporary Korea (Los Angeles, Berkeley, & London: University of California Press, 2011).
24
Fanon, Black Skin, 17.

25
Fanon, Black Skin, 1.

26
Paik, The Division System, 3.

184

27
As explicated in a published collection of lectures given at the Collège de France (1978-1979,
published in 2010), and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1990 [1978]), Michel Foucault
describes biopower as related to modern forms of (Western) governance. In focusing on the
transition from sovereign rule to the modern making of the nation-state in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Foucault describes how power morphed from “negative” forms associated
with the sovereign’s absolute right over death, to “positive” formations tied to the state’s
fostering of life. That is, through modes of governmentality—or public discourses, tactics and
mechanisms aimed at the legislation of life through the state—the human body transformed into
a productive site of knowledge and power, as the state sought to produce a “legible” and visible
citizenry, less through apparatuses of violence, and more through the strategic management and
surveillance of the body and human life.

28
Moon, Militarized Modernity.

29
Lee, Service Economies.

30
Refer to Lutz 2009, Bases of Empire and Davis, “Repeating Islands of Resistance.”

31
Davis, “Repeating Islands of Resistance,” 5.

32
Chen, Asia as Method, Kindle Loc 2012.

33
Leo Ching, “Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and the Decolonial Turn” in Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies Volume 11, Issue 22 (2010), 184.

34
Refer to Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken,
1969) and Herman Grey & Gómez-Barris, Macarena, eds., Toward a Sociology of the Trace
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010).
35
Refer to Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Cultural Memory in the Present) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Ann
Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham
& London: Duke University Press, 2003). The reference to Dylan Rodriguez is in regards to
comments given at the November 2012 American Studies Association (ASA) Conference in San
Juan, Puerto Rico. Specifically, Rodriguez described the evolution of Memory and Genocide
Studies in the U.S., and the ways in which the Holocaust has been conceptualized as the
paradigmatic catastrophe of the modern era (Panel: “Keywords in Critical Ethnic Studies:
Racialization, Genocide, Settler Colonialism, and Debt,” November 15
th
, 2012, ASA November
2012).

36
I do not mean to generalize Holocaust scholarship, as the body of work is diverse, and several
critical works, including the work of Marianne Hirsh (1997), mobilize different theoretical
frameworks that include, but are not limited to trauma theory (especially in relationship to
cultural production and cultural articulations of memory). Rather, I emphasize the ways in which
Holocaust scholarship, especially within the U.S. academy, has emerged as a discursive

185

formation and mode of power-knowledge reproduces Western subjects as privileged agents of
historical narrative.

37
Ruth Leys. Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6.

38
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press,
1978) and Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 1996).
39
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 3.

40
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2010).

41
In his work, Akira Mizuta Lippit describe technologies such as cinema and the x-ray as
“avisual” objects or mechanisms of “sightless” vision that register elements that are invisible to
the naked eye. Refer to Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis & London: University of
Minneapolis Press, 2005).
42
Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories,” 57.

43
Miriam Hansen. Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994), 13.

CHAPTER 1
1
The term “zainichi” (“living inside Japan” in Japanese) primarily refers to ethnic Koreans born
and/or residing in Japan. Currently, there are almost one million zainichi Koreans residing in
Japan, with the bulk of the population descendants of those who were mobilized and recruited for
labor in Japan during the colonial era (1910-1945).

2
Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 3.

3
Here, I find Hal Foster’s articulations of vision, visuality, and the visual helpful in unpacking
the complexities embodied by the visual. Encompassing an array of different meanings, vision is
most often described by visual culture scholars as a subjective mechanism of sight and its related
“historical techniques,” whereas visuality denotes an extensive discursive system of power,
surveillance, and knowledge that informs the construction and visualization of history. As
intertwined concepts, vision and visuality constitute the visual realm or the “total rhetoric of the
image” (3). Refer to Hal Foster, “Introduction” in Vision and Visuality (Discussions in
Contemporary Culture) (New York: The New Press, 1988)
4
Sarita Eschavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance
(Minneapolis & London: University Of Minnesota Press, 2009), xvii-xviii.

5
The notion of the “scopic regime” was first coined by Christian Metz. Although Metz uses the
term to describe cinema (through a psychoanalytic framework), scopic regime, in the most
general sense, refers to the mediation of the real through visual apparatuses such as cinema,

186

photography, and other mediums. Refer to The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the
Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1977).

6
Refer to Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York & London:
Routledge, 1993).

7
I am indebted to and grateful for Sarita Eschavez See’s careful reading and suggestion
regarding the concept of multi-determinancy.
8
For a particularly engaging discussion of modernity, the visual, and the emergence of cinema,
refer to Hansen, Babel & Babylon.

9
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2011).

10
Mirzoeff, Right to Look, 3.

11
Ibid.

12
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Rise of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1995).

13
Butler, Frames of War.

14
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990
[1978]), 138.

15
For particularly incisive critiques of Foucauldian biopower, refer to Achilles Mbembe’s
“Necropolitics” in Public Culture Volume 15, Issue 1 (Winter 2003): 11-40 and Seungsook
Moon’s Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Durham & London:
Duke University Press, 2005).

16
Refer to Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19
th

Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992).

17
Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 112.

18
Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 48-49.

19
David Lloyd, “Race Under Representation” in The Oxford Literary Review, 13 (1991): 62-94.

20
Lloyd, “Race Under Representation,” 66.

21
Ibid.

22
Lloyd, “Race Under Representation,” 67.

187

23
Lloyd, “Race Under Representation,” 70.

24
Lloyd, “Race Under Representation,” 66.

25
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1989 [1905]), 5.
Here, Du Bois specifically refers to the violent history of racialized relations in the United States
and the ways in which such a history has produced an overwhelming sense of fracturing and
fragmentation among African Americans. As poignantly observed by Du Bois, “One ever feels
his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder
(1989 [1905]: 5).”

Several scholars, including Paul Gilroy (1993), have built upon and
reconfigured Du Bois’ conceptualization of “double consciousness” through a transnational and
diasporic approach. That is, rather than relegating black culture to ethnic-specific or national
borders (for example, the United Kingdom, or the U.S.) emerging from a point of “origin,”
Gilroy contextualizes black intellectual thought and cultural traditions as formations that emerge
from intercultural and transatlantic exchanges. “Double-consciousness,” then, cannot be simply
constructed vis-à-vis a rigid black/white (i.e., African/European) dichotomy, but—and
mobilizing the slave ship as a “chronotype,” or cultural symbol that embodies trans-Atlantic
black modernity (5)— must be rearticulated as a mode of hybridity. Refer to Paul Gilroy, The
Black Atlantic: Modernity & Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993).
26
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, Revised Edition, 2008
[1952]), 90.
27
Refer to Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in the An Age of U.S. Imperialism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye:
Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1996);
David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Sharon Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner:
One Hundred Years of American in the Philippines (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2004); Metz, The Imaginary Signifier; and Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus” in Film Quarterly Volume 28, No. 2 (Winter 1974-1975): 39-47.

28
Refer to Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Knowledge: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Los
Angeles, Berkeley, & London: University of California Press, 2004) and Laura U. Marks, The
Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2000).

29
Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 72.

30
Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 62.

31
Ibid.

188

32
Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis & London:
University of Minnesota, 2002), 2.

33
As discussed most explicitly in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, the actual corresponds to a
fleeting moment that passes (the “present-that-passes”), while the virtual refers to the
preservation of the past (“past-that-is-preserved”). As the actual can never be fully recalled, the
virtual crystallizes as the institutionalized record of lived experience. However, the virtual is not
a direct rendering of passing moments, but a reconstructive project propelled by subjective
memories, narrated from particular locales and “retouched” by different spaces and spectators.

34
Marks, The Skin of the Film, 48. Quoting Henri Bergson ([1911] 1988, 105).

35
Hansen, Babel and Babylon,13.

36
Marks, The Skin of the Film, 20.

37
Mel Y. Chen. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham & London:
Duke University Press, 2012), 2.

38
Ibid.

39
Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, “Percept, Affect, and Concept” in What is Philosophy (New
York: Verso, 1994), 168 and 174.

40
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2010), 28.

41
Tara McPherson, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility and the Web” in New Media, Old Media: A
History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas W. Keenan (New
York & London: Routledge, 2006), 199-208.

42
Refer to description provided by the Korean Pavilion Website of the 14
th
Venice Biennale.
Accessed July 20, 2014. http://www.korean-pavilion.or.kr/14pavilion/main.html.

43
Ibid.

44
Paik, The Division System in Crisis, 3.

CHAPTER 2

1
Memories to Light Internet Archive site: https://archive.org/details/memoriestolight.
Interestingly enough, CAAM maintains two different websites for Memories to Light, including
the aforementioned Internet Archive site (the Internet Archive is a separate, non-profit entity and
collaborative partner of CAAM), as well as its own organizational website for the project:
http://caamedia.org/memoriestolight/. The former includes all donated films, while the latter

189

includes a selective collection of films that have been edited into trailers with family narration.
Stephen Gong provides a description of the films under the “Commissioned Films” section in the
segment, “The War Inside” (http://caamedia.org/memoriestolight/project/the-war-inside/).

2
Marks, The Skin of the Film, 6-7.

3
Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 (and was formally annexed as a colony in 1910)
and 1953 marks the “official” end of the Korean War (1950-1953).

4
Doo-Sub Kim, “The Demographic Transition in the Korean Peninsula, 1910-1990: South and
North Korea compared.” In Korea Journal off Population and Development Volume 95, Issue 2
(December 1994): 135.

5
As astutely offered by Richard S. Kim, the Korean War (1950-1953) was not solely due to
U.S.-Soviet military occupation. Rather, Manichean dynamics between Korean anti-colonial
leaders living in the diaspora had been long in the making, with a U.S. influenced camp, led
by leaders such as Rhee Syngman (the first president of the Republic of Korea, or South
Korea), establishing headquarters in Honolulu, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, while a
socialist-leaning, militant faction, led by Kim Il-sung (the first president of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea) was established in Siberia and Manchuria.
Refer to Richard S. Kim, The Quest for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and U.S.
Sovereignty, 1905-1945 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

6
Information obtained from the “U.S. Census Bureau: Census for 1930,” accessed February 9,
2014, http://www.census.gov/). Also refer to Helen Lewis Givens, “The Korean Community
in Los Angeles” (Masters’ Thesis, University of Southern California, 1939), 28-30.

7
Kim, The Quest for Statehood. 6-7, 9.

8
Kim, The Quest for Statehood, 3-4.
9
David K. Yoo, Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903-1945
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), loc 1428 (Kindle Version).

10
Kim, The Quest for Statehood, 11-12.

11
Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 72.

12
For an intriguing analysis of film in relationship to visibility and invisibility, and the
desire for transparency, refer to Karen Beckman’s Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and
Feminism (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003), 89.

13
Beckman, Vanishing Women, 89.
14
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2005), 95-97.

190

15
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia
University, 1996); Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and
Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011); Grace Cho,
Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis &
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
16
Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence, 7.

17
As emphasized by Marita Sturken, the act of remembering and memory making is intimately
linked to the act of forgetting, as the focus placed on certain memories inevitably forecloses
other possible readings and renderings. Refer to Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS
Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of
California Press, 1997).

18
Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005),
32.

19
As suggested by Naoki Sakai, Setsu Shigematsu, and Keith Camacho, the intersections
between Japanese and U.S. imperialism in the making of the modern Asia-Pacific region
between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century might be referred to as a “transpacific
alliance.” Refer to Shigematsu’s and Camacho’s Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized
Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010) (all three authors
are contributors to this anthology).

20
Refer to Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone, 1991 [1966]) and Gilles Deleuze,
“The Actual and the Virtual,” in Dialogues II, ed. trans. by Eliot Ross Albert (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), 148-152.

21
Marks, The Skin of the Film, 40.

22
Patricia R. Zimmerman Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. (Bloomington
& Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 113-115. Also, by 1927, nearly 63
percent of the U.S. single-home dwellings were equipped with electric lights, a 400%
increase from 1910.
23
Lynn Spiegel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), 1.

24
Zimmerman, Reel Families, 113-115.

25
For an explication on the Cold War, processes of racialization, and family ideology, refer to
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic
Books, 1990) and Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique & Cold War
Compositions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Simultaneously, as
elaborated in the important work of Christina Klein (Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the

191

Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of
California Press, 2003), the “liberalization” or “softening” of U.S. domestic policies toward
communities of color and foreign policies toward certain Asian countries did not reflect a
commitment to transformative policies. Rather, the U.S. state strategically crafted a "positive"
discourse toward Asia (rather than wholly exclusionary or negative) to bolster its own claim as a
compassionate, benevolent, and democratic "leader of the free world” and to contain the spread
of communism.

26
The 1952 Bell & Howell report was based on the company’s yearlong tracking of
purchased film equipment and informed by a general survey of readers who subscribed to
both specialty magazines and mainstream publications, such as The Saturday Review,
National Geographic, Better Homes and Gardens, and The New York Times—a readership
largely constituted by middlebrow, white, and suburban Americans.

27
Zimmerman. Reel Families, 115-117.
28
Zimmerman. Reel Families, 121.

29
Roger Odin, “Reflections on the Family Home film as Document” in Mining the Home
film: Excavations in Histories and Memories, edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R.
Zimmerman (Los Angeles, Berkeley, and London: University of California Press, 2008),
261.

30
Refer to Karen L. Ishizuka. Lost & Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration
(Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006). For recent scholarship focusing on the
use and integration of home films within Asian/American documentary films and
experimental works, refer to Glen M. Mimura, Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American
Film and Video (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Peter X.
Feng, Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2002).

31
Librarians and curators who have been instrumental in helping me with research include
Kenneth Klein of the Korean Heritage Library at the University of Southern California (USC),
Michael E. Macmillan of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa,
Helen Kim at Visual Communications, and Jared Case at the George Eastman House. In my
efforts to locate Korean diasporic home films, I also searched or inquired with the following
archives: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (College Park, MD); the
Central California Korean Historical Society (CCKHS in Fresno, CA); the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University;
Harvard University; the University of South Carolina (which has an extensive orphan film
collection; the collection includes amateur films by Chinese immigrant and Chinese American
amateur filmmakers); and New York University’s (NYU) Orphan Symposium.

32
I initially unearthed Reverend Luke Kim’s films as I was conducting research on filmic
traces of a 1920 Korean anti-colonial protest organized by the Korean National Association

192

(KNA) in Dinuba, CA and Philadelphia, PA at USC’s Korean Heritage Library. I then came
across Irvin Paik’s home film footage, as well as family footage belonging to Daisy Kim’s
family, through conversations with Kenneth Klein, the head librarian at the Korean Heritage
Library, as well as initial conversations with the Korean American Pioneer Club (including
Irvin Paik). Recently, David Hyun’s family films were deposited into the Korean Heritage
Library; however, the digitized films are quite dark and consequently, the footage cannot be
easily analyzed. Due to the sheer material discussed in this chapter, I decided to only include
analyses of home film footage taken by families residing in Los Angeles.

33
As suggested by the Memories to Light Project, the metadata of recovered films from the first
half of the twentieth century provide compelling clues regarding the prevailing demographics of
Asian/American families who utilized home film technology during this early era. As evidenced
by the fourteen film collections donated thus far to Memories to Light, two of which belong to
Korean/American families (both featuring footage only after 1965), Asian/Americans who used
amateur film technology in the early-to-mid twentieth century belonged to, for the most part,
privileged families with differing degrees of access to economic, political, and/or social capital.
According to Davin Agatep, the director of the Memories to Light Project, most of the families
portrayed in home films from the 1930s to the 1960s, such as the Jung, Udo, and Gee families,
were relatively affluent, with heads of households working as medical professionals (i.e.,
dentists, doctors, nurses) or employees of the U.S. state. Currently, the two film archives
belonging to Korean/American families featured in the Memories to Light collection (the Cho
and Kwon families) contain home film footage after 1965. Several of these families, including
the Jungs, also filmed in 16mm color film, a semi-professional, and a more exclusive film gauge
than the standard 8mm version. In fact, outside of the educational sector or U.S. military,
contexts in which the 16mm gauge were most commonly used, a fairly small percentage of
Americans could actually afford such expensive equipment. Refer to Memories to Light
Website, Accessed January 30, 2014, http://caamedia.org/memoriestolight/. Also refer to Devin
Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, “A History of Learning with the Lights Off,” in
Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, edited by Devin Orgeron,
Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15-66.

34
Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 22.

35
Irvin has a long history with the moving image. Based on a biography provided by the
USC Korean American Digital Archive, the following is a summary of Irvin’s career in both
the mainstream film industry and in Asian/American film and theater: growing up in postwar
Los Angeles, in the midst of a close community and with almost twenty uncles and aunts and
dozens of cousins, Irvin had open to him a greater range of opportunities than had most
Koreans prior to World War II. In high school, he became interested in drama and
photography, and continued to pursue those interests at UCLA. In his effort to foster an
acting career, Paik confronted the problems of Asian stereotypes and limited opportunities
for Asian American actors. He joined several organizations (East West Players,
Brotherhood of Artists, Japanese American Citizens League) and became an active advocate
as reflected in this collection. He enlisted in the U.S. Army to avoid the draft (1960s) and

193

enrolled in a unit of college graduates resulting in a second

lieutenant commission in the
artillery. Paik was assigned to the Field Photographic Unit of the Army Pictorial Center,
where he was able to develop technical skills that he later used to gain entry into the
Producer Training Plan, which was established to provide more equal access to men and
women of diverse backgrounds by training them for careers in the motion picture and
television industry. This led to a successful career as a film editor, in movies and more
particularly, television. Films and television series Irvin has worked on as a producer in
mainstream Hollywood include Sea of Love (1989), Major League II (1994), and ER (1994).
36
Refer to Korean American Story: Legacy Project Video, Irvin Paik. Accessed February 4,
2014, http://koreanamericanstory.org/portfolio_page/legacy-project-video-irvin-paik/.

37
Irvin himself did not digitize the films. Rather, due to his connections within the film
industry, Irvin outsourced the digitization process to a colleague and former producer at
Paramount, who then used high resolution telecine technology to convert the analog footage
into a SMPTE standard video stream digitized file. Although digital scanning is now often
utilized due to the generation of high-resolution and discrete image files, there are also
advantages to utilizing the film-to-video-stream transfer process, including the production of
less “clunky” digital files and the ability to work with editing programs such as FinalCut Pro.

38
For a particularly useful reading of accrued affects and objects, refer to Sara Ahmed’s
“Affective Economies,” Social Text 79 vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 117-139.

39
Conversations occurred via email between January and March 2014.
40
Refer to Korean American Story: Legacy Project Video, Irvin Paik. Accessed February 4,
2014, http://koreanamericanstory.org/portfolio_page/legacy-project-video-irvin-paik/.

41
Refer to Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in
Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007 [1968]), 217-252.

42
Heather Norris Nicholson, “As if by Magic: Authority, Aesthetics, and Visions of the
Workplace in Home films, circa 1931-1949,” in Mining the Home film: Excavations in Histories
and Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman (Berkeley, Los Angeles, &
London: University of California Press, 2008), 214-230.

43
Refer to Mary Paik Lee, A Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1990).

44
Even as Koreans retained “enemy alien” status, a series of General Orders issued between
January 1942 to March 1943 rescinded orders to place Korean/Americans in internment camps.
45
Lee, A Quiet Odyssey, 101.

46
Lee, A Quiet Odyssey, 99-100.

194

47
Lee, A Quiet Odyssey, 100.

48
Irvin noted this in passing during an informal conversation when I briefly met him at his home
in February 2014.

49
In particular, I am grateful for Nayan Shah’s astute observations and insights.

50
Demographic statistics are from “U.S. Census Bureau Report, Table C-8,” Aaccessed February
9, 2014, http://www.census.gov/).

51
Greg Hise, “Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles” in American Quarterly
Vol. 3, No. 3 (September 24): 545-558.
52
Irvin noted this in passing during an informal conversation when I briefly met him at his home
in February 2014.

53
Refer to Korean American Story: Legacy Project Video, Irvin Paik. Accessed February 4,
2014, http://koreanamericanstory.org/portfolio_page/legacy-project-video-irvin-paik/.

54
Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and
the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
and Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 2011). Also refer to Cheryl L. Harris, “Whiteness as Property”
in Harvard Law Review, Volume 106, No. 8 (1993): 1707-1794.

55
Hong, The Ruptures of Capital, 17.
56
Lisa Lowe refers to this differentiated yet linked process as “intimacies,” as a gendered,
sexualized, and racialized hierarchical labor force ineluctably connects the African and Asian
continents to the Americas and Europe [refer to “The Intimacies of Four Continents” in Haunted
by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2006), 191-210]. However, as cautiously noted by Dean Saranillio, Guidotti-
Hernández (Unspeakable Violence) and the emergent scholarship of Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne (a
current doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Southern California), communities of
color have also enacted acts of material and discursive violence against indigenous populations
throughout the U.S. Refer to Dean Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A
Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,” in Settler Colonial Studies,
Vol. 3 No. 3-4 (2013): 280-294 and Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, “Settler Colonial Hegemonies,
Reverberations of Violence, and Asian/American Public Culture: Figurations of the American
Indian at a Taiwanese Restaurant” (Working draft of chapter in dissertation, March 2014); and
Candace Fujikane, “Asian American Critique and Moana Nui 2011: Securing a Future Beyond
Empires, Militarized Capitalism, and APEC,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Special Issue:
Asian American Studies in Asia, Volume 13, Issue 2, (2012): 189-210

57
Although George Kim intermittently attends dinners organized by the Korean American
Pioneer Council (KAPC), a non-profit organization consisting of living members and the family

195

of the first generation of Koreans who immigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century,
neither I or Kenneth Klein, the head librarian at USC’s Korean Heritage Library, have been able
to contact or locate him for an interview regarding the footage. To the best of my knowledge,
George Kim is the only surviving child of Reverend Shungnak Kim who still resides in the U.S.

58
For an extensive discussion of ethnographic documentaries and the genre of the travelogue,
refer to Fatimah Tobing Rony’s The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1996).

59
Francis (“Frank”) Field Ellinwood, “Great Conquest,” or, Miscellaneous Papers on Missions
(New York: W. Rankin, 1876).

60
Priya Jaikumar, “An ‘Accurate Imagination’: Place, Map and Archive as Spatial Objects of
Film History,” in Film and the End of Empire, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin McCade,
(London: BFI Publishing, 2011), 167-188 and Caren Kaplan, “Sensing Distance: The Time and
Space of Contemporary War,” in Social Text, published on June 17, 2013. Accessed June 20,
2013, (http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/sensing-distance-the-time-and-space- of-
contemporary-war/).
61
Nicholson, “As if By Magic,” 221.

62
Women Service League Notes: June 1954; June-October 1955; June 1956. Refer to “Women’s
Service League Notes”, 1949-1962, available through the USC Korean American Digital
Archive (KADA), KADA-M23330 (Legacy Record ID), Accessed on January 5, 2014,
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15799coll126/id/9723/rec/3.

63
Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of
Belonging (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010). As articulated by Kim, the vast
majority of Korean “orphans” initially adopted by white American families throughout the 1950s
were so-called “mixed- blood” or “mixed-race "belonging to U.S. servicemen, both white and
African American, and Korean mothers. Even as South Korea’s Rhee Syngman administration
utilized transnational adoption as a convenient means to excise “undesirable” children from the
South Korean nation-state during the 1950s and early 1960s, “mixed-blood” children also
produced uncomfortable tensions and complications in the U.S., especially within the context of
existing political and social barriers, racialized structures, and “anti- Oriental” legislation barring
the immigration of Asians to the U.S. (Kim, Adopted Territory, 55).

64
Kim, The Quest for Statehood,10-13.

65
Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005).

66
For an elaboration of the intimate connections between militarized sex labor, national
security, and South Korean state development, refer to Lee Jin-Kyung, Service Economies:
Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis & London: University
of Minnesota Press, 2010); Lee Na- Young, “The Construction of Military Prostitution in

196

South Korea During U.S. Military Rule, 1945- 1948,” in Feminist Studies Vol. 33, No. 3 (Fall
2007): 453-481, and Katherine Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea
Relations (New York: Columbia University, 1997).

CHAPTER 3
1
Due to privacy issues, I am using the pseudonym, Korean Americans for Justice (KAJ), in
place of the actual name of the organization that coordinated the construction of the Glendale
“Comfort Women” Memorial.

2
Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World
War II (New York: Columbia University, 2001), 1.

3
Refer to Yoshimi, Comfort Women; Chungmoo Choi, “The Politics of War Memories Toward
Healing” in T. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama’s edited volume Perilous
Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), 396-
397; and C. Sarah Soh’s The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in
Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

4
Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 6.

5
Ibid.

6
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.

7
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2.

8
Although Japanese politicians often cite a 1993 formal apology by then Chief Cabinet
Secretary, Yohei Kono, advocates and scholars note that such an apology was equivocal and was
not offered by the Japanese prime minister or head of state.

9
Lisa Yoneyama’s Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley &
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 28.

10
Despite its beyond scope of this paper, it is still important to recognize that the “comfort
women” redress movement and activism looks quite differently in other spaces and cultural
contexts. For instance, in South Korea, “comfort women” activism is primarily mobilized by
feminist activists, scholars, Buddhist leaders, and community laypeople. Although certainly not
unproblematic, the focus on the South Korean-based movement is not redress or recognition
through the (U.S.) state, but has partially focused on tracking the history of sexual and gendered
violence sutured to militarized occupation by both Japanese and U.S. forces. For a thoughtful
analysis of “comfort women” redress efforts in South Korea, refer to Chungmoo Choi’s
contribution to T. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama’s edited volume Perilous

197

Memories: the Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), entitled
“The Politics of War Memories Toward Healing” (395-408).

11
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York & London: Routledge,
1993), 6.

12
Yoshiaki, Comfort Women, 3.

13
Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 33. Kim Hak-sun’s original testimony was given on Nyūsu 21,
NHK, November 28, 1991.
14
Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow, Transforming Japan: How Feminism and Diversity are Making a
Difference (New York: CUNY Feminist Press, 2011), 419.

15
The AWF was discontinued in 2007.

16
In the afterlife of these government statements, revisionist groups emerged in Japan, including
the prominent “Free History” led by Fujioka Nobukatsu, an education professor at the University
of Tokyo. Such reactionary groups have not only called for a retraction of government apologies
and statements, but have also pursued research to nullify claims offered by “comfort women,”
scholars, and advocates. Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 3-4. Also refer to the introduction in C.
Sarah Soh’s The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and
Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1-26.

17
Refer to the official site of the Women’s Tribunal for more information. Accessed June 28,
2014. http://www1.jca.apc.org/vaww-net-japan/english/womenstribunal2000/whatstribunal.html

18
Ibid.

19
Refer to Alice M. Miller’s astute article, “Sexuality, Violence Against Women, and Human
Rights: Women Make Demands and Ladies Get Protection.” Health & Human Rights Volume 7
Issue 2 (2004): 16-47; Ratna Kapur’s “The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the
‘Native’ Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics” in Harvard Human
Rights Journal (2002): 1-38. For more readings regarding the emergence of the “women’s rights
as human rights” platform, refer to Uma Narayan’s Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions,
and Third World Feminism (New York & London: Routledge, 1997).

20
An international treaty referred to as a “Bill of Rights” for women, proponents describe
CEDWA as an international instrument that addresses women’s rights within political, civil,
cultural, economic, and social life. The CEDAW is still considered by advocates as the most
rigorous effort to create a “universal” approach to addressing the rights of women across cultural
and national contexts. As of August 2009, 185 countries have ratified CEDAW. The United
States is among a small minority of countries that have not yet ratified CEDAW, including Iran
and Sudan. The United States has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the
Western Hemisphere and the only industrialized democracy that has not ratified this treaty.

198

21
Miller, “Sexuality, Violence Against Women, and Human Rights” and Kapur, “The Tragedy
of Victimization Rhetoric.”

22
Ibid.

23
Ibid.

24
Miller, “Sexuality, Violence Against Women, and Human Rights,” 2.

25
Here, I find Michel Foucault’s understanding of the discourse of silence in relationship to
power as particularly useful (1978). For Foucault, silence does not merely encompass “things
one declines to say, [or is] forbidden to name,” nor does it represent a prohibitive “limit of
discourse” (27). Rather, silence is a discursive language that speaks to the intricate systems of
knowledge and socio-cultural norms at play, while highlighting how subjects dis/engage and
communicate with each other under power-saturated conditions. Refer to Foucault, The History
of Sexuality Vol. 1.

26
Esther Kong is a pseudonym for the KAJ contact I engaged with during the research process of
this chapter.

27
Refer to the Glendale History Society’s website for a succinct history of the city, accessed July
15, 2014. http://glendalehistorical.org/history.html.

28
“Glendale Has Been Known as the Jewel City for Nearly a Century,” in Glendale News-Press,
published on July 6, 2002 and accessed July 20, 2014.
http://articles.glendalenewspress.com/2002-07-06/news/export26449_1_glendale-chamber-
jewel-city-emery.

29
However, as recently seen in the opening ceremony marking the unveiling of another
memorial in Fairfax County, Virginia, the comparison between the Jewish Holocaust the
“comfort women” is also used in other contexts. As noted by the Herndon Town Council
Member, Grace Han Wolf, who played a key role in organizing the construction of the memorial:
“It was a war crime that happened a long time ago that not many people know about, yet it
happened, much like the Holocaust happened.” Refer to Antonio Olivio, “Memorial to WWII
Comfort Women dedicated in Fairfax County Amid Protests” in Washington Post, published on
May 30, 2014 and accessed July 20, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/memorial-to-
wwii-comfort-women-dedicated-in-fairfax-county/2014/05/30/730a1248-e684-11e3-a86b-
362fd5443d19_story.html

30
Interview, Glendale Central Library (Glendale, CA), June 9, 2014.
31
Ibid.

32
Ibid.

199

33
For a critical engagement with neoliberal multiculturalism, refer to Jodi Melamed’s Represent
and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis & London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

34
More recently (October 1998), the former South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung, often
extolled as a human rights advocate and progressive politician, crafted a joint statement with the
then Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, in which Kim “accepted” a public apology from
Japan on the behalf of “comfort women,” in exchange for over $3 billion in financial aid from
Japan following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Within such a context, the ROK state’s bi-lateral
negotiations and treaties paradoxically reinscribe Korean “comfort women” as critical and
disposable to the project of South Korean nation building.

35
Interview, Glendale Central Library (Glendale, CA), June 9, 2014.

36
This closely aligns with what Lisa Yoneyama, in “Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice,”
refers to as the “Americanization of world justice,”58.

37
Interview, Glendale Central Library (Glendale, CA), June 9, 2014.

38
As noted in a recent public message sent by the KAJ vis-à-vis an electronic mail blast, with the
passing of Bae Chun-hui in June 2014, the remaining number of surviving “comfort women”
hovers around fifty.

39
Laura Hyun Yi Kang offers an especially illuminating discussion of the social etymology of
the “comfort women” in her article, “Conjuring ‘Comfort Women’: Mediated Affiliations and
Disciplined Subjects in Korean/American Transnationality,” in Journal of Asian American
Studies Volume 6, No. 1(February 2003): 25-55.

40
However, as offered by Kang, such identification is not absolute as Korean/Americans women
also emphasize a tangible distance from Korean “comfort women.” Indeed, it is their subject-
position as American citizens that allows Korean/American women to advocate on the behalf of
the dying “comfort women”: "Rather than attributing a shared ethnic and/or gender identity as
the secure origin or compelling cause of their representational impulse, they bring ‘Korean
Americans' and 'Korean American women' into legibility as distinctly American subjects of
representation and knowledge production, consequently troubling rather than affirming any neat
alignment of identity-knowledge justice. Put differently, they dispel the wishful trajectory in
which a more intimate identification with the Korean 'comfort women' leads to better
representations of the 'comfort women' which in turn secures greater justice for these women."
Refer to Kang, “Conjuring ‘Comfort Women,’” 27.
41
Sangmie Choi Schellstede, ed. Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the
Japanese Military (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 2000), vii.

42
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Introduction” in East Asian Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the
Ghosts of Violence (Asia’s Transformations), edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low,
Leonid Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu (New York & London: Routledge, 2012), 3.

200

43
The Wednesday demonstrations are organized by Korean Council for the Women Drafted for
Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.

44
Cited in Erica Toh, “Japanese-Americans slit over statue of ‘comfort women’” in The Asahi
Shimbun, August 27, 2013,
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201308270014 (Accessed July 15,
2014).

45
Ibid.

46
“Glendale Memorial Honoring Korean ‘Comfort Women’ Stirs Controversy” on CBS Los
Angeles, July 30, 2013, http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/07/30/glendale-memorial-honoring-
korean-comfort-women-stirs-controversy/ (Accessed on July 20, 2014).

47
Refer to Na Young Lee, “The Construction of Military Prostitution in South Korea during U.S.
Military Rule, 1945-1948” in Feminist Studies 33.3 (Fall 2007) 453-481, as well as Katherine
Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korean Relations (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997).
48
Refer to Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho, eds. Militarized Currents: Toward a
Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010).

49
The United States House Resolution 121 (2007) may be read in its complete form on the
website, govtrack.us: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hres121/text (Accessed on July
20, 2014)

50
T. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama’s edited volume Perilous Memories: the
Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001).

51
Base Structure Report: Fiscal Year 2013 Baseline, A Summary of the Department of Defense’s
Real Property Inventory (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense), 7, 79.

52
In a May 2011 interview, three U.S. veterans confessed to dumping approximately 250 fifty-
five gallon barrels of Agent Orange at Camp Carroll, located in the southeastern tip of the
Korean peninsula near the city of Daegu, in 1978. English News Correspondent, The Chosun
Ilbo, published on May 20, 2011, Accessed May 25, 2011,
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/05/20/2011052001085.html. Simultaneously,
in 2006, after over three years of struggle and protest, the ROK government destroyed the
farmland and homes of rice farmers in the Pyeongtaek region in order to expand Camp
Humphreys. Located approximately an hour and a half south of Seoul, Pyeongtaek will become
the new home of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) as Yongsan Garrison is due to close in 2019.
Refer to Ahn & Hong, “Bring War Dollars Home By Closing Down Bases.”

201

53
Yoon’s gruesome murder sparked a widespread mobilization against U.S. military presence in
South Korea. In 1992, Yoon’s naked body was found with white laundry detergent smeared
across her torso, and an umbrella placed into her anus and two beer bottles in her womb. Refer to
Christine Ahn & Hyun Lee, “Of Bases and Budgets,” Foreign Policy in Focus, published on
October 6, 2011, accessed on March 8, 2012, http://fpif.org/of_bases_and_budgets/

54
Ibid.

55
Sasha Davis, “Repeating Islands of Resistance: Redefining Security in Militarized
Landscapes” in Human Geography, Volume 5 Issue 1 (2012), 4.

56
Refer to Butler, Frames of War; Chandan Reddy, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality,
and the US State (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011); Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift
of Freedom: War, Debt and Other Refugee Passages (Durham & London: Duke University
Press, 2012)

57
Reddy, Freedom With Violence.

58
Speech given at Glendale “Comfort Women” Peace Memorial ceremony. Kathy Masaoka, July
30, 2013, Glendale, California. Refer to KAJ website for complete speech. Accessed July 15,
2014, http://kaforumca.org/kathy-masaoka-from-ncrr-speaks-in-support-of-comfort-women-
movement/.

59
Chungmoo Choi, “The Politics of War Memories Toward Healing” in T. Fujitani, Geoffrey
White, and Lisa Yoneyama’s edited volume Perilous Memories: the Asia-Pacific War(s)
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), 396-397.

60
It should be emphasized that the nationalistic appropriation of women’s experiences by the
South Korean state and anti-colonial activists as “representative” of a nation’s traumatic history
is not a “unique” phenomenon, but has been mobilized by other nation-states, including post-
World War II Japan (refer to Chapter 6, pp. 89-208, of Lisa Yoneyama’s Hiroshima Traces:
Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory). In a broader sense, the 1990s is often cited as the
decade in which “women’s rights” transformed into “human rights.” As succinctly explored in
critical works by Ratna Kapur (2002) and Alice Miller (2004), the 1990s witnessed the
institutionalization of women’s rights within international platforms, such as the United Nations,
and the adoption of the motto, “women’s rights are/as human rights.” For instance, following the
1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, the UN General Assembly passed the
Declaration of Violence Against Women, which strengthened and complemented the process of
effective implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW). In 1994, Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy was appointed as the first
U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. However, as emphasized by Kapur and
Miller, “violence against women” (especially in relationship to the figure of the “oppressed,
Third World woman”) transformed into a singular discourse, in which women became
“victimized” and passive figures, and gendered violence transformed into an isolated issue,
separated from broader political, social and political systems.

202

61
According to Dean Toji, nearly 1,600 Japanese/American children, or one-third of the 4,800
Nisei (i.e., second generation Japanese/Americans) visiting family or sent by their families to be
educated in Japan, were concentrated in the Hiroshima Prefecture. Following the bombing of
Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the vast majority of Nisei were barred from returning to the
United States, remaining stranded in Hiroshima while family members were deported and/or
interned in concentration camps located in the deep interior of the United States. In East Wind,
Volume 1, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 19812): 3-5. Refer to for complete article, accessed July 24, 2014,
http://www.apimovement.com/book/export/html/871.

62
Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories,” 82.

63
Ibid.

64
Refer to Marita Sturken, “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the
Japanese Internment” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), edited by Takashi
Fujitani, Lisa Yoneyama and Geoffrey M. White (Durham & London: Duke University Press,
2001), 33-49 and Joshua Inwood, James A. Tyner, and Derek H. Alderman, “Theorizing
Violence and the Dialectics of Landscape Memorialization: A Case Study of Greensboro, North
Carolina” (forthcoming article in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space).

65
Inwood et al, “Theorizing Violence,” 5.

66
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1994), xi.

67
Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 28.

CHAPTER 4

1
Here, I use the term, “fragments,” rather than narrative, as each looped video does not contain
a linear or coherent story, but is a haphazard stitching of remediated archival film clips, “found”
photographs and film footage taken by Kaisen in Jeju.

2
The phrase, “tender ties,” is borrowed from Ann Laura Stoler’s important essay, “Tense and
Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)Colonial Studies”
The Journal of American History, 88.3 (December 2001): 829-865. In the article, Stoler
describes how the private and sentimental realm, encompassing love, sexual relations, and child
rearing, has been mobilized as a racialized mechanism of imperial rule and order.

3
Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 112.

4
Refer to Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2009).

203

5
Laura Briggs, “Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the
Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption.” Gender & History 15, no. 2 (August 2003):
179-200.

6
In 1990, Lemoine’s Adoption was featured in the Korean American Museum’s “Snapshots:
Korean Adoptees” Exhibition. Her film was also included in the “East Meets West” Korean
Adoptee Exhibit in Seoul’s Samsung Ins. Gallery (1996), and the film exhibit, “Evenstill,”
curated by Me-K Ahn, another Korean adoptee visual artist, at the Minneapolis College of Art &
Design. More recently, Adoption was shown at the “Our Adoptee, Our Alien” exhibit at the
Dongsanbang Gallery and Keumsan Gallery in Seoul (2006), and Seoul’s first Adoptee Art and
Film Festival (AAFF) in November 2011. Website accessed on April 14, 2012, http://aff.com.
Lemoine also maintains an extensive and consistently updated website regarding her work.
Website accessed on April 20, 2012, http://starkimproject.com/.
7
E. Kim, Adopted Territory, 21.

8
E. Kim, Adopted Territory, 104-105.

9
Kim Stoker, “Beyond Identity: Activism in Korean Adoptee Art” in Duksung Women’s
University Journal Volume 34: 240.

10
E. Kim, Adopted Territory, 6-27.

11
E. Kim, “Producing Missing Persons,” 86-87.

12
Formally established by the U.S. military and the fledging South Korean state in the afterlife of
the Korean War (1950-’53), the South Korean adoption program is the world’s longest and
oldest overseas adoption program that has sent an estimated 200,000 children to 14 receiving
countries—almost twice the number of Chinese adoptees in the diaspora. Refer to Jennifer Kwon
Dobbs, “Ending South Korea’s Child Export Shame.” Foreign Policy in Focus. Published on
June 23, 2011 and accessed on April 20, 2012,
http://fpif.org/ending_south_koreas_child_export_shame/

13
Hosu Kim, “Television Mothers: Korean Birthmothers Lost and Found in the Search-and-
Reunion Narratives.” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 12, no. 5 (2012): 438-449.
14
E. Kim, Adopted Territory, 139.

15
E. Kim, Adopted Territory, 138-139.

16
Briggs, “Mother, Child, Race, Nation”; Christine Klein, “Family Ties and Political Obligation:
The Discourse of Adoption and the Cold War Commitment to Asia,” in Cold War Constructions:
The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1964, ed. Christian Appy (Amherst,
MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 61; Susie Woo, “A New American Comes
‘Home’: Race, Nation, and the Immigration of Korean War Adoptees, ‘GI Babies,’ and Brides”
(PhD diss., Yale University, 2010)

204

17
Refer to J. Kim, Ends of Empire.
18
Woo, Susie. “‘A New American Comes Home’: Race, Nation, and the Immigration of
Korean War Adoptees, GI Babies, and Brides,” (Ph.D. Diss., Yale University,
2011), 204-205.

19
Klein, “Family Ties and Political Obligation,” 61.

20
Yoneyama, “Traveling Memories,” 61.

21
Kim, Adopted Territory, 62-63.

22
As described by Seungsook Moon (2005), the rapid industrialization of the South Korean
state under the Park regime led to a gendered bifurcation in the labor economy in South Korea.
As the South Korean state moved toward light industry production in the 1970s, men were
recruited into the military (through compulsory military service), while single women—mostly
from working-class and rural backgrounds— were forced into poorly-paid factory labor. Even
as the mobilization of young single women into almost around-the-clock factory work
destabilized patriarchal ideals linking women to the domestic sphere, such ideals were still
staunchly maintained and upheld in the public and private spaces. Single women who became
pregnant, then, were often shunned by broader society as well as by family and personal
networks.

23
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, “Ending South Korea’s Child Export Shame.” Foreign Policy in Focus.
Published on June 23, 2011 and accessed on April 20, 2012.
http://fpif.org/ending_south_koreas_child_export_shame/.
24
Ibid.

25
The mission statement for Itiernant_sends_for_itinerant is offered on the project’s website.
Accessed on November 20, 2013, http://itinerant-incisions.org/ABOUT-CONTACT.

26
Jane Jin Kaisen, Dissident Translations (Arhus, Denmark: Arhus Kunstbygning, 2011), 7.
27
Ibid.

28
Based on my critical engagement with her oeuvre and continuing conversations with the
artist, this is my own interpretation of Kaisen’s work.

29
For a comprehensive discussion of the key cultural concepts that have been critical to nation-
state building in South Korea, refer to the introductory chapter in Lee, Service Economies.

30
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1 & 17.

31
Grey & Gómez-Barris, eds. Toward a Sociology of the Trace.

205

32
See, The Decolonized Eye.

33
Here, I offer an elaboration of the 4.3 massacres. Although 4.3 is often tied to a series of
attacks launched by Jeju leftist guerilla fighters against the U.S. military and local police force
on April 3, 1948, the term is actually a misnomer, as the “incident” encompasses an arc of
violence that unraveled between March 1947 and September 1954. In 1947, Jeju emerged as
the only region in Korea resistant to plans for separate presidential elections in the north and
south, and civilians organized a demonstration on March 1,1947, to protest the upcoming
elections and the presence of the United States Army Military Government in Korea
(USAMGIK), an officiating body that remained in control of the southern half of Korea
between September 8, 1945 and August 15, 1948. Under the direct surveillance of the
USAMGIK, South Korean police then opened fire upon the crowd, killing six and seriously
injuring six others.

This initial clash gradually snowballed into a seven-year, seven-month
struggle between leftist guerilla fighters, and the South Korean Interim Government (SKIG)
and the Northwest Youth Association, a particularly brutal cadre of right-wing youth
dispatched by SKIG. By the end of 1954, up to one-third of the island’s population, or between
30,000 and 60,000 inhabitants, disappeared, with approximately 85 percent of casualties
inflicted by SKIG. Actively suppressed by the South Korean government for decades, a formal
investigation into the atrocities was finally launched in the late 1990s due to escalating
pressure from survivors, pro-democracy groups and critical scholars.

34
Choe, Sang-hun, “Island’s Naval Base Stirs Opposition in South Korea,” The New York Times.
Published on August 18, 2011 and accessed April 20, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/world/asia/19base.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

35
Michael Rush, Video Art (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2003), 11.

36
For an extended conversation regarding the role of film in relationship to
(neo)colonial historiography and narrative construction, refer to Priya Jaikumar’s “An
‘Accurate Imagination’: Place, Map and Archive as Spatial Objects of Film History,” in
Empire and Film, eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCade (New York & London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 182.

37
Marita Sturken, “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese
Internment,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), eds. Lisa Yoneyama, Takashi
Fujitani, and Geoffrey M. White (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), 39.

38
In Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Akira Mizuta Lippit (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,
2005) conceptualizes the term, avisual, to describe the ways in which cinema functions as a
mechanism of “sightless vision,” or a device capable of detecting invisible residues and traces.

39
Kim Seong-nae. “Mourning Korean Modernity in the Memory of the Cheju April Third
Incident,” in The Inter-Cultural Studies Reader, eds. Kuan-Hsing Chen and Chua Beng Huat
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 198-199.

206

40
Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 105.

41
Kim, “Mourning Korean Modernity,” 194. Also refer to Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War,
New York: Columbia University, pp. 103-105.
42
Kim, “Mourning Korean Modernity,” 194.

43
Jane Jin Kaisen in an interview with Laura Kina, February 1, 2010. Interview published in
book chapter, “Crossfading the Gendered History of Militarism in Korea: An Interview with
Jane Jin Kaisen,” in War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, eds. Laura Kina
& Wei Ming Dariotis (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 2013), 87.

44
Refer to ÅrhusKunstBygning’s website for Dissident Translations, Accessed April 24, 2012,
http://www.aarhuskunstbygning.dk/english/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2
52:dissi dent-translations&catid=20:udstillinger-2011&Itemid=84.

45
Refer to Tom Willis-Jones, “Review: Reiterations of Dissent,” Jeju Weekly, published on
October 07, 2013 and accessed on November 8, 2013
http://www.jejuweekly.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=3567

46
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986 [1967]): 22-27.

47
Refer to Kim “Seeking Truth After 50 Years,” and Chang, National Narrative for detailed
accounts regarding the post-1990 investigations of the Jeju massacres.

48
Contributing writer, “Blood History Buried Under Jeju International Airport,” Jeju Weekly,
published on March 26, 2011 and accessed on April 20, 2012,
http://www.jejuweekly.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1383.

49
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Remembering the Unfinished Conflict: Museums and the Contested
Memory of the Korean War,” in East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of
Violence, eds. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu, (New
York & London: Routledge), 128-152.

50
Kim Hunjoon, “Seeking Truth After 50 Years: The National Committee for Investigation of
the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 3
(2009): 410.

51
During the most ferocious period of fighting between 1948 and 1949, the U.S. military
monitored the situation, interpreting the violent measures as necessary to containing communism
in the “red island.” In a message wired to Washington on May 13, 1949, the U.S. ambassador to
South Korea noted that Jeju communist sympathizers and rebels had been successfully killed,
captured, or converted. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American
Empire (New York: Owl Books, 2000), 100-101.

207

52
For an illuminating discussion regarding the performance of critical memories and
knowledge in relationship to the Asia-Pacific War(s), refer to Yoneyama’s Hiroshima Traces,
115.
53
J. Kim, Ends of Empire.

54
Sasha Davis, “The U.S. Military Base Network and Contemporary Colonialism: Power
Projection, Resistance and the Quest for Operational Unilateralism,” Political Geography 30
(2011): 217.

55
The U.S. maintained peacetime control in South Korea until 1994, when South Korea
officially transitioned from a military dictatorship to civilian control. Currently, the South
Korean government will receive wartime command of the Korean military in 2015.

56
Sang-hun Choe, “Island’s Naval Base Stirs Opposition in South Korea” in The New
York Times, published on August 18, 2011 and accessed on April 22, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/world/asia/19base.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

57
Refer to Anders Riel Müller, “One Island Village’s Struggle for Land, Life, and Peace,”
Korean Policy Institute, published on April 19, 2011 and accessed on April 24, 2012,
http://www.kpolicy.org/documents/interviews-
opeds/110419andersmulleroneislandvillagesstruggle.html

58
Shigematsu and Camacho, Militarized Currents, xvi.

59
Na-young Lee, “The Construction of Military Prostitution in South Korea During the U.S.
Military Rule, 1945-1948,” Feminist Studies 33, No. 3 (Fall 2007): 456.

60
Hilary Rodham Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy,
published in November 2011 and accessed on December 15, 2011,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/11/americas_pacific_century.

61
For instance, the International Women’s Network Against Militarism, which includes scholars
and activists from Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, Marshall Islands, Guam, Hawai’i, Puerto
Rico, Australia and the west-coast of the U.S., has expressed solidarity with the people of Jeju-
do, as observed in a September 11, 2011 open letter, accessed on December 15, 2011,
http://www.genuinesecurity.org/actions/lettertojeju.html. The Okinawan Women Act Against
Military Violence and the Committee against Heliport Construction have also expressed
solidarity and active support for the people of Jeju-do. Refer to “Event Reports & Photos—East
Asia,” Global Day of Action on Military Spending, published on April 17, 2013 and accessed on
June 10, 2013, http://demilitarized.org/2012-reports-east-asia/. For broader analysis regarding the
intersecting yet distinct histories among Pacific Islands and Asian/Americans, refer to
Shigematsu and Camacho, Militarized Currents and Davis, “The U.S. Military Base Network.”
62
Davis, “Repeating Islands of Resistance,” 2.

208

63
Jennifer Hyndman, “Mind the Gap: Bridging Feminist and Political Geography Through
Geopolitics, ”Political Geography 23, No. (2004): 309.

64
These principles were part of a statement offered by the Women for Genuine Security in 2011.
Refer to Davis, “Repeating Islands of Resistance,” 4-5.
65
Mayor Kang Dong-kyun’s talk, delivered on June 1, 2013 at the Moana Nui Conference, in
Berkeley, California. For complete viewing of his address, refer to
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CW4ZFA4hss. Accessed on September 5, 2013.

66
Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Reinscribing Memory through the Other 9/11,” in Toward a
Sociology of the Trace, eds. Herman Grey and Macarena Gómez-Barris (Minneapolis &
London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 237.

67
Suk-young Kim. “Staging the ‘Cartography of Paradox’: The DMZ Special Exhibition at the
Korean War Memorial,” Theatre Journal 63, No. 3 (October 2011): 402.

68
Yuh, “Move by War,” 281.
69
Ibid.

70
Lee Tae-Hoon, “U.S. Army Dumped Chemicals in Imjin River in 1960s,” Korea Times,
published on May 29, 2011 and accessed on June 10, 2014,
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/05/113_87887.html.

71
The notion of “slow violence” is from Rob Nixon’s work, Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
CODA

1
Jacques Rancière (Translated by Gregory Elliot), The Emancipated Spectator (London & New
York: Verso Books, 2009), 3.
2
Refer to Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 2003); Gayatri Spivak, Other Asias (New York: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2003); Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia (Cambridge & London: Harvard
University Press, 2011); and Takeuchi Yoshimi, What is Modernity: Writings of Takeuchi
Yoshimi (New York: Columbia University, 2005).

3
Wang, The Politics of Imagining Asia, Kindle Loc 145.

4
Wang, The Politics of Imagining Asia, Kindle Loc 172.

5
Suk-Young Kim, “Staging the ‘Cartography of Paradox’: The DMZ Special Exhibition at the
Korean War Memorial.” Theatre Journal 63.3 (October 2011), 381/

209

6
Terry Park, “Eternal Return of the Saline Body: Michael Joo's Salt Transfer Cycle.” MELUS
Volume 37, Issue 4 (Winter 2011), 26.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Baik, Crystal Mun-hye (author)

Core Title Mechanisms of (in)visibility: Korean militarized subjects, critical sensing, and the project of decolonization

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 09/22/2016

Defense Date 08/13/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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Creator Email crystal.baik@gmail.com

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