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Haunting the Korean Diaspora Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War Grace M. Cho |
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$67.50 cloth |
An engrossing encounter with lingering ghosts of the Korean War. Since the Korean War—the forgotten war—more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen. More than 100,000 women married GIs and moved to the United States. Through intellectual vigor and personal recollection, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers. Grace M. Cho exposes how Koreans in the United States have been profoundly affected by the forgotten war and uncovers the silences and secrets that still surround it, arguing that trauma memories have been passed unconsciously through a process psychoanalysts call “transgenerational haunting.” Tracing how such secrets have turned into “ghosts,” Cho investigates the mythic figure of the yanggongju, literally the “Western princess,” who provides sexual favors to American military personnel. She reveals how this figure haunts both the intimate realm of memory and public discourse, in which narratives of U.S. benevolence abroad and assimilation of immigrants at home go unchallenged. Memories of U.S. violence, Cho writes, threaten to undo these narratives—and so they have been rendered unspeakable. At once political and deeply personal, Cho’s wide-ranging and innovative analysis of U.S. neocolonialism and militarism under contemporary globalization brings forth a new way of understanding—and remembering—the impact of the Korean War. “Korean American sociologist Cho understands the sociological imagination. She untangles a web of Korean sex workers’ biographies within the wider historical, political , and social contexts that have influenced them, Korean, and the US. Her book is a catharsis for a traumatically muted history.” —Choice Grace M. Cho is assistant professor of sociology, anthropology, and women's studies at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. She is a contributing performance artist for the art collective Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the Forgotten War. 232 pages | 16 b&w photos | 6 x 9 | 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS A Note on Transliteration Acknowledgments Introduction: The Fabric of Erasure 1. Fleshing Out the Ghost 2. A Genealogy of Trauma 3. Tracing the Disappearance of the Yanggongju 4. The Fantasy of Honorary Whiteness 5. Diasporic Vision: Methods of Seeing Trauma Postscript: In Memoriam Notes Index |
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