Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA (review)

Imperial Citizens recently won 2009 book awards in the race/ethnicity and in the Asia and Asian America sections of the American Sociological Association. Author Nadia Kim conducted an ethnographically enabled interview study in two countries to illuminate how Korean conceptions of race/ethnicity precede and exceed the lives of Koreans in the United States. For applying a transnational approach to Korean Americans, a group often set aside as a model minority, the awards are well deserved. However, the exhaustiveness of Kim's research raises questions about the reach of transnationalism in understanding U.S. racial/ethnic dynamics.

Imperial Citizens argues that a transnational approach is essential to fully understand how immigration intersects with race relations. It is decidedly not about the assimilation of Korean Americans, but seeks to encompass both their lived experiences and the transnational circulation of racial discourse. Kim convincingly argues against the assumption that the racial/ethnic consciousness of U.S. ethnics is born with immigration and matures mainly in second-plus generations. However, it remains unclear how directly imperialism shapes the experience of U.S.-born Koreans.

The book's main contribution is to distinguish the nativistic racism that distances Asian Americans from social citizenship, from the racism that constrains blacks from upward mobility. Kim also extends political scientist Claire Kim's theory of racial triangulation with its two-dimensional space of racial status to the international stage of the U.S. military occupation of South Korea. In brief, she grounds anti-Asian racism in the continuing power of the United States over Asians in their ancestral homelands.

After Chapter 1's ambitiously dense theoretical foundation, Chapter 2 provides an introduction to the South Korean version of U.S. race/ethnicity: tanil minjok or ethnonationality. This chapter establishes the distinctiveness of ethnonationality and explains its many roots from Confucian hierarchies to reactions to Japanese colonialism. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the development of ethnonationality after the Korean War into the attitudes that post-1965 emigrants have brought to the United States. Under the U.S. occupation, South Korean ethnonationality changes as it becomes redefined within a racial triangle that includes white and black military personnel.

Chapter 5 examines how living in Los Angeles changes the attitudes of the new arrivals. These shifts largely confirm the contact hypothesis: a new appreciation of white heterogeneity, recognition of black individuality, and surprise at the presence of Latinos, developing into a sense of empathy. Their new social interactions also make being categorized as Asian a personally salient reality. Chapters 6 and 7 analyze how Korean immigrants respond to their new situation. Their pre-migrant triangulation makes their situation familiar; however, they experience this status more directly in the United States where they are a minority within a minority. Furthermore, Kim argues that they contend with discrimination and subordination as visible foreigners and foreign model minorities, and rather than oppose oppression or seek assimilation, they opt to take pride in their relative class status and seek to redefine the mainstream to include Korean Americans, becoming "approximate Americans."

Kim reports very similar perspectives among her second-generation respondents in Chapter 8. Given the extensive documentation of generational differences in attitudes, her emphasis on similarities seems incomplete especially when one of her subjects states, "It's different than coming here as an adult [when] your identity is basically formed, you're basically trying to survive... whereas younger people have to try to figure out how to fit."(235) Chapter 9 completes the transnational circuit with the social remittance of migrant narratives of their U.S. experiences. Kim finds that migrant narratives have little cache in South Korea; instead non-migrants idealize opportunities in the United States, regard emigrants as traitors, and essentially disregard their experiences as whining. In brief, the homeland is neither empty of difference before migration nor a passive vessel when migrants return.

In the final chapter, the strengths and weaknesses of Kim's argument for transnationalism...