Asians and Latinos comprise the vast majority of contemporary immigrants to the United States, and their growing presence has complicated America's prevailing White-Black race hierarchy. Imperial Citizens uses a global framework to investigate how Asians from U.S.-dominated homelands learn and understand their place along U.S. color lines. With interviews and ethnographic observations of Koreans, the book does what others rarely do: venture to the immigrants' home country and analyze racism there in relation to racial hierarchies in the United States.
Attentive to history, the book considers the origins, nature, and extent of racial ideas about Koreans/Asians in relation to White and Black Americans, investigating how immigrants engage these ideas before they depart for the United States, as well as after they arrive. The author shows that contemporary globalization involves not just the flow of capital, but also culture. Ideas about American color lines and citizenship lines have crossed oceans alongside U.S. commodities.
Nadia Y. Kim is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi Note on Terminology xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Imperial Racialization 1 Ethnonationality, "Race," and Color: The Foundation 23 Racialization in South Korea, Part I: Koreans and White America 44 Racialization in South Korea, Part II: Koreans and White-Black America 83 Navigating the Racial Terrain of Los Angeles and the United States 115 Korean Americans Walk the Line of Color and Citizenship 138 Visibly Foreign (and Invisible) Subjects: Battling Prejudice and Racism 168 Second-Generation "Foreign Model Minorities": Battling Prejudice and Racism 199 Transnational Feedback: Racial Lessons from Korean America 223 Postlude 242 Research Methods-Working in the Transnational Field 255 Notes 273 Bibliography 283 Index 305
