i EXCEPTIONAL EMPIRE AND EXCEPTIONAL SUBJECTS: BIOPOLITICS AND THE TRANSNATIONAL MAKING OF THE KOREAN/ASIAN/AMERICAN THROGH THE COLD WAR A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY SEONNA KIM IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY JOSEPHINE D. LEE DECEMBER 2016 ii © Seonna Kim, 2016 iii Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been born into this world without an enormous amount of encouragement and support of my teachers, cohorts, friends, and family. It is my great pleasure to thank all the people who have made it possible for me to write this dissertation. First of all, I have been extremely fortunate and grateful to have my advisor, Josephine Lee who has introduced and mentored me into intellectual society and maturity in the field of Asian American studies and patiently and dedicatedly guided me to complete my long-awaited dissertation. Her excellent hands-on experience, knowledge, and resources, along with her positive outlook, belief in me (sometimes more than my own), and unflappable spirit, always helped me through the writing process. I am very grateful for Shevvy Craig’s invaluable knowledge in film studies and persistent support and guidance from the early stage of my research to the end. I am also blessed to have worked with Timothy Brennan, whose critical questions and feedback have never failed to intrigue me and pushed me to horn my arguments. I have had the good fortune to have Travis Workman, a Korean literature and culture specialist on this project, who showed great interest in my research, reminded me of its importance, and encouraged me to complete my work. My gratitude also goes to my former advisors, Omi’seke N. Tinsley and Simona Sawhney, who both left Minnesota but not before they greatly inspired me to pursue my research in postcolonial feminism. I especially benefitted from Simona’s casual but dedicated mentorship inside and outside the classroom during my independent study with her. I will never forget the warm, lively, intellectual conversations I had with Simona and my cohort, Sristi. My special thanks to Michelle M. Wright who generously iv spent her time with me and listened to my story whenever I stopped by her office. This helped me immensely to survive for the first difficult years at the University as an international student. I will never forget all my dear students I met at the University of Minnesota, from whom I learned much and with whom I grew as a teacher and researcher. I would like to thank my dear friends and cohorts in the Department of English, with whom I got through every step and stage of my doctoral studies. I am especially grateful to my very supportive group of women friends, Sristi Bhattarai, Na-rae Kim, Patricia Zanski, and Eunha Na at Minnesota. Our regular Friday lunch meetings, numerous talks over coffee, drinks, and phones, and the sheer presence of each other nourished my soul and body. During my graduate years in the United States, I was also lucky to meet many fabulous and brilliant fellow students and scholars in Asian American talks and South Asian seminars at the University of Minnesota and conferences and some Korean adoptees and adoptee scholars living in Twin Cities and beyond who were interested in learning Korean language and culture and encouraged my study, including Jinang Kim, Lisa Gaskill, and Aili Zheng. I am also grateful for the warm hospitality and spiritual guidance and support of my church family and Pastor Seongeun Kim and his family. I am also greatly indebted to my former teachers at Yonsei University in Korea, where I began my graduate studies. I am especially grateful to Suk Kook Rhee, Kyung-Won Lee, and Seok Won Yang, whose inspirational lectures and mentorship sparked my interest in postcolonial studies, and Hye Joon Yoon who offered support and encouragement during a time when I needed them. My gratitude extends to my former cohorts, including Soo Wha Lee, Jina Moon, Eunah Lee, Mikyoung Kim, Hannah Park, Bomi Yoon, and v Bongjoo Shim and his wife, Irene Shim, who have been mutual supporters and will remain life-long friends. For me, my research interest in the Asian diaspora and Asian American literature and culture has evolved from these numerous encounters and my own experience of (im)migration first as an international student and then as a permanent resident and a mother of a Korean American child. Finally, but not lastly, I would like to thank my family in Korea and in the U.S. My life is greatly indebted to my mother, Sunae Seo, whose strong and loving maternal presence and sacrifice nourished my study and love of literature. My sincere thanks also go to my father and my mother-in-law who patiently supported my study for all those years, my father-in-law who could not see my husband and me finish our study but has always been with us, and my brothers(-in-law) and sisters(-in-law) who always cheered us and greeted us with great love. I cannot thank my best friend and dear husband, Dongchul Park, and my dearest love, Emily Park enough. My dissertation would not have been completed without their untiring, tremendous love, support, and sacrifice. vi Abstract This dissertation explores how the contemporary Korean American and Korean diasporic literary productions imagine and respond to the nexus between the “exceptional” American empire and the exceptional juridico-political subjects it produced and managed in South Korea and across the Pacific through the prolonged Cold War. Drawing on critical biopolitical studies, this project frames the Cold War U.S. military and humanitarian interventions in Asia as neoimperialist governmentality, which not only created excessive, doubled sovereignty and states of exception but also produced and displaced exceptional subjects in the areas affected. My research on the historical, political, legal, and cultural discourses on these displaced subjects evinces that they were not simply excluded as a demographic exception to the Korean and American nation- states, but included in their Cold War geopolitics and biopolitics. This dissertation proposes that the transnational making of the exceptional Korean, Asian, or Asian American subjects through the Cold War provides key sites for understanding the transnational history and dimensions of the post-World War II formation of Asian America as it illuminates the links between U.S. foreign policy in Asia and domestic racial liberalism during the Cold War. Tracing the origin of the transpacific exceptional subjects and their transpacific links, the project also draws a genealogy of a forgotten Korean diaspora that still haunts the modernity of two nation-states. I argue that the selected cultural memories and imaginaries produced by Nora Okja Keller, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Jane Jeong Trenka, and Chang-rae Lee expose and intervene in the complex biopolitical operations and technologies of U.S. sovereignty and governance within and across its national border and the logic of exclusion and inclusion vii by verbally enacting scenes of multiple subjectifications of the exceptional figures in Asia and America. Chapter by chapter, the dissertation attends to the particular conjunctures of local and global biopolitics in which the exceptional subjects emerged and were nationally and transnationally subjectified. It also demonstrates how each of these texts in a unique and experimental way disrupts the normative codifications and configurations of the exceptional empire as a global peacekeeper or humanitarian force and of the exceptional subjects as undeserving racial aliens or exceptionally deserving model citizens. Collectively, these literary texts create an aesthetics of the stateless that imagines alternative models of politics, subjectivity, and cross-national and interracial community to move beyond biopolitics and towards a decolonized future. viii Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: “Scenes of Subjection”: Camptown Biopolitics and an Aesthetic Remapping of the Body of the Yanggongju in Fox Girl …................................................................. 35 Chapter 2: “Afterlives of Empire”: The Necropolitics and Spectropolitics of the Cold War in Memories of My Ghost Brother.................................................................................... 83 Chapter 3: The Biopolitics of Korean Transnational Adoption and (Dis)Performing Exceptional Subjects in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Memoirs ................................................. 140 Chapter 4: Empires Old and New: The Bio/Necropolitics of Empires and Transnational Representation in A Gesture Life.................................................................................... 182 Notes .............................................................................................................................. 244 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 255 1 INTRODUCTION “This Empire… And indeed, do you not see how ostentatiously these gentlemen have just unfurled the banner of anti-colonialism? ‘Aid to the disinherited countries,’ says Truman. ‘The time of the old colonialism has passed.’ That's also Truman. Which means that American high finance considers that the time has come to raid every colony in the world. So, dear friends, here you have to be careful! I know that