Editors' Preface

Abstract

Editors' Preface Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino The articles in this issue provide a glimpse of the difficult questions and expansive, insightful possibilities that drive the discipline of Asian American studies. While each paper identifies a distinct research agenda and methodological approach, they all make clear the urgency of their fundamental contributions. The unsaid and unspeakable are exposed in careful and meticulous ways, with the understanding that such acts of engagement are crucial steps toward justice. The first three papers begin in Korea—a tiny peninsula, forever entangled with one empire after another, and the far too common horrors of sexual violence as an instrument of colonization. Yuri Doolan's piece begins by uncovering the origins of a "vexed intrapersonal relation" associated with adopted children from Korea. Doolan begins by noting that studies of Korean adoption often reference camptowns—neighborhoods near US military bases where off-duty troops find recreational activities, including sexual services, provided by local residents—in passing, as mere background context to a larger point. Doolan convincingly argues that this is a crucial, missed opportunity in understanding not only international adoption but also the sexual and racial formation of Korean and Korean American women in the United States. The author traces the discursive and ideological framing of adopted girls from Korea as rescued and rehabilitated prostitutes, as needing to be saved from "a perverse heredity and carnal savagery." The presumed origins of adopted children as sons or daughters of prostitutes became central to the maintenance of international adoptions from South Korea. Doolan illustrates how this [End Page v] persistent hypersexualization of Korean orphans and Korean American women functions to promote US exceptionalism as a humanitarian nation. Then, Laura Barberán Reinares shifts our approach to issues of sexual violence, empire, and Korea through the literary works of three Korean American authors: Therese Park, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee. Reinares focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence through language by analyzing the narration of systematic rapes endured by "comfort women" in World War II. In this article, Barberán Reinares outlines the complex task of writers in depicting sexual violence, or verbally representing the "unrepresentable." Barberán Reinares highlights the conundrum for these writers as they grapple with the discursive limits of a human rights approach to faithfully relay stories of violence as evidence for justice, knowing that the narration (fictional or otherwise) of detailed accounts may in fact reobjectify victims by merely serving others' voyeuristic curiosity. In her careful analysis, Barberán Reinares shows how these three authors avoid potentially exploitative imagery without necessarily sacrificing the political for the aesthetic. In their fictionalized representations, each author, in their own manner, creatively focuses on the inner, abject aspect of violence through a variety of narrative tools. In this way, fictional representations can convey the gravity of the violence while also developing characters not solely defined by their abuse. In Na-Young Lee's paper, we see that human rights discourse comes with further complications. The struggle to bring accountability for the violence inflicted by the Japanese military sexual slavery system illustrates how even the most egregious acts of state violence do not necessarily warrant collective repudiation or international action. Justice does not just happen. In the case of "comfort women," a coordinated effort by many individuals was required. These activists had to not only shift our understanding of human rights beyond issues that center men and thereby obscure sexual or intimate violence as worthy of global attention, but also question normative Western notions of "universal" human rights, which diminish issues raised by global south nations as "local" concerns. Lee provides a detailed "backstage" account of how "comfort women" activism by Korean women was central in making this shift. Lee argues that an international movement in solidarity with "comfort women" rewrote the norms of global women's rights in the 1990s. Incorporating methods of oral history interviews, participant observations, and textual analysis of activist archives, Lee carefully maps how this international effort transcended the boundaries of nation, race, and gender. The next article, by Lei Zhang, details a human rights activism of a different sort. Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown of...