Yellow over Black: History of Race in Korea and the New Study of Race and Empire

Abstract

This paper examines the precolonial and colonial history of race in Korea, which has been overlooked in the study of race, empire, and Korean history. While the study of race claims to be global, it implicitly assumes that racism becomes possible through physical contact with ‘different races’. Rather than examining the emergent racial politics after the recent global migration, I suggest that racism could emerge regardless of collective racial migration and contact. Further, recent colonial studies have overlooked the colonized, the Japanese Empire and its colonized. Accordingly, I question the absence of race in Korean historiography and the assumption of Korean racial naïveté based on the supposed racial homogeneity. Further, I demonstrate how the notions of race and blackness are fundamentally embedded in Koreans’ understanding of the Age of Empire. Thus, this paper calls for a new ‘global’ approach to the study of race and empire that questions these overlooked assumptions.