Traveling Chinatowns - by Sujin Eom (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Drawing on an impressive array of archival sources, from colonial criminal records to historical maps and exposé journalism, this book brings to light the overlooked history of ethnic Chinese enclaves in Korea during the era of Japanese colonialism. Situated within a global circuit of Chinese migration, the Japanese empire produced a structure of anti-migrant violence unique to colonial Asia while reproducing racial ideas that shaped the Chinatowns of North America and Europe. Each chapter of the book analyzes a site of Chinese migration as a constitutive part of the Japanese colonial infrastructures of racialization: ships and ports that served as conduits for Chinese migrants; shophouses that spread across Asia to accommodate new types of colonial labor; writings that circulated Chinese racial archetypes; streets and homes vulnerable to ethnic violence and destruction; and Japanese police photographs created to surveil Chinese migrants and their environments.

The title of the book, Traveling Chinatowns, indicates the transimperial infrastructures of Asian racialization that made Chinatowns both material and ideological spaces across multiple continents. Locating Korea's Chinatowns within transnational histories of anti-migrant racism and violence, this book challenges the prevailing view that sees Chinatowns as exclusively the creation of white settler racism, and instead sheds light on the complexity inherent in Chinatowns as spaces that are reflective of histories of empire and labor migration that have linked people, goods, and ideas across continents.

Review Quotes

"Reading colonial archives against the grain, Traveling Chinatowns reconceptualizes histories long obscured through racialization and erasure, revealing Chinatown in colonial Korea as a transimperial space shaped by migration, surveillance, and the circulation of racial imaginaries. An original and deeply important contribution to Korean history and the study of empire and migration."--Se-Mi Oh, University of Michigan

About the Author

Sujin Eom is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Dartmouth College.