Saving Black Lives: Representations of Black Koreans in Black Magazines

• In Event: Rethinking Emergences of Afro-Asian Coalitions

Abstract

This paper examines the photographs and stories of Black Korean orphans and adoptees as portrayed in African American magazines, Ebony and Jet, from 1955 after the Korean War and during the Civil Rights Movement. My study of Black Korean portrayals in African American magazines is the first attempt to think about representations of these mixed-race children through the lens of transnational politics and history. Considering the Korean War and the Civil Rights Movement as the states of emergency in Korea and the United States, respectively, my transnational viewpoint is to theorize racialized diaspora and citizenship. I mainly question why and how Ebony and Jet became involved in the transnational adoption of Black Koreans and how they understood African American responsibilities for the aftermath of the Korean War and the changing conceptions of race and citizenship.

Black Korean adoption is peculiar in the United States during the 1950s because interracial relationships and mixed-race children were not nationally and legally recognized until the abolition of anti-miscegenation laws by the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling in 1967. In light of the historical and legal states of emergency regarding race, immigration, and family formation in the US from the 1940s to the 1960s, I navigate how African American print media and photographs demonstrate geopolitical and transnational history of adoption, as well as remind us of the racial politics of a time. These print media, driven by social ad political purposes, also produced racial meanings. My work illuminates how racial and genealogical formations and intimacies were both imagined in and created by these print media and photographs. In this sense, the transnational adoption of Black Koreans was a racial project, in which racial difference was imperative.

My transnational investigations into the politics and history of Black Korean adoption narrated by African American magazines in the 1950s intend to broaden contemporary approaches to the categories of identity. While taking geographical and national specificity into consideration, these traveling bodies and images during the 50’s states of emergency unearth prejudice against racial and national Others. This project will ultimately show how the visibility and racial formation of mixed-race identities become a political battlefield across the national and racial lines.

Author

• Joo Young Lee, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor