“Feeling Brown”, Sounding Yellow: Puerto Rican Soldiers in the Korean War and the Sonic Cartography of Settler Militarism

• In Event: Settler Militarism at the Edge/End of Empire

Abstract

In August of 1950, two months after the outbreak of the Korean War, the 65th Infantry Regiment – an all-volunteer Puerto Rican regiment of the United States Army – was dispatched to fight in what will be (dis)remembered as the “forgotten war.” Consequently, in its successive wars overseas, the US military would rely heavily on its colonial subjects turned national soldiers. How did the Korean War provide the necessary geopolitical and biopolitical condition for the labor extraction of militarized (racialized) masculinites? What are the connections between US neoimperial policy in (South) Korea and US colonial rule of Puerto Rico? Furthermore, how did this infrastructure of militarist settler imperialism not only connect unlikely spaces – the Puerto Rican island and the Korean peninsula – but also the bodies and lives of racialized subjects, including Puerto Rican soldiers and Korean military workers? Engaging in a reading of Emilio Díaz Valcárcel’s literary representations of Puerto Rican soldiers and their proximities to Korean military workers during the Korean War, I explore the multiple scales of imperial violence through what I call sonic cartographies: Asian-Latin(o) American intimate sounds interrupt, merge, and intersect with transpacific cartographies of war, accumulated histories of empire (Spanish, Japanese, US), and technologies of racialized gendering. Indeed the Cold War is not only manifested through geopolitical infrastructures, but also at the level of the granular, by disciplining the most intimate and most quotidian -- sound, touch and taste. In situating the Korean War as the ongoing history of US settler militarism, I contend that paying attention to sonic cartographies across the Pacific offers a possibility of fabulating a decolonial and demilitarized world.

Author

• Junyoung Verónica Kim, New York University