Genealogy of the "Gook": Imperial Racism and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity across U.S. Wars in the Philippines, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

Organized by the Ending the Korean War (EKW) Teaching Collective, this session enables members of the collective and other scholar activists from Asian American studies who research U.S. war/counterinsurgency, militarism, empire in the Philippines, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean to come together in a curriculum-building and mapping session around the genealogy of the slur "gook." The goal is to build out a submodule of the EKW open-access syllabus that aims to teach the ongoing Korean War not as an event but as a globally far-reaching and historically consequential infrastructure of U.S. imperialist violence that impacts not only Koreans and the Korean peninsula, but peoples and geographies around the globe, including in Puerto Rico. Our goal is to teach the Korean War in order to end it.

Here, “gook,” a slur birthed out of the late nineteenth-century U.S. military conquest of the Philippines and thereafter reanimated in subsequent conflicts, enables EKW to engage in a conversation around how a term that facilitated mass Asian death serves as the grounds for anti-imperialist solidarity. Korean Americans are weaned on an apocryphal tale around the term "gook.” When sighting U.S. soldiers, our ancestors excitedly shouted, “미국!” (me-gook or United States, lit. “beautiful country”) as a way of remarking the presence of American troops deployed to the Korean theater during the early 1950s. Yet in the context of asymmetrical war, the metonym that designated the foreigner was instead turned lethally against Koreans when GIs misunderstood “me” to mean what it does in English, namely, a reference to self, and “gook” to be a term for “Korean.” Scrambled in this way, with its intended sense lost in translation, the phrase was taken to mean “I am a gook” and on another level “Kill me and my kind without consequences.” Yet, as many people have pointed out, this apocryphal account obscures the slur’s “pan-racist past,” to borrow a phrase from David Roediger. “Gook” cannot be claimed, this is to say, by Koreans alone. Although its origins occasion some debate, the slur traversed U.S. imperialist warfronts in Asia across the twentieth century, taking on new “life” in each theater of war as a term designating the killability of deindividualized Asian life. In this sense, it prompts us to reconsider how militarism and imperial war serve as the structural basis for anti-Asian racism. From the Philippine-American War to the Korean War to the Vietnam War, “gook” is part of a U.S. military-imperial lexicon, a vocabulary of psychological warfare, that conjoins peoples targeted by the U.S. war machine. Associated with women who followed U.S. forces—in Korean War parlance, “blanket squads”—the term arises in the context of the U.S. imperial war in the Philippines as a way of contemptuously referring to native peoples. The gendered and sexualized connotation arguably persists in the racialized violability that the term implies. By the time the slur’s itinerary reached Southeast Asia in the mid-twentieth century, its association with disposable Asian life was cemented. Yet even as this counterinsurgent term has served an undeniably lethal function, how does it perversely serve as the grounds for imagining solidarity across histories and geographies of imperialist war?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chairs

• Christine Hong, University of California Santa Cruz

• Monica Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Panelists

• Josen M Diaz

• Junyoung Verónica Kim, New York University

• Ma Vang, University of California Merced

• Nerissa Balce, SUNY Stony Brook

Comment

• Jinah Kim, University of California Merced

Biographical Information

Nerissa S. Balce is a cultural studies scholar. She is an Associate professor of Asian American studies at SUNY Stony Brook. Her research focuses on race, gender, state violence and popular culture in the U.S. and the Philippines. With Sarita Echavez See (UC Riverside), Pia Arboleda (UH Manoa) and Francine Marquez (Manila), she was co-curator of the 2019-2021 online art project, Dark Lens / Lente ng Karimlan: The Filipino Camera in Duterte’s Republic, an online exhibition of Filipino atrocity photographs of the Duterte “drug war” by Manila photographers Ezra Acayan, Raffy Lerma, Eloisa Lopez, and Bro. Ciriaco Santiago III. The exhibition featured commissioned poems and captions by 40 scholars and artists from the Philippines and North America. Dark Lens was sponsored by what was then called the Stony Brook University’s Center for the Study of Inequalities, Social Justice and Policy. Balce is the author of the book, Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images and the American Archive, winner of the 2018 Best Book award in Cultural Studies from the Filipino Section of the Association for Asian American Studies. The book was also a finalist for the best book in the social sciences for the 2018 Philippine National Book Awards. At Stony Brook, she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Asian American literature and popular culture. Her essays have appeared in the Asian American Writers' Workshop blog, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Journal of Asian American Studies, Social Text, Peace Review, Hitting Critical Mass and in anthologies such as Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation, "Positively No Filipinos Allowed": Building Communities and Discourse, and Resource Guide to Asian American Literature.

Josen Masangkay Diaz (she/they) is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book, Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2023), analyzes the formation of Filipino American subjectivity at the intersections of colonialism, liberalism, and authoritarianism.

Christine Hong is Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and Literature at UC Santa Cruz where she organized alongside students for ethnic studies and served as the founding chair of CRES. She directs the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz, serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and is part of the leadership core of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council. She also is a founding member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and serves as part of an organizing collective for the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine. In greater Santa Cruz, she serves on the board of Santa Cruz Black and organizes with Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice. Her book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, was published by Stanford University Press in 2020. Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. She also guest-edited a two-volume thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies on Reframing North Korean Human Rights (2013-14); a special issue of positions: asia critique on The Unending Korean War (2015); and a forum of The Abusable Past on “White Terror, ‘Red’ Island: A People’s Archive of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre.”

Jinah Kim is Professor of Communication Studies and affiliated with the Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her scholarship and teaching centers transpacific feminist activism as it intersects with racial justice projects across sites of US Military Empire. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of Pacific Wars in the Americas. She is currently working on two book projects, Against Forgetting and Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea. A core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching collective, she also serves on the board of American Quarterly, Verge: Journal of Global Asias, and Modern Language Association.

Junyoung Verónica Kim is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. Her interdisciplinary research examines how settler militarism, imperialism, and racial capitalism intersect in East Asia and Latin America and across hemispheric Asian American diasporas. She has published on Korean immigration in Argentina, the Global South project, Transpacific Studies, Asian-Latin American literature, and Latin American involvement during the Korean War. Dr. Kim is on the editorial board for the book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” for Palgrave Macmillian, and “Between Asias and Americas” for University of Pittsburgh Press, and serves on the executive committees of numerous scholarly organizations. She is a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective” and an associate member of the Korea Policy Institute. Her book in progress–Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America– centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms, hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. Currently, she has also started working on a new monograph tentatively titled Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War, as well as co-editing a special issue of positions: asia critique on "The Transpacific Korean War."

Monica Kim is Associate Professor and the William Appleman Williams Chair in U.S. International and Diplomatic History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Within and beyond the classroom, she has worked as a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective since 2018. Her book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton: 2019), received prizes from four different scholarly associations: the Association for Asian Studies, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Society for Military History, and the Association for Asian American Studies. She has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and is currently a member of the editorial collective at The Radical History Review. More recently, she co-edited a special issue of Radical History Review, titled "Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination," which came out in 2020. In 2022, she was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Ma Vang is associate professor of critical race and ethnic studies at University of California-Merced. Her book History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies(Duke University Press, 2021) examines how secrecy structures both official knowledge and refugee epistemologies about militarism and forced migration. She is also co-author of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor of Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).