The Grey Area: Rethinking the Problem of the Color Line in Vietnam War-era Korea and Japan
Humanities
Lit 195A: Independent Study
In my project, I examine U.S. military basing sites in Korea and Vietnam as arenas of U.S. civil rights struggle. By highlighting how the Jim Crow color line not only was mapped spatially in “camptowns,” or R-and-R zones around U.S. military bases, but also marked the bodies of Asian military prostitutes as “black” or “white,” my project gives layered consideration to what “civil rights” meant in overseas locations. Civil rights histories sometimes acknowledge that the U.S. military was the first site of desegregation without fully theorizing what this meant. The U.S. government offered “equality” by encouraging African Americans to fight in its violent wars in Korea and Vietnam. Black Americans viewed the war as a gateway to freedom in the United States. By examining two Vietnam War-era cultural texts—a Korean American memoir and a Japanese independent film—I consider how the American color line played out in lethal ways in its theaters of war and empire of bases abroad. My research centers on the cultural archive of U.S. military bases, specifically those within Okinawa and South Korea, in order to examine camptowns as critical sites for the struggle for racial equality and freedom during the Vietnam War era.
