Reauthenticating Race: Na Sejin and the Recycling of Colonial Physical Anthropology in Postcolonial Korea

Kim, Hoi-eun

doi:10.1353/jks.2016.0019

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…일부 보건학 전문가들과 의과대학 교수들은 사설을 통해 일반인들이 마스크를 착용하는 습관은 “2차 대전기 일본에 의해 만들어진” 것이라며 과학적으로는 오히려 “해롭다”는 의견을 제시하기 시작했다. 61) 이처럼 식민지 조선의 마스크 착용 실천의 역사가 재발명되고 마스크 착용이 과학적으로 부적절한 것으로 재정의되는 과정은 당시 남한에서 진행되던 의학적, 과학적 탈식민화 기획들과 적어도 간접적으로나마 연결되어 있었겠지만, 이에 관한 연구는 추후 과제로 남겨둔다( Kim, 2016 ; Hyun, 2019 ).…”

Section: 결론unclassified

The Emergence and Development of Hygienic Masks in Colonial Korea

Hyun¹

2022

Korean J Med Hist

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This paper examines the social life of masks in colonial Korea with a focus on their use in hygienic practices. It argues that masks first appeared in the disease control scene in late 1919 when the Governor-General of Korea belatedly introduced preventative measures against the Spanish Influenza pandemic. Since then, the central and regional hygiene authorities had begun to encourage colonial Koreans to wear masks whenever respiratory disease epidemics transpired. Simultaneously, Korean doctors and news reporters framed mask-wearing as something needed for family hygiene, particularly for trans-seasonal child health care, and advised colonial Korean women to manage and wear masks. This paper also reveals that the primary type of masks used in colonial society was black-colored Japanese respirators. Its design was the main point of contention in the debates on the effectiveness of masks against disease infection. Finally, it also highlights that the wide support of using masks by medical doctors and authorities was not based on scientific evidence but on empirical rules they developed through the pandemic and epidemics. The mask-usage practice would be challenged only when South Korean doctors reframed it as a “Japanese custom not grounded on science” at the height of postcolonial nationalism and the raised concern about the artifact’s usefulness during the Hong Kong Influenza pandemic of 1968.

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Section: 결론unclassified

The Emergence and Development of Hygienic Masks in Colonial Korea

Hyun¹

2022

Korean J Med Hist

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“…Mizuno et al (2018) seeks the transformation of Japanese colonial development in transport and power infrastructure into the Cold War technical and medical aid in Asia. Hyun (2017) and Jung and Kim (2017) reveal how colonial networks between Japanese and Korean scientists were reconstructed and reconnected in the new Cold War context, while Kim (2016) shows how a Korean physical anthropologist trained in colonial medical institutions recycled colonial knowledge for nationalist purposes. In addition, Kim (2017) illuminates the Korean state's eugenic control of disability as being similar to that of the colonial government.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blood purity and scientific independence: blood science and postcolonial struggles in Korea, 1926–1975

Hyun

2019

Sci Context

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ArgumentAfter World War II, blood groups became a symbol of anti-racial science. This paper aims to shed new light on the post-WWII history of blood groups and race, illuminating the postcolonial revitalization of racial serology in South Korea. In the prewar period, Japanese serologists developed a serological anthropology of Koreans in tandem with Japanese colonialism. The pioneering Korean hematologist Yi Samyŏl , inspired by decolonization movements during the 1960s, excavated and appropriated colonial serological anthropology to prove Koreans as biologically independent from the Japanese. However, his racial serology of Koreans shared colonial racism with Japanese anthropology, despite his anti-colonial nationalism.

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“…Hoi-Eun Kim’s research also shows how South Korean physicians developed their own sense of “superiority.” According to Kim, South Korean physicians who were educated in the colonial period used “some of the exact same anthropometric data” that their Japanese teachers and colleagues used and provided “a simple upside-down interpretation that attested to the racial distinctiveness and superiority of the Korean people as a unique and singular ethno-nation” (2016: 453). In this way, “the political utility of physical anthropology remained and was in the service of the new demands of the postcolonial nation-state” (Kim, 2016: 453).…”

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confidence: 99%

Specters of comfort women: Biopolitical colonial warfare, questions of humanity, and the haunted future

Kim-Kiteishvili

2023

Violence: An International Journal

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The memories of “comfort women” have been discursively represented primarily within the dynamic discussions that define narratives regarding the universal human rights of women. In this article, I attempt to re-read the history of the comfort women system against the paradigmatic human rights narratives of gender-based violence while contextualizing its history within the legacy of colonial racism. The understanding of the comfort women system as colonial violence that I put forward thus challenges the basic assumptions of current debates on contested memories in East Asia. For this, I draw on haunting aspects of Zainichi Korean documentary filmmaker Soonam Park’s archivization of human suffering during the colonial period and on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. I further discuss the contrasting implications of W. E. B. Du Bois’s visits to Japan and to the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in light of Michael Rothberg’s reading of Du Bois and of his conceptual reflections on “marking caesuras.” In this regard, I characterize Imperial Japan as the absent empire of postcolonial grammatology, underscoring thereby the manner in which Eurocentrism, binary thinking, and habitual orientation around the color line inhabit and determine much of the work carried out under the banner of postcolonial studies. “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost.” – Hamlet.

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Reauthenticating Race: Na Sejin and the Recycling of Colonial Physical Anthropology in Postcolonial Korea

Cited by 9 publications

References 20 publications

The Emergence and Development of Hygienic Masks in Colonial Korea

The Emergence and Development of Hygienic Masks in Colonial Korea

Blood purity and scientific independence: blood science and postcolonial struggles in Korea, 1926–1975

Specters of comfort women: Biopolitical colonial warfare, questions of humanity, and the haunted future

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