Traveling Chinatowns: Migration, Proximity, and Violence across the Pacific
On a series of hot, humid evenings in early July of 1931, a wave of violence swept over the Korean peninsula under Japanese colonial rule. It began in the port city of Inch'ŏn, where a group of laborers threw stones at Chinese restaurants, barbershops, and tea houses. Within days, such forays had become a nationwide phenomenon, occurring in Kyŏngsŏng, Pyŏngyang, Wonsan, and other cities. In Pyŏngyang, where the violence took its most fatal form, stones were replaced by knives, axes, and heavy sticks which would turn the skirmish into a bloody massacre. Houses were wrecked, housewares stolen, shops destroyed, residents beaten and stabbed to death—regardless of gender and age. It seemed that “everything Chinese” was to be wiped out. What drove this brutal street violence targeting the Chinese house in the colony? What was it that allowed for a colonized people to commit deadly violence against other minority groups and claim the right to kill them?
Tracing the origin of anti-Chinese riots in colonial Korea, my book, Traveling Chinatowns: Migration, Proximity, and Violence across the Pacific, situates “Chinatown” as an imaginative and material space within the global history of empire, labor migration, and violence. Behind what may appear to be the singular expression of xenophobia lay the translocal circulation of racial hatred and imaginings in the age of empires, in which Chinese migrants became a paradoxical figure in the colonial division of humanity. That “everything Chinese” was an accepted target for atrocious acts of brutality further illuminates the presence of “Chinese” as a category founded on sheer hatred against migrants. By analyzing architectural spaces and narratives of Chinese migration—moving ships, treaty ports, shophouses, detective fiction, exposé journalism, police photography—the book examines how Chinatown in colonial Korea became a space that would both allay and create anxiety about colonial proximity, inextricably entwined with global circuits of racial ideas, imaginings, and hatred in the era of emancipation. I argue that Chinatown served as a paradoxical site of imperial formations that required at
once both the cross-border circulation of people and restrictive spatial measures to manage that mobility. The surge of anti-migrant violence was not a phenomenon peculiar to Korea, especially when we look at the constellation of anti-Chinese riots across Asia and the Pacific, from San Francisco and Torreón to Jakarta and Darwin. The book uncovers the intertwined histories of the “Chinese Question” and asks how conventional understandings of anti-Asian racism might look different if thought and seen from a colony in East Asia.
Drawing from architectural history, Asian/American studies, and postcolonial theory, the book places a particular focus on physical interventions into the built environment, from coolie ships and shophouses to police surveillance and exposé journalism. In doing so, the book seeks to contribute to the historical study of Asian racialization by emphasizing the materiality of its constitution and reification in spatial terms.
Tracing the origin of anti-Chinese riots in colonial Korea, my book, Traveling Chinatowns: Migration, Proximity, and Violence across the Pacific, situates “Chinatown” as an imaginative and material space within the global history of empire, labor migration, and violence. Behind what may appear to be the singular expression of xenophobia lay the translocal circulation of racial hatred and imaginings in the age of empires, in which Chinese migrants became a paradoxical figure in the colonial division of humanity. That “everything Chinese” was an accepted target for atrocious acts of brutality further illuminates the presence of “Chinese” as a category founded on sheer hatred against migrants. By analyzing architectural spaces and narratives of Chinese migration—moving ships, treaty ports, shophouses, detective fiction, exposé journalism, police photography—the book examines how Chinatown in colonial Korea became a space that would both allay and create anxiety about colonial proximity, inextricably entwined with global circuits of racial ideas, imaginings, and hatred in the era of emancipation. I argue that Chinatown served as a paradoxical site of imperial formations that required at
once both the cross-border circulation of people and restrictive spatial measures to manage that mobility. The surge of anti-migrant violence was not a phenomenon peculiar to Korea, especially when we look at the constellation of anti-Chinese riots across Asia and the Pacific, from San Francisco and Torreón to Jakarta and Darwin. The book uncovers the intertwined histories of the “Chinese Question” and asks how conventional understandings of anti-Asian racism might look different if thought and seen from a colony in East Asia.
Drawing from architectural history, Asian/American studies, and postcolonial theory, the book places a particular focus on physical interventions into the built environment, from coolie ships and shophouses to police surveillance and exposé journalism. In doing so, the book seeks to contribute to the historical study of Asian racialization by emphasizing the materiality of its constitution and reification in spatial terms.