https://www.scribd.com/document/332162631/Grace-M-Cho-Haunting-the-Korean-Diaspora
Haunting the Korean Diaspora Paperback – December 2, 2008
by Grace M. Cho (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 27 ratings
Since the Korean War--the forgotten war--more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen. More than 100,000 women married GIs and moved to the United States. Through intellectual vigor and personal recollection, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.
Grace M. Cho exposes how Koreans in the United States have been profoundly affected by the forgotten war and uncovers the silences and secrets that still surround it, arguing that trauma memories have been passed unconsciously through a process psychoanalysts call "transgenerational haunting." Tracing how such secrets have turned into "ghosts," Cho investigates the mythic figure of the yanggongju, literally the "Western princess," who provides sexual favors to American military personnel. She reveals how this figure haunts both the intimate realm of memory and public discourse, in which narratives of U.S. benevolence abroad and assimilation of immigrants at home go unchallenged. Memories of U.S. violence, Cho writes, threaten to undo these narratives--and so they have been rendered unspeakable.
At once political and deeply personal, Cho's wide-ranging and innovative analysis of U.S. neocolonialism and militarism under contemporary globalization brings forth a new way of understanding--and remembering--the impact of the Korean War.
232 pages
Product details
Publisher : University of Minnesota Press (December 2, 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 232 pages
Grace M. Cho
Grace M. Cho is assistant professor of sociology, anthropology, and women's studies at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. She is a contributing performance artist for the art collective Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the Forgotten War.
Top reviews from the United States
James A. Zoller
4.0 out of 5 stars An elusive subjectReviewed in the United States on January 14, 2013
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I like the book, as the stars indicate, but it is important to know that this is an academic study. Cho necessarily works to support her theories after the manner of academic researchers both to place her work within an ongoing discussion and to give credence to an inherently problematic subject. The subject matter is by nature elusive, given that it rests on silence, absence, and the presence of ghost and transgenerational memories. There is a lot here to stimulate one's thinking and a lot of research for one to pursue as well. So if one is coming to the book with the understanding that it is, in fact, an academic study written in academic language, great.
But if one is looking for a book with strong narratives, let's say as one finds in memoir or in fiction, this book will be a tough read.
7 people found this helpful
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Cynthia Rich
5.0 out of 5 stars A non-academic reader strongly recommendsReviewed in the United States on August 23, 2009
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This powerful book is amazing--beautifully written, its creative approach opens up ways of understanding even more than its important subject. What can/do we do when we are faced with social and familial silences--how can those empty spaces be filled?
In ways that feminists of the sixties and seventies would welcome, Cho
blends the personal and the political, and shows how inextricably they are connected in women's lives. Cho also blends her
serious academic research on her subject with the understandings that can come from art and dreams.
It's all woven together in a flow that pulls the reader forward.
I found this book almost unbearably painful and yet so illuminating. As someone who comes from 50 years of progressive and feminist activism and who was a young woman during the 1950-53 years, Cho's work showed me I didn't begin to know how much I didn't know.
I strongly recommend Cho's work, of course to academics, of course to children of the Korean diaspora, but also to any reader who wants to understand her world better and to understand women's place in that world.
18 people found this helpful
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Kermit L. Shields
5.0 out of 5 stars Important book necessary to appreciate the history of Asian women during war and occupation by foreign troops for past 100 yearsReviewed in the United States on April 25, 2016
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Well written and presented, fascinating approach to understanding the mostly undocumented history of Asian women's pain and suffering for centuries.
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Mai
1.0 out of 5 stars A lost opportunity for this subject.Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2014
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The subject of women in countries at war is difficult. I had hoped for a sensitive and compassionate treatment. What I found was a manifesto that became increasingly opaque. The tone of the writing is angry, strident, and hostile. Phrases like "transnational macrospectable" lost me. I was left believing that the author sincerely wished the Korean War had ended in a different way, with North Korea taking the entire peninsula.
9 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in the United States on May 13, 2017
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great condition.
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uni park
5.0 out of 5 stars unraveling the fabric of erasureReviewed in the United States on January 27, 2009
The subject of the Korean War is often times dominated by a distinctly male point of view and limited to cold war ideological debates. The female perspective has been irrelevant and unvoiced. And the uncomfortable topic of sexual relations in geopolitical sphere's is rarely approached critically. Cho brings to light the thousands of Korean women who have worked inside the camptowns situated on the periphery of the U.S. military bases in South Korea [which once numbered as many as a hundred]. These women have been mostly invisible in the current body of historical literature about the affects of the Korean war. Cho dissects the origins and the complicated role of the 'Yangongju', shamed and yet implicit in spurring South Korea from a third world, war-torn, divided nation into one of the fastest grown economies in the developed world.
Through her book, Cho makes a bold attempt to speak about the things which we are told are unspeakable. And in that process of writing, she begins to identify this collective amnesia about the past which continues to seep into the present psyche. Transgenerational haunting is a fairly new concept that many may dismiss as a mere belief in spirits or ghosts which are quite common place in eastern cultures. This concept, first introduced by psychoanalysts studying family members of holocaust survivors, recognized that psychological trauma's have been unconsciously passed on to generations long after the trauma has been inflicted. The unspoken painful legacies of colonization, war, oppression, injustice, violence all deeply affect our cultural identities. And Cho, by excavating these buried truths, begins to unleash the collective grief and to heal the scars transfered upon the scattered diaspora.
Cho's poetic and at times fragmented narration, also reveal influences by the late artist, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose work touched upon themes that often dealt with loss: of country, language, memory, time. Cho also references quotes from "Dictee", the artists' most well-known piece that is written in a nonlinear, disconnected manner, and using multiple voices. Cho's own writing fluctuates out of objective facts to subjective memory, weaving in and out of the cold facts of the forgotten war and at the same time, piecing together a personal story that can never be fully known. One is easily drawn into the dream sequences that Cho so intimately shares with her readers, compelling and effectual in getting a sense of the personal. The style and structure of the book conveys an unconventional experimental approach at unraveling the 'fabric of erasure'.
As a 1.5 generation Korean-American, my immigration to the US was only made possible through the marriage of an aunt who worked in the camptowns and married an American GI. I am often struck by the gaps in my own family past. Reading 'Haunting the Korean Diaspora' is a profound remembrance and acknowledgment of the many thousands of Korean women who survived and their herstories that are both absent and present in our lives.
26 people found this helpful
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Emil Sinclair
5.0 out of 5 stars Literary and Scholarly work of ArtReviewed in the United States on July 23, 2017
This book was simply gorgeous. Cho's choice to step out of academic depersonalization was an effective choice: it read with the power only the personal can touch. Her mix of lyrical flow with scholastic rigor made for a deeply rich, moving, and haunting read. I highly recommend for anyone who is interested in diaspora, cultural trauma, and the visionary realms.
3 people found this helpful
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Brenton witherow
1.0 out of 5 stars Book for the Un-AmericansReviewed in the United States on October 14, 2016
The book was well written and very poetic. I'm just not into reading Anti-American material (If I could have given negative rating I would have.) If your Un-American or you hate the United States you'll love this book.
2 people found this helpful
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