UCLA

This dissertation examines the discursive construction and management of the honhyŏla (the “mixed-blood child”), or “mixed-race” Korean born during U.S. military occupation (1945-48), the transition to the First Republic of Korea (1948-60), the Korean War (1950-53), and the postwar decades that followed. Utilizing South Korea- and U.S.-based archives, I examine films, memoirs, and media accounts, as well as documents from government agencies and non-profit organizations from between the late 1940s and the 1980s. The disavowal resulting from the U.S. military empire’s expansion into the Asia Pacific and the South Korean nationalist project have shaped the material and discursive processes that render mixed-race Koreans and Korean-Americans into gendered and racialized subjects of the Cold War. I argue that the concept of “mixed-race” is a transnational regime of racialization produced out of the contradictions of U.S. narratives of benevolence as they intersect with Korean nationalist investments in racial purity. This work unpacks how honhyŏl or “mixed-blood” is a political construct that benefitted the development of South Korea as an ethnic nationalist state and the U.S. as a Cold War superpower. I foreground how assumptions of normative sexual relations and investments in heteropatriarchy are at once reinscribed and scrambled in the constitution of “mixed-race” as a discursive, bureaucratic, and ontological category. I emphasize how different modes of cultural production have generated knowledge about mixed-race Koreans, and narrate how the post-liberation era of USAMGIK (United States Army Military Government in Korea) and the ensuing Korean War produced political conditions of racial exclusion that denied mixed-race subjects citizenship and history. “Conditions of Containment” stresses the impact of ethnic nationalism, Cold War geopolitics, and cultural productions on the erasure and overrepresentation of the mixed-race figure and offers an alternative reading of subjecthood in Cold War South Korea and the United States.