Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family

Korean Studies
Volume 32 (2008)
pages 56-85
DOI: 10.1353/ks.0.0010
E-ISSN: 1529-1529; Print ISSN: 0145-840X

Mary Lee, Director
Pacific Policy Research Center, Honolulu, Hawaii

This article discusses the production of “mixed-race” subjectivity in South Korea.  It asks: how can we understand the lived experiences and histories of mixed-race people as integral to the logic of national governance, both past and present?  Instead of regarding mixed-race people in Korea as an aberration or regrettable phenomenon, this article contends that their “otherness” is an outcome of the intensions, contradictions, and insecurities of national governance which coheres around discourse and legislation on the family.  The testimony of various mixed-race people living in Korea reveals the racial, gendered, and sexual discursive modalities through which they were rendered outside the scope and meaning of Koreanness.  Their testimony also corresponds with the discursive limits set forth by the government, particularly in the establishment of laws that govern desired familial relations within the climate of Cold War militarism, industrialization, and the post-democratization era of globalization and official multiculturalism.  The longstanding and still practiced abjection of mixed-race people from South Korean society cannot be understood without exploring the intersection between a racial politics of “blood purity” and a gendered politics of patriarchy that works in service of an imagined Korean homogeneity.

Driven: Branding Derek Jeter, Redefining Race

NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture
Volume 17, Number 2, Spring 2009
pages  70-79
E-ISSN: 1534-1844 Print ISSN: 1188-9330
DOI: 10.1353/nin.0.0041

Roberta Newman

Promoting the opening of the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibit, “The Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947-1957,” curator Ann Meyerson noted that for the first time since Jackie Robinson crossed the major league’s color line in 1947, not a single African American player was likely to be included on either of the city’s teams’ twenty-five man rosters in 2007. Excluding, for the sake of argument, Mets prospect Lastings Milledge, now with the Nationals, where did that leave the captain of the New York Yankees, Derek Jeter?  In a 2005 interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Jeter handled the subject of his race with characteristic, media-savvy care: “My Dad is black, my Mom is Irish, and I’m Catholic, so I hear everything. I’m in New York and there are all different people, all races and religions. I can relate to everyone.”

Since his 1996 rookie season, Derek Jeter has not only played shortstop for the New York Yankees, he has parlayed his ability to “relate to everyone” into what advertisers hope will translate into an ability to “sell to everyone,” working overtime as a pitching machine.  Most of the products Jeter pitched before 2006 were ones generally associated with baseball and conventionally endorsed by its players-Nike sneakers, Gatorade sports drink, Ford cars and trucks, and a variety of breakfast and snack foods, including Ritz crackers, Post cereals, Skippy peanut butter, and, perhaps inevitably, Oreos.  Not so surprisingly for one of the most generously compensated players in the game, Jeter also endorsed a financial institution, Fleet Bank. In his role as a well-known man about town, not altogether unfamiliar to the readers of New York’s gossip columns, Jeter also appeared with his equally famous, generous compensator, George M. Steinbrenner, in a Visa commercial. Recently, however, Jeter has branched out beyond the expected, connecting his image to two very different…

Sonata Mulattica: Poems

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2009
240 pages
6.3 × 9.3 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-07008-8

Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English
University of Virginia

In a book-length lyric narrative inspired by history and imagination, a much celebrated poet re-creates the life of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist.

The son of a white woman and an “African Prince,” George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860) travels to Vienna to meet “bad-boy” genius Ludwig van Beethoven.  The great composer’s subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale.