Visiting Assistant Professor | East Asian Cultures; Liberal Studies
NYU
Junyoung Verónica Kim is Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Cultures in Liberal Studies at New York University. Her interdisciplinary research examines how settler militarism, imperialism, and racial capitalism intersect in East Asia and Latin America and across hemispheric Asian American diasporas. She has published on Korean immigration in Argentina, the Global South project, Transpacific Studies, Asian-Latin American literature, and Latin American involvement during the Korean War.
Dr. Kim is on the editorial board for the book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” for Palgrave Macmillian, and “Between Asias and Americas” for University of Pittsburgh Press, and serves on the executive committees of numerous scholarly organizations. She is a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective” and an associate member of the Korea Policy Institute. Her book in progress–Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America– centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms, hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. Currently, she has also started working on a new monograph tentatively titled Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War, as well as co-editing a special issue of positions: asia critique on “The Transpacific Korean War.”
Transpacific Freedom Dreams Across Korea-Mexico: The Specter of North Korea and Insurgent Kinships in José Revueltas’s The Motives of Cain
Abstract
This paper examines José Revueltas’s literary text The Motives of Cain, which in its counterhegemonic representation of the Korean War critiques U.S. raced narratives of empire–– in particular the representation of the United States as a benevolent savior of Third World peoples–– that shape dominant Cold War knowledge production.
By drawing connections between U.S. settler imperialism in Mexico and Korea, the novella unsettles prevailing interpretations of the Korean War, making intimate what is rendered distant, rendering tactile what is made invisible, and making present what has been ghosted by U.S. militarized technologies of abstraction, thereby conjuring forms of embodied critique that can imagine a world within and beyond geographies of war, carcerality, and colonial racial capitalism.
In The Motives of Cain, the fabulation of an insurgent kinship between a Chicano soldier and a North Korean prisoner that betrays state-sanctioned formations of family, friendship, or camaraderie offers a glimpse of transpacific freedom dreams marked by etchings of war’s death and dispossession. By fabulating an insurgent intimacy, Revueltas’s literary text conjures decolonial futurities across U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the Korean peninsula.
