Citation:
Date Presented:
February 4Abstract:
Since 2009, a network of Korean American actors and non-Korean American allies have successfully erected seven memorials on public property in the Greater New York area, California, and Virginia that commemorate the suffering of so-called "comfort women," colonized women—predominantly Korean—coerced into prostitution by the Imperial Japanese army before and during World War II. While collective action around the comfort women issue began in Korea in 1989, the first American political actors took up the issue in the early 2000s, while the first widespread mobilization of Korean American actors did not occur until 2007. After two years of inactivity, why did Korean American interest groups mobilize again for the comfort women issue, and why did they choose the strategy of erecting memorials in a nation that had no direct connections to the former comfort women? Pushing against the dominant transnational perspectives—which view the 2009 memorial campaign as a product of international actors—I argue that the memorial campaign is predominantly local in its origin, framing, and objectives.
To broaden the picture, my research on the 2009 memorial campaign seeks to problematize the dominant definitions of "transnationalism" in political science and social movement literature. As I will explore further, current sociology and political science literature often conceptualizes transnationalism in a manner that implies that the movement of frames, tactics, and objectives occurs in a top-down process—from a collective, imagined "transnational" space to a particularized locality. By causally explaining local phenomena as products of transnational factors, the dominant conceptualization of transnationalism renders invisible the impact and agency of local actors. In seeking a better understanding of the relationship between the transnational and the local, I have studied the 2009 memorial campaign as a case study that demonstrates how the dominant literature's transnational approach fails to explain patterns of Korean American mobilization.