Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945

By Su Yun Kim

In Imperial Romance, Su Yun Kim argues that the idea of colonial intimacy within the Japanese empire of the early twentieth century had a far broader and more popular influence on discourse makers, social leaders, and intellectuals than previously understood. Kim investigates representations of Korean-Japanese intimate and familial relationships—including romance, marriage, and kinship—in literature, media, and cinema, alongside documents that discuss colonial policies during the Japanese protectorate period and colonial rule in Korea (1905–45).

Focusing on Korean perspectives, Kim uncovers political meaning in the representation of intimacy and emotion between Koreans and Japanese portrayed in print media and films. Imperial Romance disrupts the conventional reading of colonial-period texts as the result of either coercion or the disavowal of colonialism, thereby expanding our understanding of colonial writing practices. The theme of intermarriage gave elite Korean writers and cultural producers opportunities to question their complicity with imperialism. Their fictions challenged expected colonial boundaries, creating tensions in identity and hierarchy, and also in narratives of the linear developmental trajectory of modernity. Examining a broad range of writings and films from this period, Imperial Romance maps the colonized subjects' fascination with their colonizers and with moments that allowed them to become active participants in and agents of Japanese and global imperialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501751899

Book preview

IMPERIAL ROMANCE

Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945

Su Yun Kim

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction

1. Civilization and Enlightenment

2. Under the Same Roof

3. Wartime Ideology and the Integration of Korean-Japanese Mixed Families, 1930s

4. Romance and Colonial Universalism

5. Visualizing International and Korean-Japanese Marriage in Print Media

Epilogue

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Tables

Figures

2.1. Pictures of Prince Ŭn and Princess Pangja.

2.2. Wedding photo of Prince Ŭn and Princess Pangja.

2.3. Announcement of royal engagement.

2.4. Before the royal wedding of the crown prince, visits to homes representing ‘Japan and Korea as the same body.’

3.1. Intermarriage statistics featured in the magazine Naisen ittai.

3.2. The march to initiate Japanese military participation in Love and the Vow.

5.1. Still from Angels on the Streets.

5.2. Sarangen kukkyŏngi ŏpta (Love has no borders).

5.3. A cover image of Naisen ittai.

Tables

3.1. Number of Korean-Japanese marriages between 1923 and 1937

3.2. Number of Korean-Japanese marriages between 1938 and 1942

Acknowledgments

Like many monographs dealing with colonial archives, this book has taken over a decade to finish, with many twists and turns. Many mentors, teachers, colleagues, and friends inspired this project along the journey. I am eternally grateful to them.

First, I thank my teachers and friends at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). I feel fortunate and honored to have received the guidance of such dedicated people, scholarly and politically, who offered models of how to be a scholar, thinker, and human being. My peers at UCSD have turned out to be lifelong friends and supporters, even when we live on different continents. Lisa Yoneyama, Jin-kyung Lee, Takashi Fujitani, Lisa Lowe, and Yingjin Zhang provided instrumental comments on earlier versions of this book. Lisa Yoneyama was the best adviser any student could wish for. To her, I express my heartfelt gratitude for years of guidance and support. Jin and Tak have guided me with generosity and intellectual rigor throughout the years. I am also deeply thankful to Shelley Streeby and the late Rosemary Marangoly George, whose teachings have stayed with me and with this project. I had the best group of friends in graduate school: Neda Atanasoski, Aimee Bahng, Bill Boyer, Yufang Cho, Kimberly Chung, Shih-szu Hsu, Julie Hua, Denise Khor, Jinah Kim, Kate McDonald, Ryan Moran, Gabriela Nuñez, Tomo Sasaki, Kazuyo Tsuchiya, and Rika Yonemura-Fabian. I am grateful for our continuous friendships and emotional support, on top of our intellectual exchanges. I thank Se-hyun Cho, Inyi Choi, Heasoo Hwang, and Ji Hee Jung for including me in the sisterhood that started in San Diego and continues in Korea.

Outside of UCSD, many mentors and friends supported this book by reading parts of earlier versions or helping me locate sources. I am grateful to Steve Chung, Michael Cronin, Todd A. Henry, Kelly Y. Jeong, Sonja M. Kim, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Lee Hwajin, Yoon Sun Yang, Yang Insil, and Kyu Hyun Kim. Namhee Lee’s seminar at the University of California, Los Angeles, was a critical point in my intellectual journey. At Yonsei University, I benefited from the institutional support for visiting scholars and from many individuals’ generosity. I am thankful to Kim Chul, Lee Kyoung-hoon, the Hanil Munhak Yŏn’guhoe members, Baek Moon-im, and Kim Hyun-ju. In Kyoto, I am grateful to Itagaki Ryuta for hosting me at Doshisha University as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow. I also thank Mizuno Naoki, the members of the former Kyoto Korean Studies Consortium, and colleagues and friends who helped my research while sharing many enjoyable hours: Hong Jong-wook, Jeong Jong-hyun, Ko Youngjin, Lee Sung Yup, Chung Chongwha, Sue Hyun Kim, Lee Dae Hwa, Kim Hyeong-jeong, and Lee Hwajin and Yuka Kanno, Horie Yuri, Kanako Akaeda, and Sophia Lee in the Kyoto Queer Reading Group. Watanabe Naoki and the Jinbun study members welcomed me to their monthly meeting in Tokyo, although I was only an occasional visitor.

At Hamilton College, a postdoctoral fellowship in the Asian Studies Program supported some of the research and writing that went into producing this book. I thank my colleagues and friends in my home department, comparative literature, and beyond: Anna Oldfield, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Peter Rabinowitz, Anjela Peck, Lisa Trivedi, Thomas Wilson, Kyoko Omori, Emily Rohrbach, Aaron Spevack, Ayfer Candeger, and Patricia O’Neill. I also thank Steve Yao for hosting the famous noodle nights at Utica and to other attendees; it eased my transition to upstate New York.

The University of Hong Kong provided an excellent environment for research. The Faculty of Arts generously sponsored my manuscript workshop and provided additional funding for publishing this book. My special thanks go to Derek Collins, the dean of the Faculty of Arts, for his support. I am grateful for the mentorship of Charles Schencking, Timothy O’Leary, Adam Jaworski, and Shu-mei Shih. During our few years of overlap at the University of Hong Kong, Louise Edward and Kam Louie offered helpful guidance for my research and writing. It was a stimulating experience to work with Pei-yin Lin, a fellow scholar of colonialism in East Asia. Our co-edited volume had a valuable influence on the final writing stage of this book. I would like to express my special thanks to my Korean studies colleagues Paul S. Cha and Kangsoon Lee for their support. I also thank my colleagues and friends in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (SMLC). Special thanks are due to the librarians Diana Tsui and Lucinda Wong and to Shirley Chan, Zena Cheung, and the other SMLC office staff.

My research and writing would not have been possible without generous financial support from UCSD, the Pacific Rim Research Program of the University of California, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, Hamilton College, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the General Research Fund–Early Career Scheme from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong. The University of Hong Kong also provided various forms of structural support for the research, writing, and publication of this book.

Parts of earlier versions of this book were presented in multiple places. I would like to thank numerous organizers and commentators: the late Nancy Abelmann, Jin-kyung Park, Andre Schmid, Janet Poole, Kyeong-Hee Choi, Youngju Ryu, Catherine Ryu, Christopher P. Hanscom, Dennis Washburn, Leo T. S. Ching, Todd A. Henry, Itagaki Ryuta, Mizuno Naoki, Watanabe Naoki, Loretta Kim, Barbara Molony, Tadashi Ishikawa, and Tomoyuki Sasaki. Theodore Jun Yoo and Kyeong-Hee Choi offered instrumental guidance in the book manuscript workshop; I am grateful to them for traveling so far to give their criticism and encouragement. I am greatly indebted to Aimee Bahng and Daniel Poch for reading the entire manuscript and delivering detailed and insightful feedback.

Part of chapter 4 appeared in an earlier version as Racialization and Colonial Space: Intermarriage in Yi Hyo-sŏk’s Works in the Journal of Korean Studies 18, no. 1 (2013): 29–59. I thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance in securing images and permissions: Lee Sung Yup for introducing me to Professor Nagai Kazu, and Professor Nagai for help acquiring a rare wedding celebration photo of Yi Ŭn and Yi Pangja, and Chung Chonghwa and No Ch’angwu at the Korean Film Archive.

I thank my editors Pauline Lewis, Susan Whitlock, and Allison Van Deventer for their work on this book at different stages and for offering warm encouragement. At Cornell University Press, Roger Malcolm Haydon provided professional and gracious support throughout the publication process. I appreciate the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. The responsibility for any remaining errors is entirely my own.

Finally, I thank my family for their support on my long journey that took me to many countries far away from them: Kim Bong-woon, Kim Jeol-ja, Kim Su-jin, Kim Sumi, Park Jun-sung, and my late cat, Neo; I am also grateful to Daniel Poch for companionship and love. I dedicate this book to my parents.

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Any book on an East Asian area faces the challenges of romanization. In the case of colonial Korea, where language hybridity or colonial diglossia (a concept I discuss in chapter 4) existed in the context of unequal power relationships, the choices made deserve acknowledgment. For example, by choosing to transcribe naesŏn ilch’e ideology in Korean rather than in the widely used Japanese romanization naisen ittai, I seek to strategically reveal a distinctively Korean rendering of what is generally assumed to be a Japanese colonial term. I have taken inspiration from the colonial diglossia in the 1941 sound film Pando ŭi pom (J. Hantō no haru; Spring of the Korean Peninsula). In this film, a native-Japanese-sounding employee of the railway station announces Seoul Station with the word Keijō is the Japanese reading of Kyŏngsŏng, the colonial name of Seoul (1910–1945), and this was the appropriate rendering in a colonial public space like a train station. In the same film, however, the main Korean characters refer to Seoul as Sŏul—the common Korean name of the city—in dialogue, following the conventions of everyday language. Although Japanese was the lingua franca or national language (J. kokugo) in this period, Koreans continued to appropriate Japanese terms with Korean renderings. It is likely that Korean speakers used naesŏn ilch’e more frequently than naisen ittai, as many Korean-language texts suggest, even toward the end of the colonial period. In Korean-language newspapers, in fact, Governor-General Minami Jirō’s name was always transcribed as Nam Ch’ongdok (Governor-General Nam), which was the Korean reading of his surname and title, sometimes given only in han’gŭl (Korean script) without hanja (Sino-script). With this colonial diglossia in mind, for terms with more than one rendering, I offer each appropriate romanization at a term’s first appearance, using K. to indicate the Korean rendering and J. the Japanese.

I follow the McCune-Reischauer, Hepburn, and Pinyin systems for transcribing Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, respectively, except for names and words widely known in English by other spellings. All Korean, Japanese, and Chinese names are listed with the surname first, followed by the given name, in the customary East Asian order, except when citing Western-language publications. Translations of Korean and Japanese texts are my own unless otherwise stated.

Introduction

IMPERIAL ROMANCE

In the summer of 2016, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea (MMCA) held a retrospective of works by the artist Lee Jung Seob to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. Lee (Yi Chungsŏp, 1916–1956) had been widely cherished in Korea for decades, yet the retrospective was MMCA’s first exhibition of his works and a rare effort to display together pieces that had previously been dispersed among various public and private collections in Korea and abroad.¹ In the exhibition, one room was dedicated to a series of sketch-letters Lee had sent to his family in Japan from 1952 to 1955. Written in Japanese, these letters included cartoonlike sketches of Lee and his family, of his family hugging in a circle, and of children catching fish and crabs. In addition to conveying his love to his family, the letters testify to Lee’s struggle with his loneliness, illness, and depression. They also show Lee’s faint hope for a future family reunion.²

Created in the final years of his life, these sketch-letters provide a rare glimpse into Lee’s emotions. His life story has been the subject of several movies and TV documentaries and a stage play.³ Despite his fame, however, significant aspects of Lee’s personal life have remained obscured. It is not well known, for instance, that his wife was Japanese. Yamamoto Masako came to Korea from Tokyo to marry him in 1945, at the peak of World War II, and she ultimately took their sons back to Japan during the Korean War (1950–1953), resulting in a permanent separation of the family.

Yamamoto and Lee met as fellow students at the famous avant-garde art school Bunka Gakuin (Culture College) during his stay in Tokyo (1936–1943). Lee returned to Korea alone in 1943, but when Yamamoto made her solo trip to Korea, it seemed that their love had overcome the obstacles of war and national borders. When the Japanese Empire fell, political changes in Wonsan, his hometown, did not favor elite landowners, the social group to which he belonged. The Soviet occupation, the new Communist regime in North Korea, and the outbreak of the Korean War pushed Lee and his young family to Busan and then to Jeju Island. For a mixed Korean and Japanese family, the situation was dire. That is why in 1952 Yamamoto took their two sons to her natal home in Tokyo, a more stable place, via a special Japanese ferry arranged for Japanese residents in Korea. Unable to join his family, Lee sent the sketch-letters as his only means of communication, until his lonely death in Seoul in 1956.

These Japanese-language letters revealed intimate details about his family life that the Korean public might have found an uncomfortable reminder of an important aspect of colonial history. While the atrocities and violence of the Japanese Empire had been well documented and memorialized, the intimate and sexual relationships between Koreans and Japanese went unacknowledged in Korea for a long time, although these seemingly separate sets of activities overlapped significantly. Indeed, even the MMCA exhibition played down information about the family’s Japaneseness, probably to make Lee’s personal life more palatable to contemporary Korean viewers. Lee addressed his letters to Yasukata kun and Yasunari kun, using the Japanese names of his two sons. The translations of the letters in the exhibition, however, only provided their Korean names, T’aehyŏn and T’aesŏng, erasing their Japanese identities. Lee had given Yamamoto a Korean name, too, Yi Namdŏk, which he wrote in Sino-script (Japanese kanji) in his letters. The translations again only reproduced the Korean script (han’gŭl). With occasional incorrect Japanese grammar and Korean words such as ppoppo (a childish word for kiss) written in Japanese katakana script (used for foreign words), Lee’s letters display various types of linguistic hybridity, coloniality, and postcoloniality. Yet their public presentation at the MMCA flattened his experience, continuing to obscure the mixed nature of Lee’s family in the public memory of postcolonial Korea despite his fame and the popularity of the paintings of his children.⁴

The need to erase this episode of history is not hard to understand. Colonial memories and traces of Japanese war atrocities still linger in Korea. The violence of the Japanese Empire, including war labor and military recruitment and conscription, as well as the forced abduction of Korean women as comfort women (sex slaves who served the Japanese military in the Asia-Pacific War), has overshadowed the existence of intimate and familial Korean-Japanese relationships since the colonial period. Indeed, Korean-Japanese intermarriage remains a thorny issue for the Korean public. In particular, the issue of comfort women has remained contentious after decades of debates and activism involving the former comfort women, supportive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and scholars. Demands for formal state-level acknowledgment and apology and official compensation are still unresolved (see epilogue).

Further complicating the memory of intermarriage is Korea’s experience immediately following the Asia-Pacific War. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Korean Peninsula was subjected to new colonial forces that initiated its liberation (haebang): the Soviet Union in the north and the Allied forces (primarily the United States) in the south. Korea found itself again involuntarily drawn into global politics at the center of the Cold War framework.⁵ On the one hand, since the decolonization process was managed by outside forces, the eradication of Japanese colonial legacies was not a top priority. During and after the Korean War, the former colonial elites in fact continued to thrive under the regime of Syngman Rhee (1875–1965, r. 1948–1960), while actively erasing the traces of their collaborationist past. On the other hand, the decolonization process brought a stop to colonial wartime assimilation policies; for example, any converted Japanese-style names were reverted to the original Korean names in household registers. While intimate and sexual relationships between Korean women and US military servicemen became visible and emerged as a social problem in the post–Korean War period, the Korean-Japanese intermarriages that had existed during the colonial era disappeared from public memory—until recently.

Yet in an earlier era, intermarriages like Lee Jung Seob’s were encouraged as an ideal kind of union, both by the Japanese colonial government and by Korean intellectuals. Throughout the Japanese Empire, which began with the annexation of Taiwan in 1885 and lasted until the end of World War II, the Japanese mainland government and the colonial governments in Taiwan and Korea, as well as the Japanese puppet regime in Manchuria, all at some point encouraged intermarriage between the Japanese and the colonized populations as part of the empire’s larger assimilation efforts. The Japanese Empire made a concerted effort to implant Japaneseness into its colonial subjects through language and culture.⁶ Taking up the model of French-style settler colonialism in its colonies, particularly in neighboring Korea, the metropolitan government encouraged its mainland population to move to Korea, and colonial authorities attempted to convert colonized subjects into Japanese nationals. Whether promoted by the government or not, intermarriage—marriage between two disparate races or ethnicities—brought the colonizers and the colonized into intimate and sometimes romantic engagement, often resulting in mixed children and families.⁷

In Korea, the encouragement of intermarriage as an assimilation strategy appeared fairly early in the development of Japanese imperialism, but the structural promotion of Korean and Japanese marital unions occurred long after the first general assimilation efforts in the 1910s. Beginning in the late 1930s, the Government-General of Korea’s (GGK) intermarriage campaign emerged as a top-down policy that emphasized the importance of the family unit, with the aim of making Koreans more loyal and reliable imperial subjects. Catchphrases like Love conquers all, which were part of the rhetoric that romanticized the Japanese Empire, emerged with the GGK’s pronounced efforts in support of intermarriage. Some Korean intellectuals agreed on the power of love: "Love overcomes national borders, the ethno-nation [minjok] and class; therefore, Korean-Japanese marriage does not need our worries."⁸ It certainly seems that both Koreans and Japanese wanted to believe that the idealized discourse of romance could resolve colonial and racial conflicts.

Only Koreans, however, actively adopted the theme of intermarriage into their literary fiction. In effect, the romance narrative became a key way to advocate interethnic mixing, making the assimilation program an affective apparatus in colonial territories. Many well-known authors took the intermarriage and romance theme and fictionalized the life of becoming a Korean and Japanese mixed couple or family or the life after the marriage. For the colonial authority, however, it is a complicated question to ask to what extent the GGK’s intermarriage policy was enforced on Koreans, especially when we take a closer look at the systematic support, including legal changes and benefits, given to intermarried couples and mixed families.

Imperial Romance captures this complex phenomenon, analyzing representations of Korean-Japanese intimate relationships—including romance, marriage, and kinship—in Korean popular literature, media, and cinema, alongside documents that discuss colonial policies during the Japanese protectorate period and colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945). Because intermarriage and intimate relationships were encouraged by the colonial government, Koreans’ experience of such intimacy was rare in twentieth-century global colonialism. Focusing on Korean perspectives, the book argues that Korean writers and cultural producers of the first half of the twentieth century displayed a fascination with not only their colonizers but also those moments when colonial subjects become active participants in and agents of Japanese and global imperialism. These moments can be described as cracks in the colonial system—moments, for instance, when Koreans could become equal to the Japanese, with or without the support of the colonial rulers. These fantasies envisioned passing, intermarriage, mixed families, and the full integration of Koreans into the Japanese Empire. And through fiction, the authors sought to spread their imaginations and fantasies into the empire without creating a prominent threat to it. I argue that the theme of intimate relationships, particularly intermarriage, gave elite Korean writers and cultural producers opportunities to explore their feelings about becoming proper imperial subjects. Their fictions, however, complicated the entity of the colonial and imperial subject, creating tensions in identity, imperial hierarchy, and modernization’s developmentalist trajectory. Lee Jung Seob’s sketch-letters, a late example of this cultural production, give us a glimpse of the intricate layers of the experience of intermarriage and mixed family life. The literary works and popular cultural products examined in this book offer additional accounts of the imagined intimacy, family life, and social relationships that were possible within the context of the Japanese Empire’s assimilation program.

Colonial Intimacy and Rethinking Global Imperialism

In recent decades, scholars of imperial and colonial studies have conducted exciting research on the role of intimacy and marriage in imperial projects. They have also explored the similarities in the ways various empires in different locations were invested in colonial intimacy—that is, intimate relationships formed under colonial conditions.⁹ From these studies, it is clear that regulations regarding marriage and family were a critical part of imperial governance in both European and US colonialism. During the early modern period of European imperial expansion, intermarriage played political and economic roles in the frontier settlements of West Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Americas. In these areas, marriages and sexual relationships between European men and local women were fairly common until the early nineteenth century.¹⁰ The changing attitudes toward intermarriage in modern empires were related to territorial expansion. In the early modern period, the global empire system supported the practice of intermarriage because it created connections between the metropole and distant colonies.¹¹ By contrast, in the modern world, where constructing the homogeneity and distinctiveness of a nation was central to maintaining its political boundaries, racial boundaries were rebuilt. In other words, from the early modern era to the modern period, the policies and practices surrounding intimate interactions in the colonies were not based solely on what the metropole considered to be local problems, but were instead connected to the greater well-being of the empire as a whole.¹²

In the modern era, anxieties about racial hybridization played a crucial role in diminishing the imperial centers’ long-standing acceptance of intermarriage. With the consolidation of the boundaries of modern nation-states, European countries and the United States banned most marriages between metropolitan citizens and local colonial subjects, particularly after officials observed a burgeoning number of mixed offspring in colonial societies and an increasing inflow of colonial subjects into the metropoles. The rise in the number of middle-class colonizers moving to the colonies also contributed to the necessity of regulations. As part of this regulatory effort, societies in the imperial metropoles carefully formed modern bourgeois family boundaries that excluded miscegenation and asserted racial and cultural purity, protected by Christian values that negated the hybrid conditions of the frontier.¹³ In the context of European colonialism in Southeast Asia, Ann Laura Stoler argues that the formation of rules for family and marriage was one of the most debated and heavily controlled colonial projects.¹⁴ In colonial communities with mixed-blood descendants, European identity had to be culturally proved. The ways people conducted their private lives at home were closely scrutinized; details including with whom they cohabited, where they lived, what they ate, how they raised their children, what language they chose to speak to servants and family served as evidence of their Europeanness. Home life, in other words, became a factor in determining the colonists’ European respectability.¹⁵

British colonialism in India provoked similar quandaries about hybridity and respectability.¹⁶ Durba Ghosh points out that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, preexisting interracial cohabitation practices confronted new restrictions imposed by the East India Company and the British military to cope with the rise of a middle-class British population in India. High-level officials were discouraged from keeping Indian female companions, and low-level soldiers and employees of the East India Company were encouraged to turn to prostitutes instead of pursuing long-term cohabitation that could lead to conjugality. The colonial authorities also imposed new prohibitions on admitting mixed-race subjects to the civil service and the military, thereby limiting the social mobility of mixed-blood descendants. Once the East India Company and its military began to eliminate interracial conjugality in their communities and stopped hiring mixed-blood people, anxieties about interracial sexual relationships rose to the forefront of colonial policies. As in Southeast Asia, British colonialism in India reminds us that the question of hybridity, both cultural and racial, that destabilized the homogeneities of the colonial social order was a crucial element in discussing anxieties about race, sexuality, and family.¹⁷

Scholars of postcolonial studies have pointed out that the discourses on the metropole’s racial purity were always burdened by racial mixing in the colonies between colonizers and locals. Anxieties about the practice of mixing shaped the definition of racial purity from the inception of race theory in nineteenth-century Europe. Robert J. C. Young convincingly shows, for example, that the formation of the notion of Englishness was based on colonial desire—a process predicated on the reality of cultural and racial hybridization.¹⁸ Albert Memmi, Aimé Césaire, Homi Bhabha, Mary Louise Pratt, Anne McClintock, Young, and others have studied how colonial mixing and hybridity were regulated and managed in various colonial territories. These studies have focused on the influence of the racial mixing and sexuality of Europeans and on European metropoles. Very few scholars, however, have discussed the influence on the colonized subjects, their psychology in terms of a desire for the colonizer’s culture and people. Notably, Frantz Fanon’s seminal Black Skin, White Masks is one of the few works that focus their criticism on the white love, to loosely borrow Vicente L. Rafael’s term, of black Caribbean and African people.¹⁹

Imperial Romance analyzes the colonized subjects’ internalization of colonial intimacy. It is a study of the production of knowledge on colonial Korean intermarriage that expands the meaning of colonial intimacy