What can Asian Studies contribute to an understanding of Black Lives Matters as a global multi-sited movement for racial justice and as a provocation to re-examine prevalent but overlooked assumptions about race? In what was arguably the largest transnational protest movement in global history, an estimated 26 million participants joined BLM protests in the US alone during the summer of 2020, when solidarity marches also took place in cities around the world, including Rio de Janeiro, Brussels, Sydney, and Seoul. The demonstration in South Korea, while modest in scale, generated images that quickly went viral, at a time when the Kpop group BTS and its global fan-base were reported to have donated more than $2 million to the movement. That convergence fueled international media coverage and sparked curiosity about BLM solidarity in Korea. Although hip-hop and rap have influenced youth culture there for decades, less clear is the extent to which that embrace of Black cultural forms has contributed toward countering attitudes of antiblackness and xenophobia more broadly. Recognizing that the work of anti-racism entails the endeavor to historicize racializing projections, this session considers questions concerning the late 19th century to the recent past: How has the racialization of "heug-in" created stereotyped Black spaces in the country, and how might such limits to mobility be overcome by creating new frames that challenge US-centric racial preoccupations? How can a critical perspective on the overlooked history of race in Korea during earlier the historical periods of precolonial and late colonial Korea shed light on the ways in which Koreans navigated the "modern" world in racial terms, including notions of race and blackness fundamentally embedded in their understanding of the Age of Empire?
Organized as an Innovative Panel, this session opens with remembrances of our late colleague Sue-Je Gage, anthropologist and gender-studies scholar who helped to pioneer studies of race as a subfield within Korean Studies.