Education at the Crossroads of Trans-Pacific U.S. and Japanese Imperialisms: Korean Schooling in Territorial Hawaii, 1906–1940
Presented by Jisoo Hyun (she/her), University of Washington
Date/Time: December 8, 2022. 4:00 PM-5:30 PM (Seattle, PST) / 7:00 PM-8:30PM (New York, EST)/ December 9, 9:00 AM—10:30 AM (Seoul, KST)
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Abstract
U.S. territorial Hawaii (1898–1959) was a highly contested site of engagement for immigrant Koreans. There, they encountered not only White Euro-Americans’ colonialist impulse for Americanization and the racial and economic subjugation of “Oriental” immigrants by a powerful and privileged haole (white) class, but also the strong nationalistic desire of Korean expatriates to liberate Korea from Japanese colonial rule. In this context of trans-Pacific U.S./Japanese imperial entanglement, Korean immigrants defied the status quo to develop and practice their own conception of a “proper” education. Drawing upon the cases of the first two Korean private schools in pre-statehood Hawaii and examining the stakeholders therein, this talk demonstrates the ways in which such educational institutions, established and run by Korean immigrants whose lives were enmeshed in the US/Japanese imperial projects, functioned as sites of negotiation for the meanings and methods of agency, nationalism, and citizenship. It argues that Korean-immigrant educators offered a distinctive brand of Americanization and civic education—one that emerged from a desire to establish Korean national sovereignty, promote ethnic nationalism, and create cultural differentiation, all while trying to emulate and assimilate into Protestant America. The stories of the two Korean schools and their politics of education offer a glimpse of the complex immigrant world that developed in relation to hegemonic forces of imperialism, nationalism, religion, race, and ethnicity while revealing a novel form of modern subjectivity that was called into existence within this specific historical and regional setting.
About the Presenter
Jisoo Hyun is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Education program at the University of Washington. Her dissertation project on which the talk is based received the 2020 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. She holds an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she worked as a researcher at the Institute for Modern Korean Studies in Seoul. There, she encountered the archives of two Korean private schools in Hawaii: the Korean Central School (1906–1919) and the Korean Christian Institute (1915–1940). The stacks of yellowing school records and photos—smiling Korean immigrant kids, Anglo-American and Korean teachers, lush Hawaiian palm trees—fascinated her, and led her to explore further. She found little documentation of the schools in either Korean or American historiographies and ultimately decided to devote her doctoral dissertation to them. Her study focuses on the schooling experience of Korean immigrants in territorial Hawaii (1898–1959) and poses new questions about its substance and significance, not only in relation to the American imperial project but also within the context of the competing imperialisms of the United States and Japan during the first half of the twentieth century. Informed by the growing body of work on imperial education and education for global citizenship, her study aims to enrich our knowledge of the junctures between education and imperial projects.