About this Event
Speaker: Yuri W. Doolan, Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University
Moderator: Kyu Dong Lee, Ph.D Student in the Department of History, Columbia University
Yuri W. Doolan is Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the inaugural Chair of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at Brandeis University. His research and teaching focus on Asian American history and the histories of race, gender, and empire in the Pacific world.
Doolan’s first book, The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines how Americans created and used the concept of the “Amerasian” to remove thousands of mixed-race Korean children from their mothers and place them in adoptive homes in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. The book explores the Cold War ideologies behind this so-called rescue and shows how U.S. refugee, adoption, and immigration policies profoundly shaped the lives of mixed-race Koreans and their mothers. The First Amerasians won the Association for Asian Studies’ James B. Palais Book Prize and received honorable mention for both the Association for Asian American Studies’ History Book Award and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s First Book Award.
Doolan is currently completing his second book, America’s Comfort Women: Sexual Labor and the Making of U.S. Empire. Drawing on multinational and multilingual archives, the book traces systems of sexual labor around American military bases in occupied Japan and postcolonial Korea, and across Cold War Asia and the Pacific during the Vietnam War. It argues that militarized “comfort” labor was a historically specific form of reproductive labor that helped sustain the U.S. military presence in Asia.
Doolan’s shorter work has appeared in Critical Ethnic Studies, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Diplomatic History, and The Journal of American Ethnic History, as well as in edited volumes and public-facing projects in the United States, South Korea, and Germany. His research has been supported by institutions including the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, the Korea Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
Yuri W. Doolan will be delivering his lecture on Thursday, October 15 at 4PM.
In the years surrounding the Korean War, thousands of mixed race children were born to American servicemen and local women in US-occupied South Korea. Assumed to be the children of camptown women—or military prostitutes—their presence posed a serious problem for the image of US democracy at a time when the nation was vying for Cold War allegiances abroad. As these children became increasingly visible around US bases, communists pointed to those left behind by their GI fathers as evidence of US imperialism, irresponsibility, and immorality in the Third World.
Aware of this criticism, US citizens involved in South Korea's postwar recovery launched a campaign to bring as many of these children as possible to the United States. By the early 1960s, these philanthropists, missionaries, and voluntary agencies had succeeded in constructing the figure of the abandoned and mistreated Amerasian orphan to lobby for the swift passage of international adoption legislation. They also won the sympathies of many American families eager to welcome these racially different children into the intimate confines of their homes.
But while the adoptions of mixed race Koreans promoted an image of humanitarian rescue and Cold War racial liberalism in 1950s and 1960s America, there was another problem: many of these children were not actually orphans but had been living with their mothers in the camptowncommunities surrounding US bases. Their placement in American families relied on dehumanizing portrayals of Korean women as prostitutes incapable of loving their own children, depictions of South Korea as a racist society bent on Confucian tradition and pure bloodlines, and narratives of the United States as a welcoming home in an era of intense racial segregation.
The First Amerasians tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking story of how Americans created and used the concept of the Amerasian to remove thousands of mixed race children from their Korean mothers to adoptive US homes during the 1950s and 1960s. In recovering this history, Yuri W. Doolan reveals how the Amerasian is not simply a mixed race person fathered by a US serviceman in Asia, nor a racial term used to describe individuals with one American and one Asian parent like its popular definition suggests. Rather, the Amerasian is a Cold War construct whose rescue has been utilized to repudiate accusations of US imperialism and achieve sentimental victories in the aftermath of wars not quite won by the military—beginning with Korea.
From such constructions, Americans helped create the world's largest international adoption program, which expanded beyond mixed race Koreans to include children of full Korean parentage, placing nearly 200,000 children in the United States and other Western countries. After US defeat in Vietnam, the plight of mixed race Koreans was invoked once more in support of Amerasian immigration legislation, resulting in the migration of tens of thousands of mixed race Vietnamese and their relatives to the United States.
Beyond Cold War historiography, this book also shows how in constructing Amerasians and orchestrating their rescue, Americans caused tangible harm to real people. Mixed race children were placed in adoptive homes at a time when few safeguards protected them from abuse, neglect, or racial hostility in the United States, and many Korean mothers were coerced—emotionally, physically, and financially—into relinquishing their children to US authorities.
In this book talk, Doolan will discuss the history of mixed-race Koreans and their mothers, the origins of international adoption from South Korea, and the ways race, gender, humanitarianism, and U.S. empire intersected during the Cold War. Doolan will also discuss how these policies affected the lives of the children and mothers involved, including the coercive circumstances under which many Korean women relinquished their children.
PLEASE NOTE: For non-Columbia guests, registration is required to access the Morningside campus 24 hours prior to the event. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 12:00 PM on Thursday, October 14 for campus access.
Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event and subsequently reviewed. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event.
Event venue & nearby stays
420 W 118th St room 918, 420 West 118th Street, New York, United States
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