The Politics of American Fatherhood : On Amerasian Immigration
During the Reagan administration, two immigration acts are passed to allow Amerasians, who were born to American male citizens and local women in Cambodia, Laos, South Korea and Vietnam, to enter the United States with permanent alien-cum-refugee status. While Amerasians are often referred to as those from mixed parentage between Asia and America, the generic language belies the legislations' specific purpose and implications debated in U.S. congressional hearings and debates: the welfare of biracial children born to and left behind by American GIs during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. As such, the legalization of Amerasian immigration marks out a particular type of private relations - heterosexual and inter-racial encouters of American servicemen - as an object of a public and humanitarian concern. At the same time, the legislations circumscribed eligibility criteria based on national origins, birth years and racial markers of whiteness and blackness. By way of Amerasian immigration, this paper questions the politics of American fatherhood at the intersection of race, gender and nation. In so doing, it traces how empathetic gestures toward the suffering subject of Amerasian children are articulated in ambivalent configurations that negotiates such diverging insistences on the private vs. the public, the national vs. the humanitarian, and universal appeal to empathy vs. geopolitical and racial specificity of its application
Year of publication: |
2011
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Authors: | Kim, Haeri |
Publisher: |
[2011]: [S.l.] : SSRN |
Subject: | Migrationspolitik | Immigration policy | Einwanderung | Immigration | Internationale Migration | International migration |
Description of contents: | Abstract [papers.ssrn.com] |
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