“Feeling Brown”, Sounding Yellow: Puerto Rican Soldiers and the Racial Calculus of the Korean War
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In August of 1950, two months after the outbreak of the Korean War, the 65th Infantry Regiment – an all-volunteer Puerto Rican regiment of the United States Army – was dispatched to fight in what will be (dis)remembered as the “forgotten war.” Consequently, in its successive wars overseas, the US military would rely heavily on its colonial subjects turned national soldiers. How did the Korean War recalibrate a racial calculus that deemed entire peoples as “cannon fodder” or “collateral damage”? What are the connections between US neoimperial policy in (South) Korea and US colonial rule of Puerto Rico? Furthermore, how did this infrastructure of militarist settler imperialism not only connect unlikely spaces – the Puerto Rican island and the Korean peninsula – but also the bodies and lives of racialized subjects, including Puerto Rican soldiers and Korean military workers? Engaging in a reading of Emilio Díaz Valcárcel’s literary representations of Puerto Rican soldiers and their proximities to Korean military workers during the Korean War, this talk explores the multiple scales of imperial violence. Korean-Puerto Rican intimacies interrupt, merge, and intersect with transpacific infrastructures of war, accumulated histories of empire (Spanish, Japanese, US), and technologies of racialized gendering. By tracing the ways in which the Korean War is mobilized at the level of the granular by disciplining the most intimate and most quotidian—sound, touch and taste—this article unearths the insurgent kinships and sonic cartographies that conjure transpacific freedom dreams and decolonial futurities across the Caribbean and the Korean peninsula.
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