What Yun Ch'i-ho Knew: U.S.-Japan Relations and Imperial Race Making in Korea and the American South, 1904–1919

By following the transnational life of Yun Ch’i-ho, Chris Suh uncovers the intimate interimperial relationship between the United States and Japan in the early twentieth century. This relationship produced a particular set of ideas about race that shaped American and Japanese identities as comparable peoples and legitimated the colonial rule of Korea. These ideas were, surprisingly, shaped by stories of black-white relations in the American South, and they proved crucial to maintaining an imperial world order even as the United States began to project itself as an anticolonial power—a contradiction that Yun, a Korean colonial subject educated in the American South, was particularly well positioned to see.