Afterlives of Orientalism: Corporal Punishment, the Black Market, and the Limits of US Military-Building in Korea

A birds-eye narrative of U.S. military empire in Korea presents a false story of mission success. The transformation of the South Korean Armed Forces from a motley group of 5,000 Constabulary officers in 1946 into a well-trained, lethal force of over 500,000 in 1953 dovetails with a story of the solidification of American interests in the country and the hardening of U.S. imperial structures. This paper disrupts this narrative by instead examining the dynamic processes of imperial formation carried out by American advisors. Contending with the afterlives of previous European and Japanese colonial models and with their own internal, racialized hierarchies, agents of American empire nevertheless consistently asserted the limits to their own authority. Such concessions were not necessarily the result of local resistance, but instead a complex dynamic stemming from interpersonal relationships, cross-cultural misconceptions, and a growing sense of the need for American flexibility in order to more broadly sustain its global ambitions. This paper examines the processes of decolonization and re-imperialization through two focal cases: U.S. perceptions of corporal punishment in the ROK Army and the widespread sale of U.S. supplies by ROK Army units on the black market. In both instances, Americans made the active decision not to impose Americanisms but instead acquiesce to local interests, and in turn contributed to the creation of a malleable American imperialism that operated on a playing field entangled with the imperial structures of empires past.