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영어

The Jeju April 3 Incident should be situated in the long history of US imperialist expansion into the Pacific and Asia, a history that began, in part, with the Wilkes Naval Expedition in 1838, intensified during the 1890s as the US colonized the Philippines, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Sāmoa, and that exploded during the Cold War when the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. The Truman Doctrine and Cold War strategy of containment were used to justify both the Korean War and the invasion of Southeast Asia – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos – the latter an act of imperialist aggression that led Martin Luther King Jr. to declare that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” The path to greatness began on Jeju Island at the dawn of the Cold War. Ever since the publication of Richard Drinnon’s groundbreaking work in American Studies, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1980), American Studies scholars have been approaching the intersection of culture and imperialism through the formation of an American empire in the Pacific. And yet the April 3 Incident is absent from transnational, postcolonial American Studies. As the 75th anniversary of the Jeju uprising and massacre approaches, scholars, artists, activists, students, community leaders, religious groups, and peace-loving citizens around the world should come together to learn about and discuss this ongoing history and reflect on how it relates to their own local struggles for peace and justice. Increased international awareness about the April 3 Incident will hopefully condense into a broad movement calling for the United States to apologize to the people of Jeju Island for its role in the bloodshed that devastated the island at the inception of the Cold War.