Jaeeun Kim received support from the SSRC as a participant of the Korean Studies Workshop for Junior Faculty (2013) and the Korean Studies Dissertation Workshop (2009), and as a fellow of IDRF (2008).

Scholars have long examined the relationship
between nation-states and their “internal others,” such as immigrants
and ethnoracial minorities. Contested Embrace shifts the analytic
focus to explore how a state relates to people it views as “external
members” such as emigrants and diasporas. Specifically, Jaeeun Kim
analyzes disputes over the belonging of Koreans in Japan and China,
focusing on their contested relationship with the colonial and
postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula.

Extending the constructivist approach to nationalisms and the culturalist view of the modern state to a transnational context, Contested Embrace
illuminates the political and bureaucratic construction of
ethno-national populations beyond the territorial boundary of the state.
Through a comparative analysis of transborder membership politics in
the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book shows how
the configuration of geopolitics, bureaucratic techniques, and actors’
agency shapes the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties.
Kim demonstrates that being a “homeland” state or a member of the
“transborder nation” is a precarious, arduous, and revocable political
achievement.