Migration and Racial Hierarchies in South Korea

Migration and Racial Hierarchies in South Korea examines how migrants from South and Southeast Asia are racialized in South Korea, a society often imagined as ethnically and racially homogeneous. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in factories, a multicultural family center, and neighborhoods, Seonok Lee demonstrates how Koreans understand ‘race’ and racialization through state policies, labor regimes, gendered family structures, cultural discourse, and everyday interactions. The book argues that racialization in South Korea cannot be understood simply through the Euro-American model of race. Instead, it is shaped by Korea’s changing position in global capitalism, its own postcolonial history, developmental nationalism, and its recent transition from a migrant-sending to a migrant-receiving country. Migrant workers and marriage migrants are incorporated into Korean society as economically and reproductively necessary, yet they are also marked as others who are outside full belonging. By analyzing labor and marriage migration, this book offers new insights into race in a rapidly globalizing East Asian society. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The 2024 Korean Studies Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2024-P-018).