Working the Subempire
This chapter examines the Vietnam War through the lens of South Korea and the Philippines and their respective nation-building projects in the 1960s. It demonstrates how the two countries’ efforts to modernize their national economies dovetailed with and were dependent on their participation in the U.S. war. As the two governments mobilized their citizens for war, they generated discourses of gendered national belonging and racial intimacy with the Vietnamese that obscured their complicity with U.S. imperialism. The chapter further argues that the Vietnam War functioned as an engine of subempire for South Korea and the Philippines, that is, the relations of violence that were necessitated by the two countries’ incorporation into the capitalist world system. The chapter ends by examining the emergent counterpublics in South Korea and the Philippines that challenged their governments’ complicity in the war and their narrowed conception of citizenship and economic development.