Research
My current research interests include the history of political thought, democratic ethos and pathos, idealism and realism in democratic theory, citizenship and identities of the marginalized cultural groups. Below are the summaries of my papers, including those are currently under review or in progress.
Tempering Senses of Superiority: The Virtue of Magnanimity in Democracies (AJPS 2024)
The problems of increased polarization and mutual disrespect in politics have become so commonplace that they rarely surprise us any longer. We find it increasingly difficult to engage in dialogue and communication with our political adversaries. We tend to shamelessly disregard them so easily and hold them in contempt. We often belittle and despise them, asserting our own superiority. Such practices can inspire confidence and help us stay motivated and engaged; also, they can exhaust us, prompting us at times to avoid or reduce cross-party interaction altogether. This is not a flaw attributable only to career politicians, but the one to which most ordinary citizens are also vulnerable.
Why are democratic citizens so prone to these tendencies? How can we accurately assess the phenomenon of mutual disrespect and civic enmity so pervading most democracies and offer a normatively preferable—yet also practically constructive—prescription? Apparently, simply calling for mutual respect—deliberative or agonistic—is neither realistic nor entirely desirable.
This paper argues that our urges of superiority must be understood as a feature rather than a bug in democratic politics. Ordinary citizens are prone to understand their political views and those of their opponents in a particular frame of mind, separating what is good, high, and noble from what is bad, low, and despicable, even while at once upholding—or certainly not explicitly discrediting—the foundational principle of democratic equality. The sense of superiority is an integral part of democratic sentiments. What we urgently need to discuss, then, is how to keep alive the sense of superiority that motivates ordinary citizens to participate in democratic conversations while preventing the energies stemming from the very feelings from escalating civic enmity.
Drawing primarily on Aristotle—especially his Rhetoric—this paper thoroughly examines impudence and magnanimity as two distinct manifestations of the same underlying sense of superiority. Unlike impudence—which involves a reckless and destructive expression of feelings of superiority conducive to heightened aggression—magnanimity does not give rise to an aggressive form of superiority. Why? The reason is that the magnanimous cannot express and retain their sense of superiority through hounding and pouncing on their opponents because the genuine sense of superiority that they wish to savor depends largely on whether they treat offenses against themselves lightly and refuse to confront their opponents in an impetuous or blatantly aggressive way.
This paper presents a novel, everyday-level democratic theory of magnanimity, highlighting magnanimity as a virtue in the sense of a motivational force that rouses activity or energy in people rather than that of a character trait that bears a strong ethical overtone. The virtue of magnanimity so understood involves our desire for superiority—and therefore our impulses of disregard for our opponents’ opinion—but its tempered manifestation helps us engage in cross-party conversations and keep them going without engendering or aggravating the climate of civic enmity. To promote this peculiar attitude toward political adversaries alone can make a welcoming and valuable contribution to contemporary democratic theory and practice.
Juman Kim, “Tempering Senses of Superiority: The Virtue of Magnanimity in Democracies,” American Journal of Political Science (2024 Early View)
Not Eligible But Still Fitted? Asian Race and the Question of Naturalization, 1870-1906
According to the Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103), no alien but “a free white person” could apply for American citizenship through naturalization. Congress extended the right to naturalization to racial minorities in 1870, but not by striking out the racial prerequisite for naturalization altogether. Instead, it passed the law (16 Stat. 254) extending naturalization eligibility to another specified racial group: “aliens of African nativity and … persons of African descent.” Hence anyone who was neither “white” nor “black” remained excluded from acquiring citizenship by naturalization. Prior to the emergence of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization in 1906, however, state courts often played a profound role unmoored from the close supervision of the federal government. Without openly calling for the revision of the nation’s naturalization restrictions, the local courts managed to use their discretion to open the possibilities of n aturalization to some Asians for the benefit of the community or other interests. This paper explores how racial discrimination against Asians took shape through a variety of institutional efforts between 1870 and 1906, and how these years witnessed the dissonance of the federal naturalization laws and the practice of state courts on the ground. In addition to providing an analysis of relevant case law as well as institutional development, this study focuses on the lives of two Korean immigrants—Philip Jaisohn and Pom Kwang Soh—and charts the strategies through which they strove to achieve American citizenship in an unfavorable legal and political context. It also highlights the evolution of multi-layered racial categories, the then expanding national government power over race relations and immigration—often in conflict with states’ enduring regulatory authority—and the role of racial minorities and immigrants as transformative agents in naturalization politics.
The Sublime People
This paper examines the vexing relation of individual democratic citizens to the people. I demonstrate that the existence of the people in democracy is hard to deny, but it is easily obscured as soon as we start to speculate in part because the people never appear in any immediate form. There can only be a claim of the people, but no claim is tantamount to the people themselves. Therefore, the relationship between individual democratic citizens and the people remains in permanent tension. The tension can be characterized by the tense dynamic of the need of individual citizens to invite the people even at the risk of betrayal and suppression by the despair emanating from the inescapably incomplete and possibly false representation of the latter. The people, therefore, is the source of democratic frustration as well as aspirations. Drawing heavily on Kant, among others, this paper views the democratic people as an object of sublime. The sublime people so understood is an object whose formless nature makes itself unable to be identified as any pre-existing sociological category. It can only be indirectly (or negatively) represented in the form of the aesthetic representation of the unrepresentable. This Kantian aesthetic reappraisal of the people helps us to better understand the extent to which individual democratic citizens are deeply intrigued yet at once repelled by the people. The sublime people suggests the way individual citizens invoke and invite the people as an indispensable inspiring idea while holding up against the tendency of endangering themselves to lapse into uncritical passivity and the idolatry of the claimed people.
Zainichi: A Postcolonial Melancholia
Zainichi [在日], which means residing in Japan, refers almost entirely to the group of ethnic Koreans living in Japan. By the time Japan was defeated by the Allied Powers in 1945, there were over two million ethnic Koreans in Japan. About two thirds of them were repatriated as the war ended, but one third remained for various reasons. Meanwhile, Japan promptly amended the Election Law, so the formerly colonized subjects of Korean descent were excluded in the first General Election. According to the Alien Registration Ordinance (1947) and finally the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1953), those ethnic Koreans were deprived of the status of Japanese nationals and were recognized as foreigners with Chōsen nationality. The Zainichi are these remaining colonial subjects who stayed in the former metropole under a postcolonial rule. In this paper, I argue that out of this specific mode of relation to the political world does arise a particular form of postcolonial melancholia. Unlike mourning, melancholia can be seen as reaction to a loss of something that is of a more ideal kind. Building upon Freud, Koselleck, Derrida, among others, I claim that Zainichi’s melancholia shows its phantasmatic capacity to keep alive their sense of belonging to Chosen, the bygone political entity, as an lost object. This postcolonial melancholia helps the Zainichi people to negotiate (and, to some extent, refuse to negotiate) the obstacles living in the unfavorable political world. In so doing, they can at least continuously wish what they are not allowed to hope for. Last section of the paper looks into Pachinko, Min Jin Lee’s latest novel, recounting and illustrating the particular spatiotemporality found in the experience of the Zainichi.