PUBLICATIONS
Winner of the 2017 Most Outstanding Asia/Transnational Book Award from the American Sociological Association section on Asia and Asian America
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This is the first of its kind sociological study of Korean diasporas in Japan and the United States. Dr. Kazuko Suzuki convincingly argues that the timing and means of migration, context of reception, ideology of nationhood, and broader structural circumstances in the receiving society give rise to distinct patterns of adaptation and identity formation among immigrants of the same ethno-national origin. It is a welcome addition to scholarship on comparative race, ethnicity, and immigration.
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Min Zhou, Tan Lark Sye Chair Professor of Sociology at
Nanyang Technological University and co-author of
The Asian American Achievement Paradox
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Amassing a mélange of quantitative and qualitative data, Kazuko Suzuki has composed a cogent analysis of ethnic Koreans in Japan and in the United States. Projecting a perfect pitch between case studies and general concepts, Divided Fates is a model comparative study. It should command the attention of scholars in comparative race and ethnicity in particular and comparative social sciences in general.
John Lie, University of California, Berkeley
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An ambitious, expertly-crafted work that offers a rare comparative analysis of three diasporic populations—Zainichi, Tainichi, and American Koreans—revealing the power of the racial state and related Japanese and US structural forces to marginalize immigrants, forces which remain woefully underappreciated by Western- and single state-centered frameworks. Divided Fates is a testament to how methodological rigor and theoretical sophistication informed by multiple sites, levels, and literatures reveals the richness of history, the global order, transnationality, and political process to explain the distinct fates of a population that otherwise shares so much: their Korean origin and ethnic identity.
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Nadia Y. Kim, Loyola Marymount University
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Suzuki offers an interesting study of different Korean diaspora communities, the zainichi and tainichi Korean communities in Japan and the Korean community in the United States. She brings the role and importance of the state back into the discussions of “race” and does so through a transcultural comparison that yields fruitful results. The insights offered here are well argued and thorough and contribute to the knowledge and understanding of communities with diverse backgrounds and their struggles and successes in different host countries.
The Journal of Japanese Studies
When social scientists and humanists fail to engage the discourses of the sciences, both scientists and the general public are left without the broader context of meaning that we all need in order to understand the stakes of urgent medical questions or of revelations about the human genome and what these might portend for our personal and shared futures. This collection of essays represents the promise of meaningful colloquy across the disciplines, bringing together some of our most gifted scholars to think about new ways to place science and the humanities in conversation, and to expand and complicate our understanding of race on both an historical and global scale.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, from the preface
Reconsidering Race is a thoughtful and illuminating collection of essays that should be required reading for students and teachers alike. In this engaging volume, leading scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and biology address how genetics are reconfiguring our notions of relatedness and difference and reshaping the meaning of race. They show what's at stake are not only claims about who we are but also the paths we may take for addressing the continuing problems of racial or ethnic inequalities.
Catherine Lee, author of Fictive Kinship
This estimable volume productively interrupts some of our most dearly-held convictions about the relationship between race and genetics, taking the genomics turn as an opportunity to rigorously reexamine and adapt existing social science paradigms.
Alondra Nelson, author of The Social Life of DNA: Race,
Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome
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What becomes clear from reading the chapters in this volume is just how important it is to employ a social constructivist lens to view the new narratives surrounding genomic science. So while the editors of Reconsidering Race maintain that the social sciences would do better to adapt their frameworks to encompass knowledge learned from genomics, the many rich contributions to this volume actually show that the hard sciences could stand to learn something from the social sciences.
Perspectives on Politics
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[This] volume delivers quite effectively on its promise to broaden the conversation about race and science beyond Euro-American borders -- a true strength of the collection.
American Journal of Human Biology
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