Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2020
This article reinterprets Asian industrialization during the Cold War through the lens of a forgotten commodity: the South Korean wig. Wigs were critical to Asia’s “miraculous” economic growth—a US$1 billion industry in 1970, as well as the number two export in South Korea and number four in Hong Kong at the height of export-oriented industrialization. The article makes a methodological argument, suggesting that we see industrialization differently when we “follow” a commodity transnationally—from the heads of rural South Koreans to the hands of Seoul factory workers to the shoulder bags of Korean American peddlers to the heads of African American women—and when we integrate bottom-up and top-down views of the commodity’s “life.” Only by taking this global perspective can we see how U.S. imperialism shaped the ways people and things moved across borders and oceans and how Cold War commodities were haunted by the lives of the people who touched them.
I am grateful for feedback from Engseng Ho and the Social Science Research Council Workshop for Transregional Research, Fa-ti Fan and the New York Conference on Asian Studies, Hannah Kim and the Hagley Library Research Seminar, Robert Hellyer and the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Jim Matray and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual Conference, Dan Bouk, Jill Harsin, Andrew Rotter, and other colleagues at Colgate University, the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, and two anonymous reviewers; for support and input from Nancy Abelmann, Alan Brinkley, Courtney Fullilove, Eleanor Soo-ah Hyun, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Travis Johng, Alice Kessler-Harris, Jiyul Kim, Jungwon Kim, Kiwhan Kim, Jenny Wang Medina, and Sonja Thomas; for research and translation assistance from Chunwoong Park, Haeun Lily Kim, Haesel Kim, and Seung-Ah Yang; for insight and expertise from Alyssa Park; and for guidance from Elizabeth LaCouture, who read every draft. I am also grateful for financial support from the Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council Korean Studies Grant, the Hagley Library, Colgate University, and Oberlin College.