Chul Namgung

Biography

Chul Namgung is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UCLA. His research explores the post-imperial racialization of Japan’s former colonial subjects, known as “Zainichi.” Through the lens of sovereign power and the state of exception, his work reveals how the denial of citizenship rights ensnared postcolonial individuals within Japan’s political domain, enabling the exercise of unchecked violence against them. Framing this as a politics of inclusive exclusion, his study highlights how Zainichi’s ambiguous legal status and persistent exposure to state violence fueled their postcolonial precarity, raising critical questions about Japan’s postwar (post-World War II) democracy. His research also examines how Japanese activists and critics perceived, problematized, and obfuscated the questions of inclusion, citizenship, democracy, and nation-state through their encounter with the legal liminality of Zainichi.