This talk examines how zainichi (Korean Japanese) fiction incorporates American racial discourse to conceptualize a mode of “transpacific cultural mediation”—that is, American culture functions as a mediating space for zainichi subject formation in the discriminatory social structure of Japan. Roh uses a transnational Asian American Studies framework to articulate the importance of considering tertiary national sites in diasporic minority discourse, and to reveal the triangulated formation of these communities through national policy, history, and culture. The relationship between the United States empire and imperial Japan, with the zainichi population caught between, informs their definition as colonized people, ephemerality as citizens, formulation as resident aliens, and finally, as racialized subjects. David S. Roh is assistant professor of English at the University of Utah, where he specializes in digital humanities and Asian American literature. He is the author of Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity (University of Minnesota Press), and coeditor of Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (Rutgers University Press). His work has appeared in Law & Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, and MELUS. His latest book project compares Korean American and Zainichi Korean literary fiction. Sponsored by UC San Diego Department Literature and Korean Studies