Right to Kill, Right to Make Live: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During WWII

This article argues that the demands of waging total war effected parallel and mutually constitutive changes in the political rationalities of the Japanese colonial empire and the United States, and modulated racism away from its "vulgar" to its more "polite" form. The shift in political rationality centered on a movement away from (albeit not the displacement of) the deductive logic of the "right to kill" toward the productive logic of the "right to make live."