This book explores South Korea’s experience as an aid recipient, as an aid donor, and as an inter‑Korea aid provider. Analysing case studies of international aid both received and dispensed by South Korea, from the end of the Korean War until the present day, this collection provides a novel lens through which to explore South … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 4)
The Great Homecoming
1959, Seoul. Divided from his family by the violent tumult of the Korean civil war, Yunho arrives in South Korea’s capital searching for his oldest friend. He finds him in the arms of Eve Moon, a dancer with many names who may be a refugee fleeing the communist North, or an American spy. Beguiled, Yunho … [Read More]
Forever President: A Biography of Kim Il Sung
Pieces together the rise, achievements, and failures of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. Kim Il Sung ruled his country, North Korea, for longer and shaped it more profoundly than almost any other modern leader. He created a unique and seemingly bizarre and menacing political and social system, establishing a dynasty that has maintained it … [Read More]
Hanyo (The Housemaid)
The upwardly mobile Kim family employs a young woman to help manage their new house. Mr. Kim begins an affair with the nameless ‘housemaid’, who soon drags the entire family into a terrible tragedy… The director Kim Ki-young played a formative part in South Korean cinema’s “Golden Age” of the 1960s and 1970s; his 1960 … [Read More]
Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism
How the US military origins of global capitalism facilitated both South Korea’s “economic miracle” and the decline of US industrial might The US military has become a ubiquitous part of modern economic life. The Cold War prompted the first permanent overseas deployment of US troops and the creation of a global network of US military … [Read More]
The Politics of the Have-Nots: What South Korean Activism Teaches Us about Radical Democracy [forthcoming]
Social change requires the emergence of a collective subject that can foster solidarity within and across national boundaries. But how can such a collective come together in our current era of liberal individualism and the pursuit of maximum profit? In The Politics of the Have-Nots, Hae Yeon Choo theorizes how this collective might cohere and … [Read More]
Unruly Rites: Christianity, Ritual Politics, and the Making of Religious Difference in Modern Korea, 1884-1945 [forthcoming]
When Western missionaries first introduced Protestant Christianity to Korea in 1884, Korean converts adopted beliefs and practices that defied prevailing Confucian norms, including distinct faith-based rituals. By the turn of the twentieth century, during the final years of the Chosŏn dynasty, competing cultural and religious viewpoints started to roil Korean society with frenzied—even life-and-death—controversies over … [Read More]
Traveling Chinatowns: The Architecture of Migration and Violence in Colonial Korea [forthcoming]
Drawing on an impressive array of archival sources, from colonial criminal records to historical maps and exposé journalism, this book brings to light the overlooked history of ethnic Chinese enclaves in Korea during the era of Japanese colonialism. Situated within a global circuit of Chinese migration, the Japanese empire produced a structure of anti-migrant violence … [Read More]
Everything but the Bomb: South Korea’s Nuclear Hedging Strategy [forthcoming]
Amid North Korea’s advancing nuclear capabilities and the declining credibility of U.S. extended deterrence, South Korea has a strong motive to pursue its own nuclear deterrent. With its advanced nuclear energy program, South Korea possesses the means to develop nuclear weapons indigenously. However, its opportunity to do so is constrained by the prohibitive economic, security … [Read More]
Remedying the Body: Plastic Surgery and the Politics of Embodiment in Korea [forthcoming]
Plastic surgery has exploded in popularity around the world in the recent decades, with South Korea emerging as a leader of the global beauty economy. This book presents a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in Korea through the feminist politics of care, bringing together intersecting narratives of marginalization to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a … [Read More]
Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War [forthcoming]
Black Market Intimacies reveals how illicit exchanges of money and commodities involving sexual encounters between Korean and Japanese women and US soldiers provided the material foundations of the regional economy across Korea and Japan during the Korean War. Against the conventional view that illicit exchanges exist outside the formal economy and legal regulations, Jeongmin Kim … [Read More]
Representations of Japan in South Korean Cinema of the Park Geun-hye Era: Invaders, Lovers and Demons
Providing a rare example of a national cinema that has managed to overturn the prevailing global paradigm of Hollywood dominance, South Korean films are nevertheless still haunted by the peninsula’s earlier colonial history. Focussing on a series of films produced during the administration of disgraced and then pardoned President Park Geun-hye (2013–2017), this book examines … [Read More]
Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me
This volume selects poems of many decades by one of the most startling, distinctive, and influential feminist voices in contemporary Korean poetry. Against the limits society would erect around her, Choi Seungja’s poetry trains a keen attention on everyday objects and situations until loneliness, time, emptiness, love, death and even brief-lived delight glow with uncanny … [Read More]
Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers
The first full-length English language edition of one of the foremost woman poets in Modern Korean poetry. Kim Hyesoon was the first woman recipient of the prestigious Kim Suyong Contemporary Poetry Award, and is the author of eight collections of poetry. In Kim Hyesoon’s saturated political fables, horror is packed inside cuteness, cuteness inside horror. … [Read More]
All the Garbage of the World, Unite!
The celebrated Korean poet Kim Hyesoon writes from a radiant black zone where matter becomes dark matter, human becomes trinket, garbage becomes god, a zero-point for our present moment’s grotesque and spectacular inversions. This volume includes a selection of recent work, the landmark poem “Manhole Humanity,” and the essay “In the Oxymoronic World.” With fiercely … [Read More]
The Hell of That Star
Singular poetry made through censorship, elusion, and language renewal The astonishing poetry collection The Hell of That Star enlivens the horror of Korean life under U.S.-backed authoritarianism. Poems of blows and vomit, births and coffins alternate blithe confidence and trembling terror. When slapped seven times by a government censor, Kim responded with defiant poems. The death of language … [Read More]