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]
Archives: Books (page 5)
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]
Lady No
From the legendary avant-garde poet Kim Hyesoon, a landmark collection documenting her first and only work of digital performance art to date. “Poetry in Korea has been a vaunted form — and traditionally left to men. Kim broke away from the masculine styles that came before her… Kim has pursued a vernacular that’s intensely Korean … [Read More]
Divided Korea: Understanding Unification Narratives
Divided Korea: Understanding Unification Narratives examines how different visions of Korean unification have been formed and contested across history, politics, and culture. From Cold War propaganda to digital diplomacy, or from South Korea’s democratic reforms to North Korea’s Juche ideology, the volume illustrates how unification is regarded as both hope and threat, promise and peril. … [Read More]
Korea Around the Table: Food and Global Korean Identities [forthcoming]
Korea Around the Table: Food and Global Korean Identities brings together leading scholars to examine how Korean cuisine encodes identity, memory, and belonging across local and global contexts. From the early adoption of chili peppers on the Korean peninsula to the proliferation of sundubu jjigae restaurants in suburban New Jersey, this groundbreaking volume shows how … [Read More]
Making Korea: 50 Design Stories [forthcoming]
The meteoric rise and global impact of Hallyu has made South Korea a cultural powerhouse, where pop-culture and cosmetic surgery co-exist with centuries-old shamanistic and Confucian rituals. This vibrant creative force, a potent mix of the traditional and hyper-new, informs Korean design today. Drawing on the V&A’s renowned collection, this compelling publication explores social history … [Read More]
The Art of Korean Cooking
A beautifully produced cookbook featuring eighty recipes inspired by traditional Korean cuisine, alongside illuminating essays on the country’s culinary history. The Art of Korean Cooking is a definitive introduction to Korean cuisine and a beautifully crafted cookbook. It compiles more than eighty recipes, each meticulously researched and tested by Onjium – a cultural research institute … [Read More]
The Seoul Letter Shop
A touching testament to the power of letter writing and connecting with strangers, for fans of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and What You’re Looking For is in the Library. Hyoyoung feels trapped in her small hometown after her dreams of becoming a film maker are dashed. When a friend asks if she can take … [Read More]
Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea
A briskly written primer on the North Korean decisions, foreign interventions and accidents of fate which have both threatened and, ultimately, preserved the country’s dictatorship. This nimble tour through North Korea’s history revisits sixteen knife-edge moments when collapse, reform or war nearly shattered the Kim dynasty. Structured in four acts—from the peninsula’s partition in 1945 … [Read More]