From the publisher’s website: Witnessing Gwangju describes the life-altering experience of young Peace Corps volunteer, Paul Courtright. Courtright was in the countryside of South Korea in 1980 to help leprosy patients. On the way back home from his medical checkup, Courtright was caught in the middle of what became known by some as the Gwangju Massacre, … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 58)
Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding Out K-Pop
From the publisher’s website: This book offers an in-depth study of the globalization of contemporary South Korean idol pop music, or K-Pop, visiting K-Pop and its multiple intersections with political, economic, and cultural formations and transformations. It provides detailed insights into the transformative process in and around the field of Korean pop music since the … [Read More]
A Journey in Search of Korea’s Beauty
From the publisher’s website: A Journey in Search of Korea’s Beauty by Bae Yong Joon was a yearlong project that he undertook to learn more about traditional Korean culture from the unfledged yet earnest point of view of one Korean, and to record in a down-to- earth way what he learned and felt in the process. Bae chose 13 … [Read More]
An Introduction to Classical Korean Literature: From Hyangga to P’ansori
From the publisher’s website: This work provides an introduction to some of the most important and representative genres of classical Korean literature. Coverage includes: Samguk sagi and samguk yusa as literature; Kuun mong and Unyongchon; the lyricism of Koryo songs; and the literature of Choson Dynasty Women. Contents What Is Korean Literature? The Mystery and … [Read More]
Protest Politics and the Democratization of South Korea: Strategies and Roles of Women
From the publisher’s website: This book is about protest politics and social movements led by a group of women, the “Mothers,” who were inadvertently drawn into South Korea’s democratization movement from the 1970s to the 2000s. The Mothers were female family members of political dissidents of varying backgrounds and ages—college students, political and religious leaders, … [Read More]
An Illustrated Guide to Korean Mythology
From the publisher’s website: This highly engaging volume by one of Korea’s leading scholars of comparative mythology – the the first study of its kind in English – provides a valuable introduction to centuries-old beliefs, myths and folk tales relating to Cosmology and Flood, Birth and Agriculture, Messengers of the Underworld, Shamans, Disease, Good Fortune, … [Read More]
The Korean Women’s Movement and the State: Bargaining for Change
From the publisher’s website: This book asks what strategies women’s movements can employ to induce law and policy changes at the national level that will assist women’s equality without sacrificing their feminist energy, movement cohesiveness and core feminist commitments. The book takes up this question in order to emphasize the need not only to recognize … [Read More]
The Personalist Ethic and the Rise of Urban Korea
From the publisher’s website: This book reviews South Korea’s experiences of kŭndaehwa (modernization), or catching up with the West, with a focus on three major historical projects, namely, expansion of new (Western) education, industrialization and democratization. The kŭndaehwa efforts that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have now fully transformed South Korea into an … [Read More]
The Road to Multiculturalism in South Korea: Ideas, Discourse, and Institutional Change in a Homogenous Nation-State
From the publisher’s website: This book aims to capture the complicated development of Korea from monoethnic to multicultural society, challenging the narrative of “ethnonational continuity” in Korea through a discursive institutional approach. At a time when immigration is changing the face of South Korea and an increasingly diverse society becomes empirical fact, this doesn’t necessarily … [Read More]
North Korea: State of Paranoia
From the publisher’s website: North Korea continues to make headlines, arousing curiosity and fear in equal measure. The world’s most secretive nuclear power, it still has Gulag-style prison camps, allows no access to the Internet and bans its people from talking to foreigners without official approval. In this remarkable and eye-opening book, internationally best-selling author … [Read More]
North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society
From the publisher’s website: The story of North Korea’s information underground and how it inspires people to seek better lives beyond their country’s borders One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows … [Read More]
The Korean Developmental State
From the publisher’s website: This book analyzes, from a historical comparative perspective, the Korean economic development model, the extent to which it has changed from its classical model, and what constitutes its changes and continuity. Unlike studies claims the dissolution of Korean developmentalism, the book holds that the Korean state maintains its characteristics of state-led … [Read More]
The Cultural Politics of Urban Development in South Korea: Art, Memory and Urban Boosterism in Gwangju
From the publisher’s website: This book analyses the cultural politics of urban development in Gwangju, South Korea, and illustrates the implementation of state-led arts-based urban boosterism efforts in the context of political trauma and the desire for economic growth. The book explores urban development that is complicated by the recent history of democratic uprising in … [Read More]
Chaoxianzu Entrepreneurs in Korea: Searching for Citizenship in the Ethnic Homeland
From the publisher’s website: This book explores the nature of the state-citizen societal relationship in Korea during the transition to neoliberalism, through the lenses of class and nationalism. Examining the process by which a new class, Korean Chinese entrepreneurs, emerged from Korean Chinese enclaves in South Korea and quickly became a leading group within those … [Read More]
Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State
From the publisher’s website: This is the first English-language book on cultural policy in Korea, which critically historicises and analyses the contentious and dynamic development of the policy. It highlights that the evolution of cultural policy has been bound up with the complicated political, economic and social trajectory of Korea to a surprising degree. Investigating … [Read More]
Popular Culture and the Transformation of Japan–Korea Relations
From the publisher’s website: This book presents essays exploring the ways in which popular culture reflects and engenders ongoing changes in Japan–Korea relations. Through a broad temporal coverage from the colonial period to the contemporary, the book’s chapters analyse the often contradictory roles that popular culture has played in either promoting or impeding nationalisms, regional … [Read More]