From the publisher’s website: Scholars have long examined the relationship between nation-states and their “internal others,” such as immigrants and ethnoracial minorities. Contested Embrace shifts the analytic focus to explore how a state relates to people it views as “external members” such as emigrants and diasporas. Specifically, Jaeeun Kim analyzes disputes over the belonging of Koreans in … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 71)
Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea
From the publisher’s website: This book reveals how South Korea was transformed from one of the poorest and most agrarian countries in the world in the 1950’s to one of the richest and most industrialized states by the late 1980’s. The author argues that South Korea’s economic, cultural, and political development was the product of … [Read More]
To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption
From the publisher’s website: To Save the Children of Korea is the first book about the origins and history of international adoption. Although it has become a commonplace practice in the United States, we know very little about how or why it began, or how or why it developed into the practice that we see today. … [Read More]
Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945
From the publisher’s website: South Korea represents one of the world’s most enthusiastic markets for plastic surgery. The growth of this market is particularly fascinating as access to medical care and surgery arose only recently with economic growth since the 1980s. Reconstructing Bodies traces the development of a medical infrastructure in the Republic of Korea (ROK) from … [Read More]
To Live to Work: Factory Women in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945
From the publisher’s website: Linking economic and social historical research methods with special reference to the evolution of the industrial labor force, To Live to Work offers an account of the popular expansion of gender, labor, and political consciousnesses among working women in colonial Korea. While Korea’s rapid industrial development throughout the twentieth century is one focus … [Read More]
Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy
From the publisher’s website: This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth … [Read More]
Unexpected Alliances: Independent Filmmakers, the State, and the Film Industry in Postauthoritarian South Korea
Since 1999, South Korean films have dominated roughly 40 to 60 percent of the Korean domestic box-office, matching or even surpassing Hollywood films in popularity. Why is this, and how did it come about? In Unexpected Alliances, Young-a Park seeks to answer these questions by exploring the cultural and institutional roots of the Korean film … [Read More]
Igniting the Internet: Youth and Activism in Postauthoritarian South Korea
From the publisher’s website: Igniting the Internet is one of the first books to examine in depth the development and consequences of Internet-born politics in the twenty-first century. It takes up the new wave of South Korean youth activism that originated online in 2002, when the country’s dynamic cyberspace transformed a vehicular accident involving two U.S. … [Read More]
Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea
From the publisher’s website: Since the late 1960s, the lives of south Koreans have been reconstructed on the shifting ground of urbanization, industrialization, military authoritarianism, democratic reform, and social liberalization. Class and gender identities have been modified in relation to a changing modernity and new definitions of home and family, work and leisure, husband and … [Read More]
The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea
From the publisher’s website: How do people make sense of their world in the face of the breakneck speed of contemporary social change? Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea’s experience of just such dizzyingly rapid development. Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an … [Read More]
Korean Art in the Freer and Sackler Galleries
From the publisher’s website: With more than 200 color and archival images, this guidebook presents the full scope of the museums’ Korean art collections. It first traces the formation of the Freer Gallery’s collection of 540 Korean objects, reversing the usual chronological order by following the collecting path of museum founder Charles Lang Freer. The … [Read More]
The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945
From the publisher’s website: This study examines how the concept of “Korean woman” underwent a radical transformation in Korea’s public discourse during the years of Japanese colonialism. Theodore Jun Yoo shows that as women moved out of traditional spheres to occupy new positions outside the home, they encountered the pervasive control of the colonial state, … [Read More]
It’s Madness: The Politics of Mental Health in Colonial Korea
From the publisher’s website: It’s Madness examines Korea’s years under Japanese colonialism, when mental health first became defined as a medical and social problem. As in most Asian countries, severe social ostracism, shame, and fear of jeopardizing marriage prospects compelled most Korean families to conceal the mentally ill behind closed doors. This book explores the impact … [Read More]
Not Forgotten: The True Story of My Imprisonment in North Korea
From the publisher’s website: For the first time, Kenneth Bae tells the full story surrounding his arrest and imprisonment in North Korea. Not Forgotten is a modern story of intrigue, suspense, and heart. Driven by his passion to help the people of North Korea, Bae moves to neighboring China to lead guided tours into the secretive … [Read More]
Brief Encounters: Early Reports of Korea by Westerners
From the publisher’s website: This anthology is a compilation of Westerners’ accounts of their visits to Korea, originally published in books or newspapers before the country opened its doors in the late nineteenth century. The opening of Korea made it possible to explore the country in detail and write detailed accounts. Prior impressions were garnered … [Read More]
Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways
From the publisher’s website: This book vividly traces the genealogy of modern womanhood in the encounters between Koreans and American Protestant missionaries in the early twentieth century, during Korea’s colonization by Japan. Hyaeweol Choi shows that what it meant to be a “modern” Korean woman was deeply bound up in such diverse themes as Korean … [Read More]