Since the early 1980s, Korea’s financial development has been a tale of liberalization and opening. After the 1997 financial crisis, great strides were made in building a market-oriented financial system through sweeping reforms for deregulation and the opening of financial markets. However, the new system failed to steer the country away from a credit card … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 81)
Naming the Local: Medicine, Language, and Identity in Korea since the Fifteenth Century
From the publisher’s website: Naming the Local uncovers how Koreans domesticated foreign medical novelties on their own terms, while simultaneously modifying the Korea-specific expressions of illness and wellness to make them accessible to the wider network of scholars and audiences. Due to Korea’s geopolitical position and the intrinsic tension of medicine’s efforts to balance the local … [Read More]
SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture
In 1978, four musicians crowded into a cramped basement theater in downtown Seoul, where they, for the first time, brought the rural percussive art of p’ungmul to a burgeoning urban audience. In doing so, they began a decades-long reinvention of tradition, one that would eventually create an entirely new genre of music and a national symbol for … [Read More]
The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan
From the publisher’s website: In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view … [Read More]
Glossolalia and the Problem of Language
From the publisher’s website: Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, has long been a subject of curiosity as well as vigorous theological debate. A worldwide phenomenon that spans multiple Christian traditions, glossolalia is both celebrated as a supernatural gift and condemned as semiotic alchemy. For some it is mystical speech that exceeds what words can … [Read More]
Koreo-Japonica: A Re-evaluation of a Common Genetic Origin
From the publisher’s website: The Japonic (Japanese and Ryukyuan) portmanteau language family and the Korean language have long been considered isolates on the fringe of northeast Asia. Although in the last fifty years many specialists in Japonic and Korean historical linguistics have voiced their support for a genetic relationship between the two, this concept has … [Read More]
Non-Traditional Security Issues in North Korea
From the publisher’s website: The concept of security has undergone significant change in the past few decades. Traditionally thought of in terms of the state-centric, militarily focused, realist discourse, the concept of security has been broadened to include a greater number of potential threats and an increased number of relevant actors. Yet, despite the great … [Read More]
Education Fever: Society, Politics, and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea
From the publisher’s website: In the half century after 1945, South Korea went from an impoverished, largely rural nation ruled by a succession of authoritarian regimes to a prosperous, democratic industrial society. No less impressive was the country’s transformation from a nation where a majority of the population had no formal education to one with … [Read More]
The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaii, 1903-1973
From the publisher’s website: On January 13, 1903, the first Korean immigrants arrived in Hawai’i. Numbering a little more than a hundred individuals, this group represented the initial wave of organized Korean immigration to Hawai’i. Over the next two and a half years, nearly 7,500 Koreans would make the long journey eastward across the Pacific. … [Read More]
Min Yong-hwan: A Political Biography
From the publisher’s website: The diplomat and scholar-official Min Yông-hwan (1861-1905), described by one contemporary Western observer as “undoubtably the first Korean after the emperor,” is best remembered in Korean historiography for his pioneering diplomacy at the courts of Tsar Nicholas II and Queen Victoria in the late 1890s. Furthermore, he is considered to be … [Read More]
Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956
From the publisher’s website: North Korea remains the most mysterious of all Communist countries. The acute shortage of available sources has made it a difficult subject of scholarship. Through his access to Soviet archival material made available only a decade ago, contemporary North Korean press accounts, and personal interviews, Andrei Lankov presents for the first … [Read More]
Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea
From the publisher’s website: In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korea, public health priorities in maternal and infant welfare privileged the new nation’s reproductive health and women’s responsibility for care work to produce novel organization of services in hospitals and practices in the home. The first monograph on this topic, Imperatives of Care places women … [Read More]
Happy Together (K-Fiction 029)
From the Interpark bookstore website (fed through the Google translation engine): The twenty-ninth work of K-fiction. This is a short story by Seo Jang-won that has been drawing attention by steadily publishing good works since his debut as the Dong-A Ilbo New Year’s Literature in 2020. Like in the previous works that carefully captured the … [Read More]
K-POP Now! The Korean Music Revolution
From the publisher’s website: K-Pop Now! takes a fun look at Korea’s high-energy pop music, and is written for its growing legions of fans. It features all the famous groups and singers and takes an insider’s look at how they have made it to the top. In 2012, Psy’s song and music video “Gangnam Style” suddenly … [Read More]
Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet Culture
From the publisher’s website: From kim chee to kim chic! South Korea came from nowhere in the 1990s to become one of the biggest producers of pop content (movies, music, comic books, TV dramas, online gaming) in Asia and the West. Why? Who’s behind it? Mark James Russell tells an exciting tale of rapid growth … [Read More]
If I Had Your Face
From the publisher’s website: A riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania “Powerful and provocative … a novel about female strength, spirit, resilience—and the solace … [Read More]