London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

The Korean Popular Culture Reader

From the publisher’s website: Over the past decade, Korean popular culture has become a global phenomenon. The “Korean Wave” of music, film, television, sports, and cuisine generates significant revenues and cultural pride in South Korea. The Korean Popular Culture Reader provides a timely and essential foundation for the study of “K-pop,” relating the contemporary cultural landscape to … [Read More]

The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea

From the publisher’s website: In The Massacres at Mt. Halla, Hun Joon Kim presents a compelling story of state violence, human rights advocacy, and transitional justice in South Korea since 1947. The “Jeju 4.3 events” were a series of armed uprisings and counterinsurgency actions that occurred between 1947 and 1954 in the rugged landscape around Mt. … [Read More]

No Alternative?: Experiments in South Korean Education

No Alternative? examines education in South Korea beyond daytime K-16 schooling—an escalating phenomenon in an increasingly neoliberal and globalizing society. Ethnographic portraits of private after-schooling, alternative schooling, home schooling, and adult distance education reveal that education producers and consumers often reject mainstream education while simultaneously seeking or embracing its symbolic value. Nancy Abelmann is Harry E. … [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]

Critical Readings on the Colonial Period of Korea 1910-1945 (4 vols)

From the publisher’s website: There has been a rapid accumulation of new scholarship on colonial Korea in particular and comparative colonialism in general within the last ten years. This volume gathers these articles from a variety of venues to allow researchers, students, and readers to access the most important scholarship on colonial Korea published in … [Read More]

Protesting America: Democracy and the U.S.-Korea Alliance

From the publisher’s website: When the U.S.-Korea military alliance began to deteriorate in the 2000s, many commentators blamed “anti-Americanism” and nationalism, especially among younger South Koreans. Challenging these assumptions, this book argues that Korean activism around U.S. relations owes more to transformations in domestic politics, including the decentralization of government, the diversification and politics of … [Read More]

Ask a Korean Dude: An Authoritative and Irreverent Guide to the Korea Experience

From the publisher’s website: Korea: A country where tradition and rapid modernization meet in a dynamic dichotomy full of seemingly incongruous, yet somehow germane ethnic charms. It is these very elements that truly set Korea apart from its Asian colleagues as a bombastically inclined but strangely endearing little country. This book is a collection of … [Read More]

Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea

From the publisher’s website: As millions of women and girls left country towns to generate Korea’s manufacturing boom, the factory girl emerged as an archetypal figure in twentieth-century popular culture. This book explores the factory girl in Korean literature from the 1920s to the 1990s, showing the complex ways in which she has embodied the … [Read More]

Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese Comfort Women

From the publisher’s website: In the wake of the wartime experience of sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1930-45), Korean survivors lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. These sexual slaves were known as “comfort women,” and this book brings us into the lives of … [Read More]

Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea

In the years leading up to and directly following rapprochement with China in 1992, the South Korean government looked to ethnic Korean (Chosǒnjok) brides and laborers from northeastern China to restore productivity to its industries and countryside. South Korean officials and the media celebrated these overtures not only as a pragmatic solution to population problems … [Read More]

Division System in Crisis

From the publisher’s website: Paik Nak-chung is one of Korea’s most incisive contemporary public intellectuals. By training a literary scholar, he is perhaps best known as an eloquent cultural and political critic. This volume represents the first book-length collection of his writings in English. Paik’s distinctive theme is the notion of a “division system” on the … [Read More]

South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society

From the publisher’s website: This book explores the evolution of social movements in South Korea by focusing on how they have become institutionalized and diffused in the democratic period. The contributors explore the transformation of Korean social movements from the democracy campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s to the rise of civil society struggles after … [Read More]

Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea

Service Economies presents an alternative narrative of South Korean modernity by examining how working-class labor occupies a central space in linking the United States and Asia to South Korea’s changing global position from a U.S. neocolony to a subempire. Making surprising and revelatory connections, Jin-kyung Lee analyzes South Korean military labor in the Vietnam War, domestic … [Read More]

Korea’s Online Gaming Empire

From the publisher’s website: The rapid growth of the Korean online game industry, viewed in social, cultural, and economic contexts. In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not … [Read More]

New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements

From the publisher’s website: Despite the common held belief that Asian nations have displayed anti-market tendencies of under-consumption and export-oriented trade since the Asian financial crisis, in the 10 years since the crisis, South Korea has bucked this trend accruing a higher debt rate than the US. This groundbreaking collection of essays addresses questions such … [Read More]

On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea

From the publisher’s website: Since the Korean War, gijichon—U.S. military camp towns—have been fixtures in South Korea. The most popular entertainment venues in gijichon are clubs, attracting military clientele with duty-free alcohol, music, shows, and women entertainers. In the 1990s, South Korea’s rapid economic advancement, combined with the stigma and low pay attached to this work, led to … [Read More]