As shown by the success of Squid Game and Parasite, South Korea’s film industry is producing films and original series for streaming services, film studios, and television stations worldwide. South Korea is now arguably considered one of the few countries outside the United States to have captivated the world’s hearts and minds through pop music, TV dramas, and … [Read More]
Booklist: Essays and articles
Song of Arirang: The Story of a Korean Rebel Revolutionary in China
Song of Arirang tells the true story of Korean revolutionary Kim San (Jang Jirak), who left colonized Korea as a teenager to fight against Japanese imperialism and fought alongside Mao’s Red Army during the Chinese Revolution. First published in 1941, this remarkably intimate memoir (as told to the American journalist Nym Wales aka Helen Foster … [Read More]
Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea
Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking … [Read More]
Women We Love: Femininities and the Korean Wave
Women We Love: Femininities and the Korean Wave is an edited volume exploring femininities in and around the Korean Wave since 2000. While studies on the Korean Wave are abundant, there is a dearth of thought put toward the female-identifying stars, characters, and fans who shape and lead this crucial cultural movement. This collection of … [Read More]
Korean Film and Festivals: Global Transcultural Flows
This book examines the various film festivals where Korean cinema plays a significant role, both inside and outside of Korea, focusing on their history, structure and function, and analysis of successful festival films. Using Korean film festivals and Korean cinema at international film festivals as its primary lens, this interdisciplinary volume explores the shifting relationships … [Read More]
Reflections from Prison: 20 Years and 20 Days
Reflections from Prison is a collection of letters and essays from renowned Korean thinker Shin Young-Bok written during his 20 years as a political prisoner under the military government. The letters range from post cards to tiny characters squeezed onto his Army Prison daily ration of two sheets of toilet paper. They provide a window not … [Read More]
The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security
North Korea is consistently identified as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers. However, the issue of human rights in North Korea is a complex one, intertwined with issues like life in the North Korean police state, inter-Korean relations, denuclearization, access to information in the North, and international cooperation, to name a few. There … [Read More]
The Letters of Saint Andrew Kim Dae-geon
Our translations of the 20 or so letters written by Saint Andrew Kim Dae-geon during the 4 years of travel and adventure prior to his death in 1846 have now been published by The Research Foundation of Korean Church History, marking the 200th anniversary of his birth on August 21, 1821. In addition to the … [Read More]
Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction
Publisher description: Starting with the armistice that divided the Korean Peninsula in 1953, this one-of-a-kind book spotlights the artistic movements and collectives that have flourished and evolved throughout Korean culture over the past seven decades – from the 1950s avant-garde through to the feminist scene in the 1970s, the birth of the Gwangju Biennale in … [Read More]
South Korea’s Democracy Challenge: Political System, Political Economy, and Political Society
Thirty years have passed since in 1987 formal democratization was achieved in South Korea. Since then the country has undergone the two turnover test (Huntington), and it overcame economic, financial, and political crises. However, social inequality is higher than before democratization, social conflict has been exacerbating, and political polarization has been on the rise. South … [Read More]
On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis
This book provides a rich and illuminating account of the peripheries of urban, regional, and transnational development in South Korea. Engaging with the ideas of “core location,” a term coined by Baik Young-seo, and “Asia as method,” a concept with a century-old intellectual lineage in East Asia, each chapter in the volume discusses the ways … [Read More]
Zainichi Literature
From the publisher’s website: This collection of translated works highlights a selection of writings in translation by Zainichi (diasporic Koreans in Japan). The introduction provides an historical overview of Zainichi diasporic identity; the concluding appendix considers the figure of Kin Kakuei and the flourishing Zainichi literature in the 1960s. Authors whose works are translated and … [Read More]
The Aphorisms of Yi Deok-mu: Musings of a Grateful Reader
From the publisher’s website: This volume brings together excerpts from Seongyuldang nongso [蟬橘堂濃笑: The Inexorable Glee of Master Seongyuldang] and Imokgusimseo [耳目口心書: First-hand Observations] by the 18th-century scholar Yi Deok-mu. Seongyuldang nongso is a collection of Yi’s observations about life. In Imokgusimseo, Yi writes about what he heard, saw, said, and felt in the day-to-day. … [Read More]
Korea’s Quest for Economic Democratization: Globalization, Polarization and Contention
This book studies the sources of inequality in contemporary South Korea and the social and political contention this engenders. Korean society is becoming more polarized. Demands for ‘economic democratization’ and a fairer redistribution of wealth occupy centre-stage of political campaigns, debates and discourse. The contributions offer perspectives on this wide-ranging socio-political change by examining the … [Read More]
North Korean Writers in Exile PEN Literature (VOLUME Book 4)
North Korean Writers in Exile PEN Center is the 144th member of PEN International. Since defecting from North Korea because of their opposition to the dynastic dictatorship, the members of the center have been creating literature that depicts the harsh reality of North Korea and engaging in various activities to improve conditions there. The single … [Read More]
Belief and Practice in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea
Bringing together the work of leading scholars of religion in imperial Japan and colonial Korea, this collection addresses the complex ways in which religion served as a site of contestation and negotiation among different groups, including the Korean Choson court, the Japanese colonial government, representatives of different religions, and Korean and Japanese societies. It considers … [Read More]