From the publisher’s website: This in-depth exploration of culture, media, and protest follows South Korea’s transition from the Korean War to the start of the political struggles and socioeconomic transformations of the Park Chung Hee era. Although the post–Korean War years are commonly remembered as a time of crisis and disarray, Charles Kim contends that … [Read More]
Booklist: 1960-1993 (page 4)
Contemporary Korean Political Thought and Park Chung-hee
From the publisher’s website: This important new book identifies the distinctive characteristics of the ideological terrain in contemporary (South) Korean politics and reexamines the political thought of Park Chung-hee (1917–1979), the most revered, albeit the most controversial, former president in the history of South Korea, in light of those characteristics. Jung In Kang articulates “simultaneity … [Read More]
Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development, 1919-1984
From the publisher’s website: A regional and transnational history of anarchism in Korea. This book provides a history of anarchism in Korea and challenges conventional views of Korean anarchism as merely part of nationalist ideology, situating the study within a wider East Asian regional context. Dongyoun Hwang demonstrates that although the anarchist movement in Korea … [Read More]
Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History
From the publisher’s website: Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when Korea became entangled in the world of modern imperialism and the old social, economic and political order began to change; this handbook brings together cutting edge scholarship on major themes in Korean History. Contributions by experts in the field cover the Late Choson and Colonial … [Read More]
A History of Football in North and South Korea c.1910–2002 Development and Diffusion
For the Koreans, no sport has surpassed football in terms of its popularity and national importance, from the Japanese colonization era onwards. However, its importance has developed over time as a result of unusual and agonizing historical events, including the tragic split between North and South Korea. This volume attempts to assess football’s changing political … [Read More]
Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea
In 1975, a young high school teacher took the stage at a prayer meeting in a southwestern Korean city to recite a poem called The Winter Republic. The poem became an anthem against the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee and his successors; the poet, however, soon found himself in court and then in prison … [Read More]
Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970-1979
From the publisher’s website: 1970s South Korea is characterized by many as the “dark age for democracy.” Most scholarship on South Korea’s democracy movement and civil society has focused on the “student revolution” in 1960 and the large protest cycles in the 1980s which were followed by Korea’s transition to democracy in 1987. But in … [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 Affair with Korea: Memories of South Korea in the 1960s
From the publisher’s website: In 1966 Vincent S. R. Brandt lived in Sokp’o, a poor and isolated South Korean fishing village on the coast of the Yellow Sea, carrying out social anthropological research. At that time, the only way to reach Sokp’o, other than by boat, was a two hour walk along foot paths. This … [Read More]
The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History
Ever since Korea was first divided at the end of World War II, the tension between its northern and southern halves has riveted, and threatened to embroil, the rest of the world. In this landmark history, now thoroughly revised and updated in conjunction with Korea expert Robert Carlin, veteran journalist Don Oberdorfer grippingly describes how … [Read More]
Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method
Starting in the mid-1960s, a group of Korean artists began to push paint, soak canvas, drag pencils, rip paper, and otherwise manipulate the materials of painting in ways that prompted critics to describe their actions as “methods” rather than artworks. A crucial artistic movement of twentieth-century Korea, Tansaekhwa (monochromatic painting) also became one of its … [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]
Being Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection of Popular Culture and Democracy, 1980-2010
From the distributor’s website: Many artworks from recent South Korean history are located in the nebulous but fertile contact zone between public/popular culture and democracy movements. Being Political Popular attempts a thematically focused and historically interventionist inquiry into the current status of South Korean contemporary art, exploring the work of 17 artists and art collectives. Being Political … [Read More]
Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora
From the publisher’s website: The essays in this collection offer a rich and complex picture of changing circumstances on the Korean peninsula over the past one-and-a-half centuries. By drawing attention to mobility in subjectivity—to the contested nature of subjectivity in the processes of mobility—this volume seeks to connect the experiences of the Korean diaspora with … [Read More]
Democracy After Democratization: The Korean Experience
From the publisher’s website: Half a century since the adoption of democracy in South Korea, the Korean people’s high hopes for popular governance have not been met. There is widespread skepticism about what Korea’s implementation of democracy has brought to the nation and whether it will be able to respond effectively in the future to … [Read More]
KPOP: Roots and Blossoming of Korean Popular Music
Publisher description: K-pop, referring to pop and dance music performed by idol groups mainly targeted at teens, has been expanding in popularity beyond Asia to Europe and South America. It was the 1990s when this school of music first appeared in Korea, but its emergence was not abrupt and its roots are sunk deep into … [Read More]