London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States

From the publisher’s website: Korean adoption and the legacies of gratitude Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. Kimberly D. … [Read More]

The Korean Diaspora: A Sourcebook

From the preface: This book is a collection of articles and other original content on the history and current state of the Korean diaspora. It is designed to provide useful information and references to researchers and readers with interests in the Korean diaspora as a phenomenon of migration and settlement of Koreans abroad. The Korean … [Read More]

The Korean-American Dream: Portraits of a Successful Immigrant Community

From the publisher’s website: Chairman Yang Ho Cho, head of Korean Air and Hanjin, talks of Los Angeles as a “microcosm of the United States—a land built of immigrants who want to do one thing: improve their lives.” In The Korean-American Dream, respected and distinguished business journalist James Flanigan uncovers the struggles and contributions of the … [Read More]

All You Can Ever Know

This beloved memoir “is an extraordinary, honest, nuanced and compassionate look at adoption, race in America and families in general” (Jasmine Guillory, Code Switch, NPR) What does it means to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean … [Read More]

Mixed Korean: Our Stories

From the Mixed Race Studies website: From the struggles of the Korean War, to the modern dilemmas faced by those who are mixed race, comes an assortment of stories that capture the essence of what it is to be a mixed Korean. With common themes of exclusion, and recollections of not looking Korean enough, black … [Read More]

The Spread of the Korean Language Through the Korean Diaspora and Beyond

From the publisher’s website: This volume of essays examines the development of Korean language education in expatriate Korean communities, and the role that the Korean government has played in the spread of the Korean language abroad. The ten contributors to this volume explore the dynamics of Korean language education in maintaining a sense of Korean … [Read More]

Not My White Savior: A Memoir in Poems

A provocative and furious book about race, culture, identity and what it means to be an inter-country adoptee in America Julayne Lee was born in South Korea to a mother she never knew. When she was an infant, she was adopted by a white Christian family in Minnesota, where she was sent to grow up. Not … [Read More]

A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea

The harrowing true story of one man’s life in―and subsequent escape from―North Korea, one of the world’s most brutal totalitarian regimes. Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen … [Read More]

Homing: An Affective Topography of Ethnic Korean Return Migration

Millions of ethnic Koreans have been driven from the Korean Peninsula over the course of the region’s modern history. Emigration was often the personal choice of migrants hoping to escape economic and political hardship, but it was also enforced or encouraged by governmental relocation and migration projects in both colonial and postcolonial times. The turning … [Read More]

A Lesser Love

A Lesser Love presents poems of love and departure for romantic partners, family members, and even national citizens. Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh describes her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. The spirit of … [Read More]

Transnational Encounters between Germany and Korea: Affinity in Culture and Politics Since the 1880s

This book examines the history of the German-Korean relationship from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing on the nations’ varied encounters with each other during the last years of the Yi dynasty, the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era. With essays from a range of internationally respected … [Read More]

Pachinko

Publisher description: Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a … [Read More]

The Korean Diaspora in Post War Japan: Geopolitics, Identity and Nation-Building

From the publisher’s website: The indistinct status of the Zainichi has meant that, since the late 1940s, two ethnic Korean associations, the Chongryun (pro-North) and the Mindan (pro-South) have been vying for political loyalty from the Zainichi, with both groups initially opposing their assimilation in Japan. Unlike the Korean diasporas living in Russia, China or … [Read More]

Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung

Publisher description: ‘All my life my Stradivarius had been waiting for me, as I had been waiting for her . . .’ At 7 years old Min Kym was a prodigy, the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. At 11 she won her first international prize. She worked with many violins, waiting … [Read More]

Zainichi Cinema: Korean-in-Japan Film Culture

From the publisher’s website: This book examines how filmmakers, curators, and critics created a category of transnational, Korean-in-Japan (Zainichi) Cinema, focussing on the period from the 1960s onwards. An enormously diverse swathe of films have been claimed for this cinema of the Korean diaspora, ranging across major studio yakuza films and melodramas, news reels created … [Read More]

Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea

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]