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]
Booklist: Korean diaspora (page 5)
The Korean Diaspora in Post War Japan: Geopolitics, Identity and Nation-Building
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 the US, the Zainichi … [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]
A Postcolonial Self: Korean Immigrant Theology and Church
From the publisher’s website: A theologically informed look at the postcolonial self that forms as Korean immigrants confront life in the United States. Theologian Choi Hee An explores how Korean immigrants create a new, postcolonial identity in response to life in the United States. A Postcolonial Self begins with a discussion of a Korean ethnic self (“Woori” or … [Read More]
South Korea’s Education Exodus: The Life and Times of Early Study Abroad
From the publisher’s website: South Korea’s Education Exodus analyzes Early Study Abroad in relation to the neoliberalization of South Korean education and labor. With chapters based on demographic and survey data, discourse analysis, and ethnography in destinations such as Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, the book considers the complex motivations that spur families … [Read More]
To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption
From the publisher’s website: To Save the Children of Korea is the first book about the origins and history of international adoption. Although it has become a commonplace practice in the United States, we know very little about how or why it began, or how or why it developed into the practice that we see today. … [Read More]
Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity
From the publisher’s website: Can food be both national and global at the same time? What happens when a food with a national identity travels beyond the boundaries of a nation? What makes a food authentically national and yet American or broader global? With these questions in mind, Sonia Ryang explores the world of Korean … [Read More]
The Spirit Moves West: Korean Missionaries in America
From the publisher’s website: With the extraordinary growth of Christianity in the global south has come the rise of “reverse missions,” in which countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America send missionaries to re-evangelize the West. In The Spirit Moves West, Rebecca Kim focuses on South Korea as a case study of how non-Western missionaries evangelize Americans, … [Read More]
From Orphan to Adoptee: U.S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption
Since the 1950s, more than 100,000 Korean children have been adopted by predominantly white Americans; they were orphans of the Korean War, or so the story went. But begin the story earlier, as SooJin Pate does, and what has long been viewed as humanitarian rescue reveals itself as an exercise in expanding American empire during … [Read More]
Dust Star (Bi-lingual, Vol 50 – Diaspora)
“Once I got lost and found myself in the furniture complex at Siksadong. The road was muddy and had deep tire tracks everywhere. Because the doors of the furniture factories were all open wide, I could see the foreign workers working inside. They took sideway glances at me from time to time. A foreign woman, … [Read More]
The Elephant (Bi-lingual, Vol 49 – Diaspora)
No synopsis available online We guess the translators are Nicholas Yohan Duvernay, Lee Moon-ok, as they were responsible for a version of the text published in LTI Korea’s New Writing From Korea vol 1 (2008) [Read More]
Happy New Year to Everyone – To Raymond Carver (Bi-lingual, Vol 48 – Diaspora)
No synopsis available – but Charles Montgomery’s review linked below is helpful Available on Kindle [Read More]
People I Left in Shanghai (Bi-lingual, Vol 47 – Diaspora)
No summary available. Available on Kindle [Read More]
Underwear (Bi-lingual, Vol 46 – Diaspora)
No synopsis available Available on Kindle [Read More]