Since the Korean War—the forgotten war—more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen. More than 100,000 women married GIs and moved to the United States. Through intellectual vigor and personal recollection, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and … [Read More]
Booklist: Korean diaspora (page 7)
An Empty House: Korean-American Poetry
From the publisher’s website: A sequel to Fragrance of Poetry, a much acclaimed poetry collection, An Empty House contains ninety-four poems by twelve Korean-American poets. It is a work that represents significant thought, effort, and collaboration. Poems in this volume show the breadth and depth of Korean-American poets’ homesickness, grief, pain, and joy of life … [Read More]
Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War
From the publisher’s website: Ranging from Geneva to Pyongyang, this remarkable book takes readers on an odyssey through one of the most extraordinary forgotten tragedies of the Cold War: the “return” of over 90,000 people, most of them ethnic Koreans, from Japan to North Korea from 1959 onward. Presented to the world as a humanitarian … [Read More]
Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America
From the publisher’s website: Hollywood and the news media have repeatedly depicted the inner-city retail store as a scene of racial conflict and acrimony. Civility in the City uncovers a quite different story. Jennifer Lee examines the relationships between African American, Jewish, and Korean merchants and their black customers in New York and Philadelphia, and shows that, in fact, … [Read More]
Lamentation as History: Narratives by Koreans in Japan, 1965-2000
This book examines narratives by and about the Koreans in Japan from the mid-1960s through 2000. In so doing, it traces the emergence and evolution of a discourse of this group as a minority community within Japan. Koreans are the only significant postcolonial population to have been subjects of a non-Western empire, yet this is … [Read More]
Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea
Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea deals with issues of tradition, modernity, and identity in modern and contemporary Korean art. On a deeper level, this is one of the only books of its kind in English that exposes readers to specific artists and their works, an especially useful resource for those who wish to know more … [Read More]
Hidden Treasures: Lives of First-Generation Korean Women in Japan
From the publisher’s website: Ten first-generation Korean women who migrated to Japan during Korea’s colonial period tell their compelling stories in Hidden Treasures. Powerful narratives of migration, minority life, gender discrimination, and the often difficult social relations between Korean immigrants and the Japanese are included, written in the women’s own words. During the colonial era, … [Read More]
Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender and Community in a Korean American Temple
From the publisher’s website: Challenging Western notions of Buddhism as a self-effacing path to rebirth and enlightenment, Sharon Suh shows how first-generation Korean Americans at Sa Chal Temple in Los Angeles have applied Buddhist doctrines to the project of finding and knowing the self in everyday life. Buddhism, for these Buddhists, serves as a source … [Read More]
The 1.5 Generation: Becoming Korean American in Hawaii
From the publisher’s website: The “1.5 generation” (Ilchom ose) refers to Koreans who immigrated to the United States as children. Unlike their first-generation parents and second-generation children born in the United States, 1.5ers have been socialized in both Korean and American cultures and express the cultural values and beliefs of each. In this first extended look at … [Read More]
Surfacing Sadness: A Centennial of Korean-American Literature 1903-2003
This book is published to commemorate the centennial of the first landing of Korean immigrants in America in 1903. An anthology of poems, essays and short stories by thirty-seven Korean-American writers, Surfacing Sadness is the first serious effort to bring together the Korean-American literary experiences to join mainstream American literature. The book primarily contains translations … [Read More]
Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land
Only listed on this site because it contains a short story by Kim Yong-ik entitled They Won’t Crack it Open, highly rated by Charles over at KTLit.com. Amazon has the following blurb about the collection: The acclaimed multicultural fiction anthology, updated to include recent writers. Thirty-seven short stories from 1900 to the present, written by … [Read More]
The Korean Diaspora in the World Economy
From the publisher’s website: Koreans living in the United States have generated an increase of about 15 to 20 percent in trade between the United States and Korea. This is one of the surprising conclusions reached in this special report, which, upon the 100th anniversary of the migration of Koreans from their homeland, looks at … [Read More]
Yellow
Set in the fictional California coastal town of Rosarita Bay, a collection of stories features such characters as Annie Yun, whose passion for country music has her longing for a cowboy, ex-fisherman Alan Fujitani, stuck in romantic widowerhood, and the competitive “Oriental Hair Poets,” whose handcrafted chairs are museum pieces. “Elegant and engrossing…[an] unusually complete … [Read More]
Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin
From the publisher’s website: Koreans in Japan are a barely known minority, not only in the West but also within Japan itself. This pioneering study analyses these relations in the context of the particular conditions and constraints that Koreans face in Japanese society. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, including: the legal and … [Read More]
The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaii, 1903-1973
From the publisher’s website: On January 13, 1903, the first Korean immigrants arrived in Hawai’i. Numbering a little more than a hundred individuals, this group represented the initial wave of organized Korean immigration to Hawai’i. Over the next two and a half years, nearly 7,500 Koreans would make the long journey eastward across the Pacific. … [Read More]
The Foreign Student
A young Korean man scarred by war finds unlikely love in the American South in National Book Award–winning author Susan Choi’s acclaimed debut novel. Tennessee, 1955. When Chuck Ahn arrives in Sewanee to begin his studies at the University of the South, he is shy and speaks English haltingly. On the subject of his earlier … [Read More]