London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-Pop Idols

South Korean masculinities have enjoyed dramatically greater influence in recent years in many realms of pan-Asian popular culture, which travels freely in part because of its hybrid trans-nationalistic appeal. This book investigates transcultural consumption of three iconic figures—the middle-aged Japanese female fandom of actor Bae Yong-Joon, the Western online cult fandom of the thriller film Oldboy, … [Read More]

Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again

From the publisher’s website: Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema is about the changing constructs of modernity, masculinity, and gender relations and discourses in Korean literature and cinema during the crucial decades of the colonial and postcolonial era, based on close historical examination and a wide-ranging theoretical foundation that look … [Read More]

Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

From the publisher’s website: Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice … [Read More]

Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance

From the publisher’s website: Contributors to this volume explore the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional “us.” They describe the multifaceted ways “tradition” is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in … [Read More]

Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea

Service Economies presents an alternative narrative of South Korean modernity by examining how working-class labor occupies a central space in linking the United States and Asia to South Korea’s changing global position from a U.S. neocolony to a subempire. Making surprising and revelatory connections, Jin-kyung Lee analyzes South Korean military labor in the Vietnam War, domestic … [Read More]

The Dance of Identities: Korean Adoptees and Their Journey toward Empowerment

From the publisher’s website: Korean adoptees have a difficult time relating to any of the racial identity models because they are people of color who often grew up in white homes and communities. Biracial and nonadopted people of color typically have at least one parent whom they can racially identify with, which may also allow … [Read More]

New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements

From the publisher’s website: Despite the common held belief that Asian nations have displayed anti-market tendencies of under-consumption and export-oriented trade since the Asian financial crisis, in the 10 years since the crisis, South Korea has bucked this trend accruing a higher debt rate than the US. This groundbreaking collection of essays addresses questions such … [Read More]

Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945

From the publisher’s website: This remarkable book examines the complex history of Japanese colonial and postcolonial interactions with Korea, particularly in matters of cultural policy. E. Taylor Atkins focuses on past and present Japanese fascination with Korean culture as he reassesses colonial anthropology, heritage curation, cultural policy, and Korean performance art in Japanese mass media … [Read More]

Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: the Beginnings (1880s-1910s)

From the publisher’s website: The book deals with the influences Social Darwinism exerted upon Korea’s modern ideologies in their formative period – especially nationalism – after its introduction to Korea in 1883 and before Korea’s annexation by Japan in 1910. It shows that the belief in the “survival of the fittest” as the overarching cosmic … [Read More]

The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History

From the publisher’s website: This volume makes available for the first time in English a collection of the work of historian Yi Tae-Jin. Over the course of his career, he has done path-breaking research that covers virtually the entire Chosōn period (1392–1910) from the Koryō-Chosōn transition to the Kojong period and Korea’s takeover by Japan … [Read More]

Across the Perilous Sea: Japanese Trade with China and Korea from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries

Originally published as Le commerce extérieur du Japon des origines au XVIe siécle in 1988, this new edition of the landmark French study chronicles Japan’s transformation from an importer of continental luxury items, raw materials, and techniques to an exporter of high-quality merchandise over nearly a millennium. The vicissitudes of foreign trade policy, as well … [Read More]

On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea

From the publisher’s website: Since the Korean War, gijichon—U.S. military camp towns—have been fixtures in South Korea. The most popular entertainment venues in gijichon are clubs, attracting military clientele with duty-free alcohol, music, shows, and women entertainers. In the 1990s, South Korea’s rapid economic advancement, combined with the stigma and low pay attached to this work, led to … [Read More]

Representations of Femininity in Contemporary South Korean Women’s Literature

From the publisher’s website: This book discusses perceptions of ‘femininity’ in contemporary South Korea and the extent to which fictional representations in South Korean women’s fiction of the 1990s challenges the enduring association of the feminine with domesticity, docility and passivity. While existing literature addresses Korean women’s legal, educational, political and employment issues, this study … [Read More]

Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways

From the publisher’s website: This book vividly traces the genealogy of modern womanhood in the encounters between Koreans and American Protestant missionaries in the early twentieth century, during Korea’s colonization by Japan. Hyaeweol Choi shows that what it meant to be a “modern” Korean woman was deeply bound up in such diverse themes as Korean … [Read More]

Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine

For the first time, using original sources and his own reporting going back to 1972 when he met Kim Dae Jung at his home in Seoul, Donald Kirk explores the great untold story of modern Korean history. This book recounts the rise of Kim Dae Jung from an oppressed region of Korea, beginning with his … [Read More]

Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945

From the publisher’s website: From the late nineteenth century, Japan sought to incorporate the Korean Peninsula into its expanding empire. Japan took control of Korea in 1910 and ruled it until the end of World War II. During this colonial period, Japan advertised as a national goal the assimilation of Koreans into the Japanese state. … [Read More]