The Korean War and Postmemory Generation (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)
by Dong-Yeon Koh
This pioneering volume navigates cultural memory of the Korean War through the lens of contemporary arts and film in South Korea for the last two decades. Cultural memory of the Korean War has been a subject of persistent controversy in the forging of South Korean postwar national and ideological identity. Applying the theoretical notion of “postmemory,” this book examines the increasingly diversified attitudes toward memories of the Korean War and Cold War from the late 1990s and onward, part...
A Panorama of 5000 Years
Maps are the manifestation of an intellectual construct of physical and metaphysical environments. They are rich cultural objects presenting and transmitting information about time and place of production. A map is not neutral - it is an interactive, constructed representation of space as perceived and presented by its maker and then interpreted by the viewer. Maps thus reveal methodological relationships between artistic and scientific approaches, aesthetics and functionality and form and conte...
This book offers a quite unique look at a land that has both intrigued and puzzled outsiders for decades. Over a period of one year, Dr. Saccone lived and worked in North Korea studying their behavior while chronicling his fascinating experiences. We can learn how North Koreans live, think and act from a person who penetrated the facade presented to most foreigners. Finally, his observations may answer those who wonder what it s really like to live in such an isolated land.
Korea has one of the most dynamic and diverse religious cultures of any nation on earth. Koreans are highly religious, yet no single religious community enjoys dominance. Buddhists share the Korean religious landscape with both Protestant and Catholic Christians as well as with shamans, Confucians, and practitioners of numerous new religions. As a result, Korea is a fruitful site for the exploration of the various manifestations of spirituality in the modern world. At the same time, however, the...
Elusive Belonging examines the post-migration experiences of Filipina marriage immigrants in rural South Korea. Marriage migration-crossing national borders for marriage-has attracted significant public and scholarly attention, especially in new destination countries, which grapple with how to integrate marriage migrants and their children and what that integration means for citizenship boundaries and a once-homogenous national identity. In the early twenty-first century many Filipina marriage i...
Depicted as an insular and forbidding police state with an "insane" dictator at its helm, North Korea-charter member of Bush's "Axis of Evil"-is a country the U.S. loves to hate. Now the CIA says it possesses nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles capable of delivering them to America's West Coast. But, as Bruce Cumings demonstrates in this provocative, lively read, the story of the U.S.-Korea conflict is more complex than our leaders or our news media would ha...
A Concise History of Modern Korea (A Concise History of Modern Korea)
by Michael J. Seth
This comprehensive and balanced history of modern Korea explores the social, economic, and political issues it has faced since being catapulted into the wider world at the end of the nineteenth century. Placing this formerly insular society in a global context, Michael J. Seth describes how this ancient, culturally and ethnically homogeneous society first fell victim to Japanese imperialist expansionism, and then was arbitrarily divided in half after World War II. Seth traces the postwar paths o...
Korean Cinema in Global Contexts (Critical Asian Cinemas)
by PROF. Soyoung Kim
Offering the most comprehensive analysis of Korean cinema from its early history to the present, and including the films of Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Ki-young, Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema situates itself in the local, Inter-Asian, and transnational contexts by mobilizing the critical frameworks of feminism, postcolonial critique and comparative film studies. It is attentive to an enmeshment of the cinematic, aesthetics, politics...
Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that...
This in-depth look at one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the Pacific Northwest provides a much-needed overview of the Korean American experience as well as moving personal anecdotes. Graphs offer information about Korean immigration patterns over time, while black-and-white portraits reveal the people behind the statistics. The Korean American Historical Society is a nonprofit organization founded in 1985 to enrich the collective memory of Korean Americans by collecting, maintaining...
Youth for Nation (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
by Charles R. Kim
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 they also created a formative and productive juncture in which South Koreans reworked pre-1945 constructions of national identity to meet the political and cultural needs...
Syngman Rhee (Yi Sung-man, 1875-1965) is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in modern Korean history. He emerged as the dominant leader in Korea's nationalist struggle against Japan and served as the first president of the Republic of Korea from 1948 through 1960. Rhee's political career as founder and president, however, was not without controversy. While some hailed him as the George Washington of Korea, others regarded Rhee as a little Chiang Kai-shek. This first English translatio...
Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence
by William H. Gleysteen, Jr.
Using extensive documentation, this book examines how President Jimmy Carter's troop withdrawal and human rights policies -conceived in abstraction from East Asian realities -contributed to the demise of Korean President Park Chung Hee. The author suggests that some lessons are relevant beyond Korea, for example, in our treatment of human rights problems in China today.
By tracing the evolution of South Korean state-led capitalism and comparing it with other economies, this book critiques prevalent theories including neoliberalism, the developmental state, and institutionalism, and proposes a theoretical alternative focusing on endogenous changes through elites' competition within and outside the state. Unlike the arguments of neoliberals, this volume asserts that the state can still play an active role in reconstituting the national economy through globalizat...