New Books in Korean Studies
108 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsInterviews with Authors about their New Books in Korean Studies
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/korean-studies
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Youngna Kim, "Korean Art Since 1945: Challenges and Changes" (Brill, 2024)
June 08, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesIn this beautiful new book, Dr. Youngna Kim draws on her vast understanding of Korean art to provide an overview of the peninsula’s contemporary art scene. Korean artists have become increasingly active at an international level, with many being invited for residencies and exhibitions all over the world. Nonetheless, for various reasons, the general understanding of Korean contemporary art remains insufficient. Korean Art since 1945: Challenges and Changes (Brill, 2024) is volume 9 in the ser...
Joan E. Cho, "Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
May 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSouth Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilisation: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) by Dr. Joan E. Cho takes a closer look at the history of South Korea to show that Korea’s advance to democracy was not linear. Instead, while Korea’s national economy grew dramatically under the regimes of Park Chung Hee (1961–79) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980–...
South Korea after the 2024 Parliamentary Elections
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesHow do election campaigns in South Korea look like? Why have satellite parties become an important instrument of power politics? What do the election results mean for the Yoon government’s ability to implement its policy agenda? In April 2024, South Koreans went to the polls to elect a new parliament but many regarded the elections also as a referendum on President Yoon Suk-yeol and opposition leader Lee Jae-myung. In this episode, Outi Luova talks to Sabine Burghart about her observations du...
Andre Schmid, "North Korea's Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965" (U California Press, 2024)
April 30, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHistories of North Korea typically focus on one man — Kim Il Sung — and one narrative — his grand rise to absolute power. Andre Schmid’s new book, North Korea's Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965 (University of California Press, 2024), tells a much more complex and richly textured story. Moving away from the focus on Kim Il Sung, Schmid looks at how the Korean population participated in party-state projects to create “New Living”: a quest for a better ...
SunAh M. Laybourn, "Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants" (NYU Press, 2024)
March 27, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesDr. SunAh M. Laybourn’s Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants (NYU Press, 2024) explores the experiences of Korean adoptees, the largest population of adult transnational adoptees in the United States. Over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted into primarily white US families since the 1950s, and despite being raised as US citizens, still experience both legal and social barriers to national belonging. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Korean adoptee adults, online surve...
David Savran, "Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 11, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesTell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even transforming local practices and traditions. It traces especially how the musical has been indigenized in South Korea and Germany, the commercial centers for Broadway musicals in East Asia and continental Europe. Both countries were occupied after World War II by the United States, which disseminated U.S. American popular music, jazz, movies, an...
Sandra Fahy, "Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record" (Columbia UP, 2019)
February 24, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutes“The things that are happening to North Korea are happening to all of us…they are part of the human community. To say that this is just a problem for North Korea is to say that North Koreans are not part of the human community.” In her new book, Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia University Press, 2019), Sandra Fahy gives a thorough and compelling analysis of testimonies and reports on North Korea. Fahy explores the United Nation’s report as we...
Andrew David Jackson, "The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
January 30, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDr. Andy Jackson’s The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) examines an unexplored area of South Korean cinema history – the 1985-1997 growth of art film exhibition, consumption, and cinephilia. This moment of heightened interest in art film altered how many Koreans conceptualised cinema and helped pave the way for the critical success of South Korean film. This historical study analyses the cultural, political, social, an...
Hwisang Cho, "The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea" (U Washington Press, 2020)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesThe invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written ...
Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)
December 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourEven in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as Alyssa Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) shows, when both peoples and whole political paradigms are on the move simultaneously, we are able to look in very new ways at how governance works and...
Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki, "Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire" (Routledge, 2023)
December 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAnalysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women e...
Elise Hu, "Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital" (Dutton, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutesIn August, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to complain about how U.S. regulations are holding local sunscreens back compared to the rest of the world. And while she didn’t name any specific country, the video featured headlines that did name one nation: South Korea. On social media, Korean cosmetics are now viewed as the world’s best. But where did this success come from—and, perhaps, what does it say about South Korea? Elise Hu, during her time in South Korea, tried t...
June Hee Kwon, "Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers" (Duke UP, 2023)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMigration is a theme intertwined with hopes and dreams. In Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke UP, 2023), June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursui...
Stephanie K. Kim, "Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul" (MIT Press, 2023)
November 12, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesConstructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popular image of the international student in the American imagination, an image of affluence, access, and privilege. In this provocative book, higher education scholar Stephanie Kim argues that universities -- not the students -- create the paths that allow students their international mobility. Focusing on universities in the United States and South...
Shellen Xiao Wu, "Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesFrom the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire and the deployment of science and technology to aid frontier development in extreme environments. Through a century of pol...
Hannah Michell, "Excavations: A Novel" (One World, 2023)
October 12, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesSae, former journalist turned a young mother of two in 1992 Seoul, is waiting for her husband, an engineer for a small construction company. He’s late. A neighbor rushes down with the news: a high-rise downtown has collapsed, trapping hundreds inside–the same high-rise that Sae’s husband is working. That disaster, which parallels the real-life Sampoong Department Store collapse in 1995, starts the story of Hannah Michell’s novel Excavations (One World: 2023). Sae and the book’s other characte...
Joo Ok Kim, "Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War" (Temple UP, 2022)
September 30, 2023 04:00 - 50 minutes“[W]hat is our relationship to the Korean War and to the affinities” of different institutions that produce knowledge about the Korean War? (130) In her book, Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War (Temple UP, 2022), Joo Ok Kim “conceptualizes racialized formations of kinship emerging from the Korean War as a problem of knowledge” (4). Through a close reading of Chicanx and Asian American cultural productions as well as archives produced by white penitentiary prisoners and the...
Hieyoon Kim, "Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea" (U California Press, 2023)
September 27, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesBefore South Korea became the democracy and media powerhouse that it is today, it underwent several decades of authoritarian rule during the Cold War from the late 1940s to late 1980s. Amidst this authoritarian period, South Korea’s filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors nevertheless found ways to push the boundaries of both cinema and politics. This is the topic of Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea (University of California Press, 2023). Kim is ...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Suzy Kim, "Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2023)
September 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023), Suzy Kim follows Korean women’s engagement in a broader international women’s movement from the beginnings of the Korean War in the 1940s until International Women’s Year in 1975. Obscured by layers of “cascading erasures,” the communist women of North Korea have been overlooked in traditional narratives of Asian and feminist history. By tracing their participation in global networks like the Wo...
Chuyun Oh, "K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media" (Routledge, 2022)
August 28, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesK-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2022) is about K-pop dance and the evolution and presence of its dance fandom on social media. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul, the book traces the evolution of K-pop dance from the 1980s to the 2020s and explains its distinctive feature called ‘gestural point choreography’ – front-d...
Don J. Wyatt, "Slavery in East Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 17, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesToday I talked to Don J. Wyatt about his book Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022). In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly a...
Olga Fedorenko, "Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAn ethnography of advertising in postmillennial South Korea, Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads (U Hawaii Press, 2022) details contests over advertising freedoms and obligations among divergent vested interests while positing far-reaching questions about the social contract that governs advertising in late-capitalist societies. The term "flower of capitalism" is a clichéd metaphor for advertising in South Korea, bringing resolutely positive connotations, which down...
Miya Qiong Xie, "Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesXiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential exam...
Michael J. Seth, "Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World" (Tuttle Publishing, 2023)
July 27, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesThe Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there. Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea a...
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, "The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)
July 23, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesDr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023). In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized b...
Victor Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo, "Korea: A New History of South and North" (Yale UP, 2023)
July 13, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesAs a member of the U.S. National Security Council, Victor Cha flew over the DMZ separating North and South Korea in 2007, following negotiations with Pyongyang. He writes in Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023)—his latest book with co-author, and previous podcast guest, Ramon Pacheco Pardo—about how he was struck by the environment on both sides of the border. The north had barren fields, no cars, and windowless homes; the south, gleaming skyscrapers in the gl...
Suk-Young Kim, "Surviving Squid Game: A Guide to K-Drama, Netflix, and Global Streaming Wars" (Applause Books, 2023)
July 04, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Surviving Squid Game: A Guide to K-Drama, Netflix, and Global Streaming Wars (Applause Books, 2023), scholar Suk-Young Kim reflects on Netflix's most-viewed series and one of the most influential Korean dramas, Squid Game. The series premiered in September 2021, when the pandemic cloud still hung heavy over viewers and seemed to mirror the societal ills COVID-19 brought to the surface. Kim explores the drama's intricate imagery, discussion of free will, and other components that made Squid...
Chris Suh, "The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford UP, 2023) traces how American ideas about race in the Pacific were made and remade on the imperial stage before World War II. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the United States cultivated an amicable relationship with Japan based on the belief that it was a "progressive" empire akin to its own. Even as the two nations competed for influence in Asia and clashed over immigration iss...
Monica Macias, "Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity" (Duckworth, 2023)
June 01, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesMonica Macias, the youngest daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s first president at just seven years old, lands in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1979. Her father had sent her to the country to study, but what was meant to be a shorter visit grew to a decade-long stay when her father was ousted in a coup. Monica stays in Pyongyang until 1994, when she graduates from Pyongyang University of Light Industry, and she decides to travel the world: to China, to Spain, to South Korea, to Equatorial Guinea, the...
Neither Friend nor Enemy: Sweden-North Korea Relations
May 26, 2023 08:00 - 27 minutesWelcome to the fourth NIAS-Korea episode. We invite Dr. Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein to discuss Sweden-North Korea relations. It may seem odd that among the Western countries, Sweden is the one that has maintained friendlier relations with North Korea. For example, Sweden was the first Western country that opened an embassy in Pyongyang, and the embassy still operates. This is notable given that only a few Western countries currently have an embassy in North Korea. How could we make sense of ...
David Weiss, "The God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory: Ancient Myths and Modern Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesThe God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory: Ancient Myths and Modern Empire (Bloomsbury, 2022) traces reiterations and reinterpretations of the deity Susanoo regarding his relationship with Korea vis-a-vis Japan. Through careful examination of mythological texts and other primary sources, David Weiss examines Susanoo’s role in the construction of Korea’s image as Japan’s periphery. This book discusses how ancient Japanese mythology was utilized during the colonial period to justify ...
Aram Hur, "Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesEspecially within the last decade, the word "nationalism" often evokes images of bombastic demagogues and democratic backsliding. But does nationalism always hurt liberal democracy? In Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell UP, 2022), Aram Hur argues that the answer might be "no". Instead, under specific circumstances, national attachments can actually strengthen democracies. Hur—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Uni...
Kevin Blackburn, "The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory" (National U of Singapore Press, 2022)
February 17, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutes"Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War. The role of comfort women in history remains a topic of importance — and emotion — around the world. It is well-known that an elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, were organised by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945. So why did no local former comfort women come forward and tell their ...
Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesAmong all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its vast forests, mountains, plains and earth according their own political, spiritual or scientific p...
South Korea, Technology, and Globalization
January 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourPatrick Chung, assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, talks about his research on the rise of shipping and manufacturing in South Korea with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Along the way, Chung provides fascinating insights into the role that both the US Department of Defense and local South Korean actors played in globalization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppor...
Between the Streets and the Assembly: South Korean Social Movements before and after Democratization
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesWelcome to the third NIAS-Korea episode! In this episode, we invite Prof. Yoonkyung Lee to discuss social movements in South Korea. Since its founding, South Korea has had a longstanding social movement history. One cannot fully understand the country’s democratic history without discussing the dynamics of social movements. Yoonkyung explains the main actors of social movements and social movement organizations (SMOs) before and after democratization in the country. She also discusses labor m...
Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)
January 05, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesOn September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise. That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolon...
Dan Slater and Joseph Wong, "From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 17, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesWhy some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become...
Ksenia Chizhova, "Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday" (Columbia UP, 2021)
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesIn the face of a Korean cultural world preoccupied with newness, literary output from the more measured and regulated Choson period (1392-1910) can seem difficult to engage with for readers both inside and outside the country. But as Ksenia Chizhova’s Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday (Columbia UP, 2021) shows, a particular genre of late-Chsoson lineage novels reflect not only the staid norms of Confucian patriarchy and heredity, but als...
Leah Kalmanson, "Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
October 20, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesDoes human existence have a meaning? If so, is that meaning found in the world outside of us, or is it something we bring to our experience? In Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (Bloomsbury, 2020) Leah Kalmanson shows how East Asian philosophies challenge the dichotomy implicit in the way this question is often framed. Her book investigates Korean Buddhist meditation, Confucian ritual practices, and Yijing divination. Along the way she argues t...
95 Intercultural Buddhism and Philosophy: A Discussion with Jin Y. Park
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWelcome to the new season of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. After a well-earned and challenging summer filled with drought, war, political strife and ridiculous heat, we’re back in the saddle and raring to go with some intellectual stimulation aimed at the practicing life. Four episodes are lined up with Buddhist scholars, philosophers and practitioners. First off we have Jin Y. Park. She is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy and Religion at the American University and also served as...
Jieun Baek, “North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society” (Yale UP, 2016)
September 23, 2022 21:30 - 1 hourWith recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a considerable period of time. Among the most important dimensions of this are the changes that have occurred in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/korean-studies
Jini Kim Watson, "Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization" (Fordham UP, 2021)
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHow did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021) tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form ...
Angela Ki Che Leung et al., "Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
August 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe twelve chapters of Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) are divided into three sections: Good Foods, Bad Foods, and Moral Foods. Using case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia, these chapters investigate the moralization of food in modern Asia. These studies on moral food regimes are highly specific, but their implications, especially about the malleability of food as an ...
Anoma Van Der Veere et al., "Public Health in Asia During the Covid-19 Pandemic" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
August 15, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesEvery nation in Asia has dealt with COVID-19 differently and with varying levels of success in the absence of clear and effective leadership from the WHO. As a result, the WHO’s role in Asia as a global health organization is coming under increasing pressure. As its credibility is slowly being eroded by public displays of incompetence and negligence, it has also become an arena of contestation. Moreover, while the pandemic continues to undermine the future of global health governance as a who...
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, "Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 04, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesIf there’s a country that “punches above its weight”, it’s South Korea. It’s home to some of the world’s largest and most important companies, and the source of pop culture that dominates Asia—and even planted a foothold in the West. But the country’s growth would have been astounding to those at the end of the Korean War. The Republic of Korea was poor, devastated by war, and stuck deep in Cold War politics. Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop (Hurst, 2022) by Ramon ...
Benjamin R. Young, "Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World" (Stanford UP, 2021)
August 02, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesFar from always having been an isolated nation and a pariah state in the international community, North Korea exercised significant influence among Third World nations during the Cold War era. With one foot in the socialist Second World and the other in the anticolonial Third World, North Korea occupied a unique position as both a postcolonial nation and a Soviet client state, and sent advisors to assist African liberation movements, trained anti-imperialist guerilla fighters, and completed b...
The Future of Korea: A Discussion with Eugene Y. Park
August 02, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesThere have been times when Korea has lived in periods of prolonged stability and tranquillity. But there have also been times, such as now, when it seems to have an outsized influence on global affairs – as is certainly the case of North Korea the influence of which is far bigger than its GDP figures would suggest it might have. With is nuclear capability and ruthless authoritarianism, North Korea has engaged Beijing and Washington as the highest level. And the economic miracle in the south a...
Japanese Immigration and the Korean Minority
July 22, 2022 08:00 - 26 minutesWhy does Japanese immigration policy have such a bad name? What are the historical origins of tight immigration policies? Where have these policies left immigrants of Korean descent, many of who lost their Japanese nationality in the wake of the Pacific War? Are Koreans in Japan still torn between competing loyalties to North and South Korea? And what prospects are there for immigration reform in Japan, especially given the country’s aging population and urgent need for more labour? Sara Park...