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Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity
International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in India
Kurien, Prema A
Rutgers University Press, 2002

Co-Winner of the 2003 American Sociological Association's Asia/Asian American book award.

Based on ethnographic research in three communities (Ezhava Hindu, Mappila Muslim, and Syrian Christian) in Kerala, India, which sent large numbers of workers to the Middle East for temporary jobs, Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity explores the factors responsible for the striking differences in the groups’ patterns of migration and migration-induced social change. Most broadly, Prema Kurien seeks to understand what ethnicity is and how it affects people’s activities and decisions. She argues that, in each case, a community-specific nexus of religion, gender, and status shaped migration, and was, in turn, transformed by it.

The religious background of the three groups determined their social location within colonial and postcolonial Kerala. This social location in turn affected their occupational profiles, family structures, and social networks, as well as their conceptions of gender and honor, and thus was fundamental in shaping migration patterns. The rapid enrichment brought about by international migration resulted in a reinterpretation of religious identity and practice which was manifested by changes in patterns of gendered behavior and status in each of the three communities. What makes this book unique is its focus on the sociocultural patterns of short-term international migration and its comparative ethnographic approach.

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Kali's Child
The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna
Jeffrey J. Kripal
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In a book now marked by both critical acclaim and cross-cultural controversy, Jeffrey J. Kripal explores the life and teachings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a nineteenth-century Bengali saint who played a major role in the creation of modern Hinduism. Through extended textual and symbolic analyses of Ramakrishna's censored "secret talk," Kripal demonstrates that the saint's famous ecstatic and visionary experiences were driven by mystico-erotic energies that he neither fully accepted nor understood. The result is a striking new vision of Ramakrishna as a conflicted, homoerotic Tantric mystic that is as complex as it is clear and as sympathetic to the historical Ramakrishna as it is critical of his traditional portraits.

In a substantial new preface to this second edition, Kripal answers his critics, addresses the controversy the book has generated in India, and traces the genealogy of his work in the history of psychoanalytic discourse on mysticism, Hinduism, and Ramakrishna himself. Kali's Child has already proven to be provocative, groundbreaking, and immensely enjoyable.

"Only a few books make such a major contribution to their field that from the moment of publication things are never quite the same again. Kali's Child is such a book."—John Stratton Hawley, History of Religions

Winner of the American Academy of Religion's History of Religions Prize for the Best First Book of 1995
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Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms
The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Why did almost one thousand highly educated "student soldiers" volunteer to serve in Japan's tokkotai (kamikaze) operations near the end of World War II, even though Japan was losing the war? In this fascinating study of the role of symbolism and aesthetics in totalitarian ideology, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney shows how the state manipulated the time-honored Japanese symbol of the cherry blossom to convince people that it was their honor to "die like beautiful falling cherry petals" for the emperor.

Drawing on diaries never before published in English, Ohnuki-Tierney describes these young men's agonies and even defiance against the imperial ideology. Passionately devoted to cosmopolitan intellectual traditions, the pilots saw the cherry blossom not in militaristic terms, but as a symbol of the painful beauty and unresolved ambiguities of their tragically brief lives. Using Japan as an example, the author breaks new ground in the understanding of symbolic communication, nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies and their execution.
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Kamikaze Diaries
Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
University of Chicago Press, 2006
“We tried to live with 120 percent intensity, rather than waiting for death. We read and read, trying to understand why we had to die in our early twenties. We felt the clock ticking away towards our death, every sound of the clock shortening our lives.” So wrote Irokawa Daikichi, one of the many kamikaze pilots, or tokkotai, who faced almost certain death in the futile military operations conducted by Japan at the end of World War II. 

This moving history presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during the war. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise. A significant number of the kamikaze were university students who were drafted and forced to volunteer for this desperate military operation. Such young men were the intellectual elite of modern Japan: steeped in the classics and major works of philosophy, they took Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as their motto. And in their diaries and correspondence, as Ohnuki-Tierney shows, these student soldiers wrote long and often heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear, expressed profound ambivalence toward the war, and articulated thoughtful opposition to their nation’s imperialism. 

A salutary correction to the many caricatures of the kamikaze, this poignant work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of Japan and World War II.
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Kashmir
Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace
Sumantra Bose
Harvard University Press, 2005

In 2002, nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan mobilized for war over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir, sparking panic around the world. Drawing on extensive firsthand experience in the contested region, Sumantra Bose reveals how the conflict became a grave threat to South Asia and the world and suggests feasible steps toward peace.

Though the roots of conflict lie in the end of empire and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the contemporary problem owes more to subsequent developments, particularly the severe authoritarianism of Indian rule. Deadly dimensions have been added since 1990 with the rise of a Kashmiri independence movement and guerrilla war waged by Islamist groups. Bose explains the intricate mix of regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and caste communities that populate Kashmir, and emphasizes that a viable framework for peace must take into account the sovereignty concerns of India and Pakistan and popular aspirations to self-rule as well as conflicting loyalties within Kashmir. He calls for the establishment of inclusive, representative political structures in Indian Kashmir, and cross-border links between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. Bose also invokes compelling comparisons to other cases, particularly the peace-building framework in Northern Ireland, which offers important lessons for a settlement in Kashmir.

The Western world has not fully appreciated the desperate tragedy of Kashmir: between 1989 and 2003 violence claimed up to 80,000 lives. Informative, balanced, and accessible, Kashmir is vital reading for anyone wishing to understand one of the world's most dangerous conflicts.

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Kathmandu
Thomas Bell
Haus Publishing, 2016
One of the greatest cities of the Himalaya, Kathmandu, Nepal, is a unique blend of thousand-year-old cultural practices and accelerated urban development. In this book, Thomas Bell recounts his experiences from his many years in the city—exploring in the process the rich history of Kathmandu and its many instances of self-reinvention.    
Closed to the outside world until 1951 and trapped in a medieval time warp, Kathmandu is, as Bell argues, a jewel of the art world, a carnival of sexual license, a hotbed of communist revolution, a paradigm of failed democracy, a case study in bungled western intervention, and an environmental catastrophe. In important ways, Kathmandu’s rapid modernization can be seen as an extreme version of what is happening in other traditional societies.  Bell also discusses the ramifications of the recent Nepal earthquake.
A comprehensive look at a top global destination, Kathmandu is an entertaining and accessible chronicle for anyone eager to learn more about this fascinating city.
 
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Kazakhstan's New Economy
Post-Soviet, Central Asian Industries in a Global Era
Jay Nathan
University of Scranton Press, 2013
Kazakhstan has faced severe economic challenges since it gained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991. Kazakhstan’s New Economy explores how the country might shed the outdated business practices that continue to hamper its growth. Jay Nathan first provides a historical overview of the economy and then delves deeper into the strengths and weaknesses of nine major industries, including oil and gas, banking, telecommunications, and transportation. Nathan’s careful analysis and recommendations will provide valuable insight for anyone interested in Central Asia’s economic growth. 

“An excellent resource on major industries in Kazakhstan.”—Byrganym Aitimova, Minister of Education and Science, the Republic of Kazakhstan

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Kenmu
Go–Daigo's Revolution
Andrew Edmund Goble
Harvard University Press, 1996
The short-lived Kenmu regime (1333–1336) of Japanese Emperor Go-Daigo is often seen as an inevitably doomed, revanchist attempt to shore up the old aristocratic order. But far from resisting change, Andrew Edmund Goble here forcefully argues, the flamboyant Go-Daigo and his iconoclastic associates were among the competitors seeking to overcome the old order and renegotiate its structure and ethos. Their ultimate defeat did not automatically spell failure; rather, the revolutionary nature of their enterprise decisively moved Japan into its medieval age.By birth, education, and circumstances, Go-Daigo should have been a weak, fatalistic bit player. Instead this student of Chinese political theory was a bold actor with an unprecedented knowledge of the various regions of Japan, who forced situations to his own benefit and led a rebellion that overthrew the Kamakura bakufu. Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution tells his extraordinary personal story vividly, reexamines original sources to discover the real nature of the Kenmu polity, and sets both within the broader backdrop of social, economic, and intellectual change at a dynamic moment in Japanese history.
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The Khmer Rouge Tribunal
Power, Politics, and Resistance in Transitional Justice
Julie Bernath
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
From 1975 to 1979, while Cambodia was ruled by the brutal Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) regime, torture, starvation, rape, and forced labor contributed to the death of at least a fifth of the country’s population. Despite the severity of these abuses, civil war and international interference prevented investigation until 2004, when protracted negotiations between the Cambodian government and the United Nations resulted in the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or Khmer Rouge tribunal. The resulting trials have been well scrutinized, with many scholars seeking to weigh the results of the tribunal against the extent of the offenses. 

Here, Julie Bernath takes a different tack, deliberately decentering the trials in an effort to understand the ECCC in its particular context—and, by extension, the degree to which notions of transitional justice generally must be understood in particular social, cultural, and political contexts. She focuses on “sites of resistance” to the ECCC, including not only members of the elite political class but also citizens who do not, for a variety of tangled reasons, participate in the tribunal—and even resistance from victims of the regime and participants in the trials. Bernath demonstrates that the ECCC both shapes and is shaped by long-term contestation over Cambodia’s social, economic, and political transformations, and thereby argues that transitional justice must be understood locally rather than as a homogenous good that can be implanted by international actors.
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The Killing of Shishupala
Magha
Harvard University Press, 2017

A canonical great poem, or mahākāvya, of the Sanskrit canon, depicting a well-known episode from the Mahābhārata.

Magha’s The Killing of Shishupala, written in the seventh century, is a celebrated example of the Sanskrit genre known as mahākāvya, or great poem. This adaptation from the epic Mahābhārata tells the story of Shishupala, who disrupts Yudhishthira’s coronation by refusing to honor Krishna, the king’s principal ally and a manifestation of divinity. When Shishupala challenges Krishna to combat, he is immediately beheaded.

Magha, who was likely a court poet in western India, draws on the rich stylistic resources of Sanskrit poetry to imbue his work with unparalleled sophistication. He expands the narrative’s cosmic implications through elaborate depictions of the natural world and intense erotic sensuality, mixing myth and classical erudition with scenes of political debate and battlefield slaughter. Krishna is variously portrayed as refined prince, formidable warrior, and incarnation of the god Vishnu protecting the world from demonic threat.

With this translation of The Killing of Shishupala, presented alongside the original text in the Devanagari script, English readers for the first time gain access to a masterwork that has dazzled Indian audiences for a thousand years.

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Kimono
A Modern History
Terry Satsuki Milhaupt
Reaktion Books, 2014

What is the kimono? Everyday garment? Art object? Symbol of Japan? As this book shows, the kimono has served all of these roles, its meaning changing across time and with the perspective of the wearer or viewer.
            Kimono: A Modern History begins by exposing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century foundations of the modern kimono fashion industry. It explores the crossover between ‘art’ and ‘fashion’ in this period at the hands of famous Japanese painters who worked with clothing pattern books and painted directly onto garments. With Japan’s exposure to Western fashion in the nineteenth century, and Westerners’ exposure to Japanese modes of dress and design, the kimono took on new associations and came to symbolize an exotic culture and an alluring female form. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the kimono industry was sustained through government support. The line between fashion and art became blurred as kimonos produced by famous designers were collected for their beauty and displayed in museums, rather than being worn as clothing. Today, the kimono has once again taken on new dimensions, as the Internet and social media proliferate images of the kimono as a versatile garment to be integrated into a range of individual styles.
            Kimono: A Modern History, the inspiration for a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,not only tells the story of a distinctive garment’s ever-changing functions and image, but provides a novel perspective on Japan’s modernization and encounter with the West.

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Kingdom of Beauty
Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan
Kim Brandt
Duke University Press, 2007
A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Kingdom of Beauty
shows that the discovery of mingei (folk art) by Japanese intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s was central to the complex process by which Japan became both a modern nation and an imperial world power. Kim Brandt’s account of the mingei movement locates its origins in colonial Korea, where middle-class Japanese artists and collectors discovered that imperialism offered them special opportunities to amass art objects and gain social, cultural, and even political influence. Later, mingei enthusiasts worked with (and against) other groups—such as state officials, fascist ideologues, rival folk art organizations, local artisans, newspaper and magazine editors, and department store managers—to promote their own vision of beautiful prosperity for Japan, Asia, and indeed the world. In tracing the history of mingei activism, Brandt considers not only Yanagi Muneyoshi, Hamada Shōji, Kawai Kanjirō, and other well-known leaders of the folk art movement but also the often overlooked networks of provincial intellectuals, craftspeople, marketers, and shoppers who were just as important to its success. The result of their collective efforts, she makes clear, was the transformation of a once-obscure category of pre-industrial rural artifacts into an icon of modern national style.
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The King’s Peace
Law and Order in the British Empire
Lisa Ford
Harvard University Press, 2021

How the imposition of Crown rule across the British Empire during the Age of Revolution corroded the rights of British subjects and laid the foundations of the modern police state.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Empire responded to numerous crises in its colonies, from North America to Jamaica, Bengal to New South Wales. This was the Age of Revolution, and the Crown, through colonial governors, tested an array of coercive peacekeeping methods in a desperate effort to maintain control. In the process these leaders transformed what it meant to be a British subject.

In the decades after the American Revolution, colonial legal regimes were transformed as the king’s representatives ruled new colonies with an increasingly heavy hand. These new autocratic regimes blurred the lines between the rule of law and the rule of the sword. Safeguards of liberty and justice, developed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, were eroded while exacting obedience and imposing order became the focus of colonial governance. In the process, many constitutional principles of empire were subordinated to a single, overarching rule: where necessary, colonial law could diverge from metropolitan law. Within decades of the American Revolution, Lisa Ford shows, the rights claimed by American rebels became unthinkable in the British Empire. Some colonial subjects fought back but, in the empire, the real winner of the American Revolution was the king.

In tracing the dramatic growth of colonial executive power and the increasing deployment of arbitrary policing and military violence to maintain order, The King’s Peace provides important lessons on the relationship between peacekeeping, sovereignty, and political subjectivity—lessons that illuminate contemporary debates over the imbalance between liberty and security.

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Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland
Rajput Identity during the Early Colonial Encounter
Arik Moran
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland explores the modern transformation of state and society in the Indian Himalaya. Centred on three Rajput led-kingdoms during the transition to British rule (c. 1790-1840) and their interconnected histories, it demonstrates how border making practices engendered a modern reading of ‘tradition’ that informs communal identities to this day. Countering the common depiction of these states as all-male, caste-exclusive entities, it reveals the strong familial base of Rajput polity, wherein women — and regent queens in particular — played a key role alongside numerous non-Rajput groups. Drawing on rich archival records, rarely examined local histories, and nearly two decades of ethnographic research, it offers an alternative to the popular and scholarly discourses that developed with the rise of colonial knowledge. The analysis exposes the cardinal contribution of borderland spaces to the fabrication of group identities. This book will interest historians and anthropologists of South Asia and of the Himalaya, as well as scholars working on postcolonialism, gender, and historiography.
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Knowing Manchuria
Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland
Ruth Rogaski
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Making sense of nature in one of the world’s most contested borderlands.

According to Chinese government reports, hundreds of plague-infected rodents fell from the skies over Gannan county on an April night in 1952. Chinese scientists determined that these flying voles were not native to the region, but were vectors of germ warfare, dispatched over the border by agents of imperialism. Mastery of biology had become a way to claim political mastery over a remote frontier. Beginning with this bizarre incident from the Korean War, Knowing Manchuria places the creation of knowledge about nature at the center of our understanding of a little-known but historically important Asian landscape. 

At the intersection of China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia, Manchuria is known as a site of war and environmental extremes, where projects of political control intersected with projects designed to make sense of Manchuria’s multiple environments. Covering more than 500,000 square miles, Manchuria’s landscapes include temperate rainforests, deserts, prairies, cultivated plains, wetlands, and Siberian taiga. With analysis spanning the seventeenth century to the present day, Ruth Rogaski reveals how an array of historical actors—Chinese poets, Manchu shamans, Russian botanists, Korean mathematicians, Japanese bacteriologists, American paleontologists, and indigenous hunters—made sense of the Manchurian frontier. She uncovers how natural knowledge, and thus the nature of Manchuria itself, changed over time, from a sacred “land where the dragon arose” to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic “wasteland” to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation.
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The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
Federico Marcon
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity—and then seemingly disappeared. Or did it? In The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europe’s but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation.
           
The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era.
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The Komedie Stamboel
Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903
Matthew Isaac Cohen
Ohio University Press, 2006
Winner of the 2008 Benda Prize

Originating in 1891 in the port city of Surabaya, the Komedie Stamboel, or Istanbul-style theater, toured colonial Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia by rail and steamship. The company performed musical versions of the Arabian Nights, European fairy tales and operas such as Sleeping Beauty and Aida, as well as Indian and Persian romances, Southeast Asian chronicles, true crime stories, and political allegories. The actors were primarily Eurasians, the original backers were Chinese, and audiences were made up of all races and classes. The Komedie Stamboel explores how this new hybrid theater pointed toward possibilities for the transformation of self in a colonial society and sparked debates on moral behavior and mixed-race politics.

While audiences marveled at spectacles involving white-skinned actors, there were also racial frictions between actors and financiers, sexual scandals, fights among actors and patrons, bankruptcies, imprisonments, and a murder.

Matthew Isaac Cohen's evocative social history situates the Komedie Stamboel in the culture of empire and in late nineteenth-century itinerant entertainment. He shows how the theater was used as a symbol of cross-ethnic integration in postcolonial Indonesia and as an emblem of Eurasian cultural accomplishment by Indische Nederlanders. A pioneering study of nineteenth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, The Komedie Stamboel gives a new picture of the region's arts and culture and explores the interplay of currents in global culture, theatrical innovation, and movement in colonial Indonesia.ABOUT THE AUTHOR---Matthew Isaac Cohen is senior lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway University of London. His articles on Southeast Asian performance have appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Asian Theatre Journal, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Archipel. As a practicing shadow puppeteer, he has performed in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
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Korea 1905–1945
From Japanese Colonialism to Liberation and Independence
Ku Daeyeol
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This important new study by one of Korea’s leading historians focuses on the international relations of colonial Korea – from the Japanese rule of the peninsula and its foreign relations (1905–1945) to the ultimate liberation of the country at the end of the Second World War. In addition, it fills a significant gap – the ‘blank space’ – in Korean diplomatic history. Furthermore, it highlights several other fundamental aspects in the history of modern Korea, such as the historical perception of the policy-making process and the attitudes of both China and Britain which influenced US policy regarding Korea at the end of World War II.
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Korea
A Cartographic History
John Rennie Short
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The first general history of Korea as seen through maps, Korea: A Cartographic History provides a beautifully illustrated introduction to how Korea was and is represented cartographically. John Rennie Short, one of today’s most prolific and well-respected geographers, encapsulates six hundred years of maps made by Koreans and non-Koreans alike.
 
Largely chronological in its organization, Korea begins by examining the differing cartographic traditions prevalent in the early Joseon period in Korea—roughly 1400 to 1600—and its temporal equivalent in early modern Europe. As one of the longest continuous dynasties, Joseon rule encompassed an enormous range and depth of cartographic production. Short then surveys the cartographic encounters from 1600 to 1900, distinguishing between the early and late Joseon periods and highlighting the influences of China, Japan, and the rest of the world on Korean cartography. In his final section, Short covers the period from Japanese colonial control of Korea to the present day and demonstrates how some of the tumultuous events of the past hundred years are recorded and contested in maps. He also explores recent cartographic controversies, including the naming of the East Sea/Sea of Japan and claims of ownership of the island of Dokdo.
 
A common theme running throughout Short’s study is how the global flow of knowledge and ideas affects mapmaking, and Short reveals how Korean mapmakers throughout history have embodied, reflected, and even contested these foreign depictions of their homeland.  
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Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection
An Annotated Selection
Young-mee Yu Cho
Rutgers University Press, 2024
William Elliot Griffis (1843 – 1928) graduated from Rutgers College in 1869 and taught four years in Fukui and Tokyo. After his return to the United States, he devoted himself to his research and writing on East Asia throughout his life. He authored 20 books about Japan and five books about Korea including, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882), Corea, Without and Within: Chapters on Corean History, Manners and Religion (1885), The Unmannerly Tiger, and Other Korean Tales (1911), A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Appenzeller (1912), and Korean Fairy Tales (1922). In particular, his bestseller, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882) was reprinted numerous times through nine editions over thirty years. He was not only known as "the foremost interpreter of Japan to the West before World War I but also the American expert on Korea. After his death, his collection of books, documents, photographs and ephemera was donated to Rutgers.

The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.
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The Korean Buddhist Empire
A Transnational History, 1910–1945
Hwansoo Ilmee Kim
Harvard University Press

In the first part of the twentieth century, Korean Buddhists, despite living under colonial rule, reconfigured sacred objects, festivals, urban temples, propagation—and even their own identities—to modernize and elevate Korean Buddhism. By focusing on six case studies, this book highlights the centrality of transnational relationships in the transformation of colonial Korean Buddhism.

Hwansoo Ilmee Kim examines how Korean, Japanese, and other Buddhists operating in colonial Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Manchuria, and beyond participated in and were significantly influenced by transnational forces, even as Buddhists of Korea and other parts of Asia were motivated by nationalist and sectarian interests. More broadly, the cases explored in the The Korean Buddhist Empire reveal that, while Japanese Buddhism exerted the most influence, Korean Buddhism was (as Japanese Buddhism was itself) deeply influenced by developments in China, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Europe, and the United States, as well as by Christianity.

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Korean Cinema in Global Contexts
Post-Colonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema
Soyoung Kim
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
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 and cultural history.
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Korean Cuisine
An Illustrated History
Michael J. Pettid
Reaktion Books, 2008
The spicy tang of kimchi, the richness of Korean barbecue, the hearty flavors of bibimbap: Korean cuisine is savored the world over for its diversity of ingredients and flavors. Michael Pettid offers here a lushly illustrated historical account of Korean food and its intricate relationship with the nation’s culture.

Over the last twelve centuries, Korean food dishes and their complex preparations have evolved along with the larger cultural and political upheaval experienced by the nation. Pettid charts this historical development of the cuisine, exploring the ways that regional distinctions and historical transformations played out in the Korean diet—including the effects of wartime food shortages and preparation techniques. Underlying all these dishes are complicated philosophical and aesthetic considerations, and Pettid delves into their impact on everything from the rituals associated with group meals or drinks with friends to the strict rules governing combinations of dishes and ingredients according to temperature, texture, spices, color, and consistency.

Featuring a batch of mouthwatering recipes and over a hundred vivid photographs of a striking array of dishes, Korean Cuisine is an incisive and engaging investigation into the relationship between Korean culture and food that will spice up the bookshelves of foodies and scholars alike.
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The Korean Economy
From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future
Barry Eichengreen, Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park, and Dwight H. Perkins
Harvard University Press, 2017

South Korea has been held out as an economic miracle—as a country that successfully completed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status—and as an example of how a middle-income country can continue to move up the technology ladder into the production and export of more sophisticated goods and services. But with these successes have come challenges, among them poverty, inequality, long work hours, financial instability, and complaints about the economic and political power of the country’s large corporate conglomerates, or chaebol.

The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Successive chapters analyze the Korean experience from the perspectives of political economy, the growth record, industrial organization and corporate governance, financial development and instability, labor and employment, inequality and social policy, and Korea’s place in the world economy. A concluding chapter describes the country’s economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met. The volume also serves to summarize the findings of companion volumes in the Harvard–Korean Development Institute series on the Korean economy, also published by the Harvard University Asia Center.

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Korean Political and Economic Development
Crisis, Security, and Institutional Rebalancing
Jongryn Mo and Barry R. Weingast
Harvard University Press

How do poor nations become rich, industrialized, and democratic? And what role does democracy play in this transition? To address these questions, Jongryn Mo and Barry R. Weingast study South Korea’s remarkable transformation since 1960. The authors concentrate on three critical turning points: Park Chung Hee’s creation of the development state beginning in the early 1960s, democratization in 1987, and the genesis of and reaction to the 1997 economic crisis. At each turning point, Korea took a significant step toward creating an open access social order.

The dynamics of this transition hinge on the inclusion of a wide array of citizens, rather than just a narrow elite, in economic and political activities and organizations. The political economy systems that followed each of the first two turning points lacked balance in the degree of political and economic openness and did not last. The Korean experience, therefore, suggests that a society lacking balance cannot sustain development. Korean Political and Economic Development offers a new view of how Korea was able to maintain a pro-development state with sustained growth by resolving repeated crises in favor of rebalancing and greater political and economic openness.

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The Korean Popular Culture Reader
Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Over the past decade, Korean popular culture has become a global phenomenon. The "Korean Wave" of music, film, television, sports, and cuisine generates significant revenues and cultural pride in South Korea. The Korean Popular Culture Reader provides a timely and essential foundation for the study of "K-pop," relating the contemporary cultural landscape to its historical roots. The essays in this collection reveal the intimate connections of Korean popular culture, or hallyu, to the peninsula's colonial and postcolonial histories, to the nationalist projects of the military dictatorship, and to the neoliberalism of twenty-first-century South Korea. Combining translations of seminal essays by Korean scholars on topics ranging from sports to colonial-era serial fiction with new work by scholars based in fields including literary studies, film and media studies, ethnomusicology, and art history, this collection expertly navigates the social and political dynamics that have shaped Korean cultural production over the past century.

Contributors. Jung-hwan Cheon, Michelle Cho, Youngmin Choe, Steven Chung, Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, Stephen Epstein, Olga Fedorenko, Kelly Y. Jeong, Rachael Miyung Joo, Inkyu Kang, Kyu Hyun Kim, Kyung Hyun Kim, Pil Ho Kim, Boduerae Kwon, Regina Yung Lee, Sohl Lee, Jessica Likens, Roald Maliangkay, Youngju Ryu, Hyunjoon Shin, Min-Jung Son, James Turnbull, Travis Workman
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The Korean Singer of Tales
Marshall R. Pihl
Harvard University Press

P'ansori, the traditional oral narrative of Korea, is sung by a highly trained soloist to the accompaniment of complex drumming. The singer both narrates the story and dramatizes all the characters, male and female. Performances require as long as six hours and make extraordinary vocal demands. In the first book-length treatment in English of this remarkable art form, Pihl traces the history of p'ansori from its roots in shamanism and folktales through its nineteenth-century heyday under highly acclaimed masters and discusses its evolution in the twentieth century. After examining the place of p'ansori in popular entertainment and its textual tradition, he analyzes the nature of texts in the repertoire and explains the vocal and rhythmic techniques required to perform them.

Pihl's superb translation of the alternately touching and comic "Song of Shim Ch'ong"—the first annotated English translation of a full p'ansori performance text—illustrates the emotional range, narrative variety, and technical complexity of p'ansori literature. The Korean Singer of Tales will interest not only Korean specialists, but also students of comparative literature, folklore, anthropology, and music.

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Kurosawa
Film Studies and Japanese Cinema
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
Duke University Press, 2000
The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan. In this comprehensive and theoretically informed study of the influential director’s cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto definitively analyzes Kurosawa’s entire body of work, from 1943’s Sanshiro Sugata to 1993’s Madadayo. In scrutinizing this oeuvre, Yoshimoto shifts the ground upon which the scholarship on Japanese cinema has been built and questions its dominant interpretive frameworks and critical assumptions.
Arguing that Kurosawa’s films arouse anxiety in Japanese and Western critics because the films problematize Japan’s self-image and the West’s image of Japan, Yoshimoto challenges widely circulating clichés about the films and shows how these works constitute narrative answers to sociocultural contradictions and institutional dilemmas. While fully acknowledging the achievement of Kurosawa as a filmmaker, Yoshimoto uses the director’s work to reflect on and rethink a variety of larger issues, from Japanese film history, modern Japanese history, and cultural production to national identity and the global circulation of cultural capital. He examines how Japanese cinema has been “invented” in the discipline of film studies for specific ideological purposes and analyzes Kurosawa’s role in that process of invention. Demonstrating the richness of both this director’s work and Japanese cinema in general, Yoshimoto’s nuanced study illuminates an array of thematic and stylistic aspects of the films in addition to their social and historical contexts.
Beyond aficionados of Kurosawa and Japanese film, this book will interest those engaged with cultural studies, postcolonial studies, cultural globalization, film studies, Asian studies, and the formation of academic disciplines.


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Kyongju Things
Assembling Place
Robert Oppenheim
University of Michigan Press, 2008

Kyongju is South Korea's preeminent "culture city," an urban site rich with archaeological wonders that residents compare to those of Nara, Xian, and Rome. By examining these ancient objects in relation to the controversies that engulfed South Korea's high-speed railway line when it was first proposed in the 1990s, Kyongju Things offers a grounded and theoretically sophisticated account of South Korean development and citizenship in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Its sensitivity to issues of place, knowledge, and cultural heritage and its innovative use of network theory will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in anthropology, Asian studies, the history of science and technology, cultural geography, urban planning, and political science.

Robert Oppenheim is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

"A tale of South Korea's new politics involving antiquarians, weekend hikers, activists, and entrepreneurs, told with wit and theoretical sophistication."
---Laurel Kendall, Curator, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History

"In Kyongju Things, Robert Oppenheim employs an innovative theoretical blend to insightfully illuminate the interactions of agency and objects in the making of a 'place.'"
---Roger L. Janelli, Professor Emeritus, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

"Kyongju Things is responsible, pathbreaking, and ambitious, with a stunning and welcoming introduction . . . Oppenheim calls upon a theoretical tool kit that allows him to productively re-think place, locality, technology, things, and subjectivity in ways that really do challenge the existing scholarship on South Korea. Kyongju Things will make a splash in Korean studies."
---Nancy Abelmann, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and author of Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement

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Kyoto’s Renaissance
Ancient Capital for Modern Japan
John Breen
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Draws on archive of material, a first in English to take an in-depth look at Kyoto’s modern transformation – its reinvention after ‘collapse’ (Meiji Restoration) and relocation of the imperial court to Tokyo. Includes: introduction, chapters on notable historical elements that sustain Kyoto as a quintessentially modern ‘ancient capital’ today.
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