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72 books match the query 'Korea (South)' and 3 start with d

cover of Decolonial Becoming: Immobility, Indigeneity, and Disability in Transpacific Korea

Decolonial Becoming

Immobility, Indigeneity, and Disability in Transpacific Korea

Jeong Eun Annabel We

Duke University Press, 2027

Decolonial Becoming reimagines decolonization by centering questions of Indigeneity, disability, and the settler diaspora in modern Korea from the 1930s to the present. Jeong Eun Annabel We traces the ways that South Korean military and economic practices in the Pacific have functioned as a subempire of US settler colonialism and how South Korea’s nationalist ideology of monoethnicity as Indigeneity under US and Japanese occupations has come at the expense of myriad Indigenous and disabled peoples. Arguing that Korea must grapple with its place in this transpacific colonial order, We challenges the binary of mobility as freedom and immobility as unfreedom through what she calls “decolonial becoming,” a polyrhythmic theory of dialectics in which immobility is a condition of occupation as well as a critical site of relationality. She places Asian, diasporic, and transpacific theories and literatures of decolonization in conversation with Caribbean and Latin American decolonial thought and Native and Indigenous studies to show how immobility can offer a means of unlearning settler colonial logics.
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cover of Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States

Disrupting Kinship

Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States

Kimberly D. McKee

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship.

Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.

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cover of Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation

Divided Korea

Toward a Culture of Reconciliation

Roland Bleiker

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

In 2002, North Korea precipitated a major international crisis when it revealed the existence of a secret nuclear weapons program and announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Earlier in the year, George W. Bush had declared North Korea part of the “axis of evil,” and soon afterward his administration listed the country as a potential target of a preemptive nuclear strike. Pyongyang’s angry reaction ensured the complete deterioration of relations on the Korean peninsula, where only two years before the leaders of North and South Korea had come together in a historic summit meeting.

Few international conflicts are as volatile, protracted, or seemingly insoluble as the one in Korea, where mutual mistrust, hostile Cold War attitudes, and the possibility of a North Korean economic collapse threaten the security of the entire region. For Roland Bleiker, this persistently recurring pattern suggests profound structural problems within and between the two Koreas that have not been acknowledged until now. Expanding the discussion beyond geopolitics and ideology, Bleiker places peninsular tensions in the context of an ongoing struggle over competing forms of Korean identity. Divided Korea examines both domestic and international attitudes toward Korean identity, the legacy of war, and the possibilities for-and anxieties about-unification.

Divided Korea challenges the prevailing logic of confrontation and deterrence, embarking on a fundamental reassessment of both the roots of the conflict and the means to achieve a more stable political environment and, ultimately, peace. In order to realize a lasting solution, Bleiker concludes, the two Koreas and the international community must first show a willingness to accept difference and contemplate forgiveness as part of a broader reconciliation process.


Roland Bleiker is professor of international relations at the University of Queensland. From 1986 to 1988 he served as chief of office for the Swiss delegation to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission in Panmunjom.

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