Results by title
69 books match the query 'Korea' and 16 start with t
The Burden of the Past
Problems of Historical Perception in Japan-Korea RelationsKan Kimura; Translated by Marie Speed
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Utilizing Japanese and South Korean newspaper databases to review discussion of the two countries’ disputed historical perceptions from the end of World War II to the present, The Burden of the Past provides readers with the historical framework and the major players involved, offering much-needed clarity on such polarizing issues. By seeing behind the public discourse and political rhetoric, this book offers a firmer footing for a discussion and the steps toward resolution.
The Comfort Women
Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and JapanC. Sarah Soh
University of Chicago Press, 2008
A powerful debunking of simplistic views of a wartime tragedy
In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative.
Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.
The Films of Bong Joon Ho
Nam Lee
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Bong Joon Ho won the Oscar® for Best Director for Parasite (2019), which also won Best Picture, the first foreign film to do so, and two other Academy Awards. Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. These achievements mark a new career peak for the director, who first achieved wide international acclaim with 2006’s monster movie The Host and whose forays into English-language film with Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) brought him further recognition.
As this timely book reveals, even as Bong Joon Ho has emerged as an internationally known director, his films still engage with distinctly Korean social and political contexts that may elude many Western viewers. The Films of Bong Joon Ho demonstrates how he hybridizes Hollywood conventions with local realities in order to create a cinema that foregrounds the absurd cultural anomie Koreans have experienced in tandem with their rapid economic development. Film critic and scholar Nam Lee explores how Bong subverts the structures of the genres he works within, from the crime thriller to the sci-fi film, in order to be truthful to Korean realities that often deny the reassurances of the happy Hollywood ending. With detailed readings of Bong’s films from Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) through Parasite (2019), the book will give readers a new appreciation of this world-class cinematic talent.
The Great Enterprise
Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern KoreaHenry H. Em
Duke University Press, 2013
Surveying historical works written over the course of the twentieth century, Em elucidates the influence of Christian missionaries, as well as the role that Japan's colonial policy played in determining the narrative framework for defining Korea's national past. Em goes on to analyze postcolonial works in which South Korean historians promoted national narratives appropriate for South Korea's place in the U.S.-led Cold War system. Throughout, Em highlights equal sovereignty's creative and productive potential to generate oppositional subjectivities and vital political alternatives.
The Korean Popular Culture Reader
Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
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
The Naval Air War in Korea
Richard P. Hallion
University of Alabama Press, 2011
How carrier-based air power helped define victory in the first hot war of the Cold War.
In The Naval Air War in Korea, Richard P. Hallion offers a compelling and authoritative account of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps air campaign during the Korean War, a conflict that marked a pivotal transition in the history of military aviation. Through meticulous research and engaging narrative, Hallion examines how carrier-based air power became a decisive factor in supporting United Nations forces across the Korean Peninsula.
From the desperate defense of the Pusan Perimeter and the dramatic Inchon landing to interdiction strikes, close air support missions, and air superiority operations, naval aviators demonstrated extraordinary adaptability in a rapidly changing battlefield environment. The conflict also witnessed the evolution of aviation technology as propeller-driven aircraft served alongside emerging jet fighters, foreshadowing the future of modern air warfare.
Hallion highlights the courage, innovation, and operational effectiveness of Navy and Marine pilots who flew from aircraft carriers positioned off Korea's coasts, projecting combat power far beyond the reach of ground forces. Beyond recounting key battles and campaigns, he explores the strategic lessons learned from the war and their lasting influence on American naval doctrine and Cold War military planning.
A valuable resource for historians, aviation enthusiasts, and students of military strategy, this volume illuminates the crucial role of naval air power in shaping the outcome and legacy of the Korean War.
The Postdevelopmental State
Dilemmas of Economic Democratization in Contemporary South KoreaJamie Doucette
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Winner of the 2025 Association of Korean Studies in Europe Book Prize
Over the last 25 years, South Korea has witnessed growing inequality due to the proliferation of non-standard employment, ballooning household debt, deepening export-dependency, and the growth of super-conglomerates such as Samsung and Hyundai. Combined with declining rates of economic growth and turbulent political events, these processes mark a departure from Korea’s past recognition as a high growth “developmental state.”
The Postdevelopmental State radically reframes research into the South Korean economy by foregrounding the efforts of pro-democratic reformers and social movements in South Korea to create an alternative economic model—one that can address Korea’s legacy of authoritarian economic development during the Cold War and neoliberal restructuring since the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Understanding these attempts offers insight into the types of economic reforms that have been enacted since the late 1990s as well as the continued legacy of dictatorship-era politics within the Korean political and legal system. By examining the dilemmas economic democracy has encountered over the past 25 years, from the IMF Crisis to the aftermath of the Candlelight Revolution, the book reveals the enormous and comprehensive challenges involved in addressing the legacy of authoritarian economic models and their neoliberal transformations.
The Proletarian Gamble
Korean Workers in Interwar JapanKen C. Kawashima
Duke University Press, 2009
Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean “minority,” he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how, when migrant workers did organize—as when they became involved in Rōsō (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyō (the Japanese communist labor union)—their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In The Proletarian Gamble, his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader rethinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.
The South Korean Film Industry
Sangjoon Lee, Dal Yong Jin, And Junhyoung Cho, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2024
The South Korean Film Industry is the first detailed scholarly overview of the South Korean film industry. The thirteen chapters discuss topics from short films to popular television series that have engaged global audiences. Contributors explore the major changes in South Korean film making, marketing, and in the international growth and popularity of South Korean films. By bringing together a wide range of academic specialists, The South Korean Film Industry situates the current scholarship on South Korean cinema within the ongoing theoretical debates in contemporary global film studies. This volume will be widely read in undergraduate and graduate classes related to Korean and East Asian studies, cinema and media studies, cultural studies, and communication studies. Moreover, many institutions offer dedicated modules on South Korean cinema, media, and popular culture, for which The South Korean Film Industry will be ideal.
The Will to Win
American Military Advisors in Korea, 1946–1953Bryan R. Gibby
University of Alabama Press, 2012
One of America’s early attempts at nation building - US military advisors' shaping of the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) from 1946 until 1953.
Gibby describes ROKA’s structure, mission, challenges, and successes, thereby linking the South Korean army and their US advisors to the traditional narrative of this “forgotten war.” The work also demonstrates the difficulties inherent in national reconstruction, focusing on barriers in culture and society, and the effects of rapid decolonization combined with intense nationalism and the appeal of communism to East Asia following the destruction of the Japanese empire. Key conclusions include the importance of individual advisors, the significance of the prewar advisory effort, and the depth of the impact these men had on individual Korean units and in a few cases on the entire South Korean army.
The success or failure of South Korean government in the decade following the end of World War II hinged on the loyalty, strength, and fighting capability of its army, which in turn relied on its American advisors. Gibby argues that without a proficient ROKA, the 1953 armistice, still in effect today, would not have been possible. He reexamines the Korean conflict from its beginning in 1945—particularly Korean politics, military operations, and armed forces—and demonstrates the crucial role the American military advisory program and personnel played to develop a more competent and reliable Korean army.
Tourist Distractions
Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu CinemaYoungmin Choe
Duke University Press, 2016
Transforming Gender and Emotion
The Butterfly Lovers Story in China and KoreaSookja Cho
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Transgression in Korea
Beyond Resistance and ControlEdited by Juhn Ahn
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Transgression in Korea challenges the popular conceptions of transgression as resistance to authority, the collapse of morality, and an attempt at self- empowerment. Examples of transgression from premodern, modern, and contemporary Korea are examined side by side to underscore the possibility of reading transgression in more ways than one. These examples are taken from a devotional screen from medieval Korea, trickster tales from the late Chosŏn period, reports about flesheating humans, newspaper articles about same- sex relationships from colonial Korea, and films about extramarital affairs, wayward youths, and a vengeful vigilante. Bringing together specialists from various disciplines such as history, art history, anthropology, premodern
literature, religion, and fi lm studies, the context- sensitive readings of transgression provided in this book suggest that transgression and authority can be seen as forming something other than an antagonistic relationship.
Transnational Korean Cinema
Cultural Politics, Film Genres, and Digital TechnologiesDal Yong Jin
Rutgers University Press, 2020
The book emphasizes the economic and industrial aspects of the story, looking at questions on the interaction of politics and economics, including censorship and public funding, and provides a better view of the big picture by laying bare the relationship between film industries, the global market, and government. Jin also sheds light on the operations and globalization strategies of Korean film industries alongside changing cultural policies in tandem with Hollywood’s continuing influences in order to comprehend the power relations within cultural politics, nationally and globally. This is the first book to offer a full overview of the nascent development of Korean cinema.
Transnational Sport
Gender, Media, and Global KoreaRachael Miyung Joo
Duke University Press, 2012
Truman and Korea
The Political Culture of the Early Cold WarPaul G. Pierpaoli, Jr.
University of Missouri Press, 1999
Detailing for the first time the story of America's homefront during the Korean War, Truman and Korea fills an important gap in the historical scholarship of the postwar era. Paul Pierpaoli analyzes the political, economic, social, and international ramifications of America's first war of Soviet containment, never losing sight of the larger context of the cold war. He focuses on how and why the Truman administration undertook a bloody, inconclusive war on the Korean peninsula while permanently placing the nation on a war footing.
Truman and Korea illuminates the importance of the Korean conflict as a critical turning point in the cold war by examining both the immediate and the long-term domestic and foreign policy effects of the conflict. Pierpaoli addresses such important topics as presidential war powers and debates concerning the Defense Production Act; the inner workings of the many war mobilization agencies; the operations and politics of nationwide price and wage controls; questions concerning cold war tax policies and fiscal and monetary policies; and the evolution of national security policy.
Pierpaoli shows that President Truman's decision to intervene in the Korean War quickly became subsumed by larger cold war concerns. By the autumn of 1950 the Korean mobilization program had become the nation's de facto cold war preparedness program, which would come to span nearly forty years and eight presidential administrations. After 1950 the cold war not only continued to significantly shape political and ideological discourse in the United States but also began to reshape aggregate economic policy. By doing so, it altered the nation's industrial and economic contours, giving birth to the concept of an institutionalized "national security state," which in turn spawned the cold war military-industrial-scientific complex.
Based upon extensive research in the papers and official presidential files of Harry S. Truman, as well as many manuscript collections and records of wartime and government agencies, Truman and Korea offers a new perspective on the Korean War era and its inextricable ties to broader cold war decision making.