Episodi
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For more than 70 years, South Korea has woven the threat of North Korea into daily life. But now that threat has become mundane, and South Korean national security addresses family, public health, and national unity. Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses (Helsinki University Press, 2023) illustrates how as a result, queer Koreans are seen to represent a viral threat to national security. Taking readers from police stations and the Constitutional Court to queer activist offices and pride festivals, Timothy Gitzen shows how security weaves through daily life and diffuses the queer threat, in a context where queer Koreans are treated as viral carriers, disruptions to public order, and threats to family and culture.
Timothy Gitzen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University.
Qing Shen recently obtained his PhD in anthropology from Uppsala University, Sweden.
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Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For many others, however, this coercive gambit failed to work. When does nuclear latency--the technical capacity to build the bomb--enable states to pursue effective coercion?
In Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), Tristan A. Volpe argues that having greater capacity to build weaponry doesn't translate to greater coercive advantage. Volpe finds that there is a trade-off between threatening proliferation and promising nuclear restraint. States need just enough bomb-making capacity to threaten proliferation but not so much that it becomes too difficult for them to offer nonproliferation assurances. The boundaries of this sweet spot align with the capacity to produce the fissile material at the heart of an atomic weapon.
To test this argument, Volpe includes comparative case studies of four countries that leveraged latency against superpowers: Japan, West Germany, North Korea, and Iran.
Volpe identifies a generalizable mechanism--the threat-assurance trade-off--that explains why more power often makes compellence less likely to work.
Volpe proposes a framework that illuminates how technology shapes broader bargaining dynamics and helps to refine policy options for inhibiting the spread of nuclear weapons. As nuclear technology continues to cast a shadow over the global landscape, Leveraging Latency systematically assesses its coercive utility.
Our guest today is Tristan Volpe, an Assistant Professor in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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To the untrained eye there’s nothing as unexciting as tofu, normally regarded as a tasteless, beige, congealed mass of crushed, boiled soybeans. However, tofu more than stands up on its own. Reviled for decades as a vegetarian oddity, the brave, wobbly block has made a comeback.
Tofu: a Culinary History (Reaktion, 2024) by Russell Thomas is a global history of bean curd stretches from ancient creation myths and tomb paintings, via Chinese poetry and Japanese Buddhist cuisine, to deportations in Soviet Russia and struggles for power on the African continent. It describes the potentially non-Chinese roots of tofu, its myriad types, why ‘eating tofu’ is an insult in Cantonese, and its environmental impact today. Warning: this book actually makes tofu exciting. It’s anything but bland.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Park Jeong-Mi uncovers how the lives and work of women engaged in prostitution, long considered the most abased members of society, have been strategically intertwined with the lofty purpose of building South Korea's postcolonial nation-state.
Through a complicated, contradictory patchwork of laws and regulations, which Dr. Park conceptualizes as a "toleration-regulation regime," the South Korean state did not merely exclude sex workers from ordinary citizenship; it also mobilized them for national security, national development, and the making of a gendered citizenry. In the process, the newly independent state was constructed, augmented, and consolidated. Sex workers often protested such draconian policies and sometimes utilized state apparatuses to get recognition as citizens. Based on expansive, meticulous archival research and sophisticated interpretation of historical records and women's voices, Dr. Park rewrites the dynamic history of South Korea from 1945 to the present through the lens of prostitution.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Dr. Dennis Wuerthner’s Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is the first complete English translation of one of the oldest extant Korean source materials. The scholar, Yi Illo (1152–1220), filled this collection with poetry by himself and diverse writers, ranging from Chinese master poets and Koryŏ-era kings, to long-forgotten lower-level officials and rural scholars. The verse compositions are embedded in short narratives by Yi that provide context for the poems, a combination called sihwa.
The book contains a comprehensive introduction that explores the lives of Yi Illo and his contemporaries, and the political landscape at the time this collection came into being. The translation itself is richly annotated to provide context to the allusions and to explore possible meanings.
The publication is an excellent resource for readers interested in the political and social environment of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392) and for anyone with a love for poetry and prose.
Dr. Dennis Wuerthner is assistant professor of East Asian literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures, at Boston University. He holds a PhD from Ruhr University in Bochum and his main field of research is Korean literature, history and culture in a broader East Asian context.
Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and lives in Seoul, South Korea. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo.
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When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era.
Satoru Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding the origins of modern literature in a transregional context, drawing on Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language texts in both classical and vernacular forms. He argues that modern literature came into being in East Asia through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present’s historical relationship to the past across the cultural transformations caused by modernization. Hashimoto examines writers’ anachronistic engagement with past cultures that were deemed obsolete or antithetical to new systems of values, showing that this transnational process was integral to the emergence of modern literature.
A groundbreaking cross-cultural excavation of the origins of modern literature in East Asia featuring remarkable linguistic scope, Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea (Columbia UP, 2023) bridges Asian studies and comparative literature and delivers a remapping of world literature.
Satoru Hashimoto is assistant professor of comparative thought and literature at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published in English, Japanese, Chinese, and French on topics in comparative literature, aesthetics, and thought engaging East Asian and European traditions. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of World Literature.
Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.
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Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho, Senior Lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are primarily in the field of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistics of translation & interpreting. Jinhyun's research focuses on intersections between gender, language ideologies, neoliberalism and intercultural communication across diverse social contexts including Australia and Korea.
Brynn and Jinhyun speak about her 2017 book entitled English Language Ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the Past and Present (Springer, 2017) which critically examines the phenomenon of “English fever” in South Korea from both micro- and macro-perspectives. Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions: why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the ‘dreams’ and ‘realities’ associated with English in Korea?
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
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Though traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Chŏngjo has benefited in recent decades from a wave of new scholarship which has reassessed both his reign and his role in Korean history. The latest to do so is Christopher Lovins, who in his book King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea (State University of New York Press 2019) explains how as king Chŏngjo governed not as a weak ruler but as an absolute monarch. Lovins situates this within modern definitions of absolutism, showing how their conceptualizations apply to Chŏngjo just as effectively as they do to such period rulers as the Chinese emperor Qianlong and the French monarch Louis XIV. Motivated by the experiences with court factionalism that he blamed for the death of his father, Chŏngjo drew upon Confucian thinking to strengthen his position ideologically. These arguments he used to centralize power in his hands, most dramatically in his strengthening of the traditionally weak Korean army. Though many of Chŏngjo’s changes were undone after his death in 1800, Lovins makes the case that Chŏngjo’s legacy should be considered separate from the failings of his successors rather than as part of them.
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Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan’s East Asian empire (1895–1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that sought to persuade colonial subjects to identify with the empire while simultaneously maintaining the distinctions that subjugated them and marking their attempts to self-identify as Japanese as inauthentic, illegitimate forms of “passing” or “posing.” Visions of inclusion encouraged assimilation but also threatened to disrupt the very logic of imperialism itself: If there was no immutable difference between Taiwanese and Japanese subjects, for example, then what justified the subordination of the former to the latter? The chapters emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of empire, together with the contradictions and tensions of its ideologies of race, nation, and ethnicity.
The paradoxes of passing, posing, and persuasion opened up unique opportunities for colonial contestation and negotiation in the arenas of cultural production, including theater, fiction, film, magazines, and other media of entertainment and propaganda consumed by audiences in mainland Japan and its colonies. From Meiji adaptations of Shakespeare and interwar mass media and colonial fiction to wartime propaganda films, competing narratives sought to shape how ambiguous identities were performed and read. All empires necessarily engender multiple kinds of border crossings and transgressions; in the case of Japan, the policing and blurring of boundaries often pivoted on the outer markers of ethno-national identification. This book showcases how actors—in multiple senses of the word—from all parts of the empire were able to move in and out of different performative identities, thus troubling its ontological boundaries.
Christina Yi is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of British Columbia. Her research field is modern and contemporary Japanese literature, with a particular focus on issues of postcoloniality, language politics, genre, and cultural studies. Yi’s first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018.
Andre Haag is associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research explores how the insecurities and terrors of colonialism attendant to the annexation of Korea and internalization of the “Korea Problem” were inscribed within the literature, culture, and vocabularies that circulated within the Japanese imperial metropole.
Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.
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Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history’s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale.
Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book’s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores “post-historical” Hunchun’s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism’s demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound “end of history” which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea (Stanford UP, 2024) is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.
Ed Pulford is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Sino-Russian relations, the past and present of socialism, and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. He has lived and worked in China, Russia, Japan, and Korea.
Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
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Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2023), Viren Murthy offers an intellectual history of the writings of theorists, intellectuals, and activists—spanning leftist, conservative, and right-wing thinkers—who proposed new ways of thinking about Asia in their own historical and political contexts.
Tracing pan-Asianist discourse across the twentieth century, Murthy reveals a stronger tradition of resistance and alternative visions than the contemporary discourse on pan-Asianism would suggest. At the heart of pan-Asianist thinking, Murthy shows, were the notions of a unity of Asian nations, of weak nations becoming powerful, and of the Third World confronting the “advanced world” on equal terms—an idea that grew to include non-Asian countries into the global community of Asian nations. But pan-Asianists also had larger aims, imagining a future beyond both imperialism and capitalism. The fact that the resurgence of pan-Asianist discourse has emerged alongside the dominance of capitalism, Murthy argues, signals a profound misunderstanding of its roots, history, and potential.
Viren Murthy is a Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His previous book include Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness and The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future. His current project concerns how East Asian intellectuals drew on G.W.F Hegel to uncover logics to Chinese and Japanese history, which culminate in a new world order inspired by their respective cultures.
Nick Zeller is a senior program associate for The Carter Center's China Focus initiative and managing editor of the English-language U.S.-China Perception Monitor. Prior to joining China Focus, Nick was a Visiting Assistant Professor of World History in Kennesaw State University’s Department of History and Philosophy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian History in the University of South Carolina’s Department of History, and an NSEP Boren Fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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In 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 series Modern Asian Art and Visual Culture. The book draws on primary sources to discuss the ideological stakes that affected the art world, modernist art vs. political art, and the fluidity of concepts such as tradition and national identity. Moreover, the book also has a chapter on the art of North Korea. The book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in Korean studies or contemporary art.
Dr. Youngna Kim is Professor Emerita of the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul National University and was the Director of the National Museum of Korea from 2011 until 2016. Dr. Kim received her bachelor’s degree from Muhlenberg College and her Ph.D. in the History of Art from The Ohio State University. She has many publications to her name about Korea’s ever-evolving art scene.
Buy Youngna Kim’s new book about Korean art before independence (only available in Korean) here.
Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and lives in Seoul, South Korea. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo.
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South 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 (1980–88), the political system first became increasingly authoritarian. Because modernization was founded on industrial complexes and tertiary education, these structures initially helped bolster the authoritarian regimes. In the long run, however, these structures later facilitated the anti-regime protests by various social movement groups—most importantly, workers and students—that ultimately brought democracy to the country.
By using original subnational protest event datasets, government publications, oral interviews, and publications from labour and student movement organisations, Dr. Cho takes a long view of democratisation that incorporates the decades before and after South Korea’s democratic transition. She demonstrates that Korea’s democratisation resulted from a combination of factors from below and from above, and that authoritarian development itself was a hidden root cause of democratic development in South Korea. Seeds of Mobilization shows how socioeconomic development did not create a steady pressure toward democracy but acted as a “double-edged sword” that initially stabilised autocratic regimes before destabilising them over time.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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How 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 during the election campaign in Seoul and Jeonju, the government’s controversial medical reform plans, new political actors and gender differences in voting behavior.
Sabine Burghart is University Lecturer and Academic Director of the Master’s Degree Programme in East Asian Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), University of Turku, Finland.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Asianettverket, University of Oslo (Norway), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden).
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Histories 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 life, realized through socialism. Each part of North Korea’s Mundane Revolution focuses on a question that was central to a different aspect of New Living: How to self-improve? How to build more efficiently? How to make a happy family home? How to consume properly? In exploring these questions, Schmid looks at a wide range of overlooked sources, especially North Korean magazines and journals, complete with tongue-in-cheek cartoons and photographs. Wonderfully nuanced, empirically rich, and utterly compelling, this book not only sheds light on the origins of North Korea's durability, but it does so through a fascinating history of unhappy housewives and prefabricated apartments.
North Korea’s Mundane Revolution is sure to appeal to those interested in Korean history and global histories of gender, socialist revolution, and print culture, as well as anyone who has ever wondered "How do you do North Korean history?"
And if you want to read more about this book before diving in, you should check out how it fares at the ‘The Page 99 Test,’ here.
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Dr. 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 surveys, and participant observation at Korean adoptee events across the US and in Korea, Out of Place illustrates how Korean adoptees come to understand their racial positions, reconcile competing expectations of citizenship and racial and ethnic group membership, and actively work to redefine belonging both individually and collectively. In considering when and how Korean adoptees have been remade, rejected, and celebrated as exceptional citizens, Out of Place brings to the fore the features of the race-making process.
Dr. SunAh M. Laybourn is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Memphis. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 2018. Her areas of interest include race and ethnicity, identity development, and Asian America/ns.
Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo.
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Tell 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, and musical theatre in the belief that these nations needed to rebuild their cultures in accordance with U.S. guidelines. By the 1990s, Broadway imports had become phenomenally popular in Seoul and Hamburg while home-grown musicals proliferated that adapted and transformed the prototypes that had been disseminated by the U.S.
Although this book focuses on recent musicals, it also looks back through the twentieth century to plot the evolution of musical theatre in South Korea and Germany. Part One considers the key questions: What is a musical? Why is it the great success story of U.S. theatre? How has it been assimilated to musical theatre traditions around the world? Part Two focuses on musical theatre in South Korea, studying the import/export business in large-scale musicals about Korean history and innovative hybrid experiments that mix local performance traditions with the Broadway vernacular. Part Three moves to Europe to analyze the conflicted attitudes toward musicals in the German-speaking world. Its three chapters survey the history of musicals in Germany from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reconfiguration of musical theatre conventions by experimental directors, and finally the ground-breaking German-language productions of Broadway classics by Barrie Kosky and other innovative directors.
In the twenty-first century, Broadway-style musical theatre has succeeded in becoming a lingua franca, the template for musical theatre around the world. This book shows how some of the most innovative, beautiful, and exciting musical theatre is being made outside the United States.
Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.
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“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 well as North Korea’s response to the report. The book also tackles issues of famine and hunger, information control, movement within the country and outside it, in addition to other pertinent issues. The book is full of detailed reporting on the issues but is still written in an accessible way in order to help readers understand more about North Korea and its people.
Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.
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Dr. 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, and economic developments of the post-1985 period that increased interest in European art film. It looks at the interactions of art house exhibitors with cinephile audiences, the media and the state-level administrators responsible for governing the industry. The aim of young cinephiles was nothing less than a bottom-up cultural transformation of a society emerging from three decades of dictatorship. The analysis is based on the previously unheard voices of audiences who participated in the cinephilia. This study is both a history of an era in Korean cinema and an argument about the impact of this period of cultural renewal on the industry.
Andy Jackson is an Associate Professor in the Korean Studies programme at Monash University. He is also director of the Monash University Korean Studies Research Hub (MUKSRH) and current convenor of Korean Studies. His key research areas include the history of rebellion in Korea, premodern and modern Korean history, North and South Korean film and popular culture, invented traditions in Korea. Learn more about Monash University’s Korean Studies Research Hub here.
Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University. You can follow her activities on X.
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The 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 culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies.
The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at [email protected]
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