Hyun Ok Park. The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea. Columbia University Press, 2015. 400 pp. ISBN: 9780231171922 Reviewed by Christopher Green, PhD candidate at Leiden University. Follow him on twitter @dest_pyongyang. Crisis as a driver of social change is scarcely a new idea. The desire to fundamentally alter the status quo appears to transcend partisan politics. Perhaps that is inevitable, for if one… Read more →
Book Reviews
Book Review: North Korea: Markets and Military Rule, by Hazel Smith
Hazel Smith, North Korea. Markets and Military Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0-521-72344-2 Reviewed by Robert Winstanley-Chesters, University of Cambridge (Beyond the Korean War) and University of Leeds (School of Geography) North Korea is a sovereign space surrounded on all metaphorical, analytical and conceptual sides by common sense. It is common sense that Pyongyang’s government is an autocratic, reactionary… Read more →
Book Review: Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 by Todd A. Henry
Todd A. Henry. Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2014. 320 pp. ISBN: 9780520276550 Book review by Steven Denney, PhD Candidate at University of Toronto Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul is the first book written about Seoul during the colonial period. It adds to the scholarship in the English language… Read more →
Book Review: The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia by Andrei Lankov
Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); pp. 304. ISBN 978-0-19-996429-1. Hb. £16.99 Book review by Adam Cathcart, University of Leeds. Socialist nostalgia is a powerful thing in northeast Asia. North Korea’s current leader Kim Jong-un (or, more correctly perhaps, his group of handlers) has wielded it at… Read more →
Book Review: Infected Korean Language: Purity Versus Hybridity From The Sinographic Cosmopolis To Japanese Colonialism To Global English by Koh Jongsok
Koh Jongsok, Infected Korean Language: Purity versus Hybridity from the Sinographic Cosmopolis to Japanese Colonialism to Global English. (Ross King, Trans.) (Amherst, NY, Cambria Press, 2014); pp. 312; tables, glossary, index. ISBN 978-1-60497-871-1. Hb. £75.99 Book review by Simon Barnes-Sadler, PhD student at SOAS, University of London. Ross King’s new translation of Koh Jongsok’s collection of linguistic essays is a… Read more →
Book Review: Brokers Of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism In Korea, 1876–1945 by Jun Uchida
Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism In Korea, 1876–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. 500 pp. ISBN: 978-0674492028. £22.95. Book review by Steven Denney, PhD Candidate at University of Toronto. Jun Uchida’s Brokers of Empire opens the discourse on a long forgotten or purposefully ignored group of individuals: Japanese colonial settlers. Uchida’s focus on Japanese colonial settlers shines light on a world… Read more →
Book Review: The Korean War: An International History by Wada Haruki
Wada Haruki. The Korean War: An International History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013. 410 pp. ISBN: 978-1442223295. £26.95. Reviewed by Steven Denney, PhD. candidate at University of Toronto. There is much to be said about the potential an interdisciplinary approach holds for helping Koreanists go beyond the “origins” debate: a debate on the origins of the Korean War—a question of… Read more →
Book Review: Marching Through Suffering: Loss And Survival In North Korea by Sandra Fahy
Sandra Fahy, Marching Through Suffering: Loss And Survival In North Korea. New York: Columbia University Press (2015). 240pps. ISBN: 978-0231171342. £27.50. Reviewed by Darcie Draudt, research associate for Korea Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (U.S.). Of late, there has been an upsurge in popular monographs that detail North Korean defector narratives. The proliferation of these accounts, biographical and… Read more →
Book Review: Korean Musical Drama: P’ansori and the Making of Tradition in Modernity by Haekyung Um
Haekyung Um: Korean Musical Drama: P’ansori and the Making of Tradition in Modernity. SOAS Musicological Series. Farnham: Ashgate 2013. 254pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-6276-1. This volume explores how a variety of facets of modernity have produced today’s p’ansori, an art genre classified as ‘traditional’. Through considering its development, Um aims to illuminate the presence of tradition, overcoming the old dichotomy between… Read more →
Book Review: Hwang Byungki: Traditional Music and the Contemporary Composer in the Republic of Korea by Andrew Killick
Andrew Killick: Hwang Byungki: Traditional Music and the Contemporary Composer in the Republic of Korea. xi + 237pp. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4094-2030-9. Aiming for a confluence between East and West, as Chou Wen-chung (Chang 2006; Lai 2009) argues, Andrew Killick’s book on Hwang Byungki attempts to show how the two regions could be merged while at the… Read more →