Product Description
In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history of the minjung ("common people's") movement in South Korea, Namhee Lee shows how the movement arose in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the repressive authoritarian regime and grew out of a widespread sense that the nation's "failed history" left Korean identity profoundly incomplete. The Making of Minjung captures the movement in its many dimensions, presenting its intellectual trajectory as a discourse, its impact as a political movement, as well as raising questions about how intellectuals represented the minjung. Lee's portrait is based on a wide range of sources: underground pamphlets, diaries, court documents, contemporary newspaper reports, and interviews with participants.

Thousands of students and intellectuals left universities during this period and became factory workers, forging an intellectual-labor alliance perhaps unique in world history. At the same time, minjung cultural activists reinvigorated traditional folk theater, created a new "minjung literature," and impacted religious practices and academic disciplines. In its transformative scope, the minjung phenomenon is comparable to better-known contemporaneous movements in South Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

Understanding the minjung movement is essential to understanding South Korea's recent resistance to U.S. influence. Along with its well-known economic transformation, South Korea has also had a profound social and political transformation. The minjung movement drove this transformation and this book tells its story comprehensively and critically. ... Read more

Product Description
In an effort to make Korean culture better known around the world, 21 aspects of Korean culture are introduced in this volume along with UNESCO Treasures of Korea. These aspects, or cultural images, which include inlaid celadon ceramics of unexcelled beauty, the Tripitaka Koreana, the world's most comprehensive compilation of Buddhist scriptures, the world's first movable metal printing type, the world's first rain gauge and hanguel, one of the most scientific alphabets and writing system in the world, will give the reader a glimpse of Korea's rich cultural heritage. ... Read more

Product Description
This catalog features spectacular color photographs 179 of the artifacts, maps, art objects, paintings, furnishings, and other rare and beautiful items featured in this 2009 exhibition. The captions are in both English and Korean, but the bulk of the text is in Korean only. ... Read more

Product Description
illustrated guide book of korea,detailed descriptions of destination recommedned by the korea tourism org. ... Read more

Product Description
South Korean masculinities have enjoyed dramatic influence in pan-Asian popular culture, which travels freely due to its non-nationalistic appeal. This book investigates transcultural consumption of three iconic figuresthe middle aged Japanese female fandom of actor Bae Yong-Joon, the Western online cult fandom of the horror film Oldboy, and the Singaporean fandom of the popstar Rain. Through these three specific but hybrid masculine contexts, the author develops the concepts of soft masculinity, as well as global and postmodern variants of masculine cultural impacts. Jung argues that Korean masculinity is being reconstructed through its regional and sometimes global circulation as part of the Korean Wave, producing new forms that negotiate local Korean forces and international consumer forces to create culturally odorless forms that travel easily and find ready consumption.

Sun Jung is a Research Fellow in the School of Communication and the Arts at Victoria University. ... Read more

Product Description
This special issue of positions is a collection of thought-provoking essays that challenges the ways in which the West has traditionally experienced Asia/Pacific film. Focusing on film texts from Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, the articles explore the powerful emotions of frustration and alienation that cinema can express in the face of modernization and globalization.
Contributors examine how specific films—including Haplos (1982), Chilsu and Mansu (1988), Fresh Kill (1994), and Princess Mononoke (1997)—rework folktales, literary sources, popular memory, lived experience, and history. Some of the films examined here incorporate supernatural elements and/or gay and lesbian narratives that provide an escape from the sexism, racism, homophobia, environmental destruction, and urban alienation that the filmmakers see as the defining characteristics of the postcolonial world.

Asia/Pacific Cinema posits that film, with its ability to play with memory, fate, and linear time, creates a space in which to consider alternatives to the dominant cultural, economic, and social norms.

Contributors. Jonathan Beller, Joan Kee, Kyung Hyun Kim, Helen Hok-sze Leung, Bliss Cau Lim, Gina Marchetti, Susan Napier, Esther C. M. Yau ... Read more

Product Description
Cheju Island, Korea's historic island of exile, with a harsh natural environment, early developed a negative image as human habitat. The author challenges this perception and shows how Neo-Confucian state ideology during the Yi dynasty (A.D. 1392-1910) created and conserved the island as a viable habitat by using feng-shui--a powerful medieval science of surveying--to shape the island's built environment and quality of life. The outcome, reflecting sustained political commitment to the philosophical concept of enlightened undervelopment, was a sincere landscape inhabited by a virtuous people. ... Read more

Product Description

East Asia has undergone an intense period of economic development and accompanying social change in recent years and among the unforeseen social phenomena that have emerged are new forms of trade unions. This book analyzes the importance of such a new union movement in Korea by focusing on the promotion of social reforms by, and the intensification of interunion solidarity between the white-collar movement factions.

Three sectors of the white-collar movement are examined—financial, hospital, and research unions. In comparing their success in raising social reforms and fortifying interunion solidarity, Doowon Suh considers diverse macro and micro social relations, such as the structure of political opportunities, organization leadership, and the effects of internal labor markets.

This book is an important read for those interested in industrial relations, labor history and social movements in Korea.

Product Description
Big Brother, Little Brother provides a fascinating case study of the impact of American culture on South Korea during the Johnson administration. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters include: Making of Korean Culture, Traditional Lifestyles, The Era of Globalization, and Local Cultures ... Read more

Product Description
"...On occasion of the five hundred and fiftieth birthday of Han-gul, we have collected several articles...for the purpose of looking back upon the true meaning of the invention of Han-gul..."A bi-lingual collection. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Juche, Culture of North Korea, International Friendship Exhibition, Women in North Korea, Pyongyang, Grand People's Study House, Children of the Secret State, Sungeoguk, Mass Games, Public Holidays in North Korea, Liberation Day, a State of Mind, Sea of Blood, North Korean Calendar, Committee for Cultural Relations With Foreign Countries, Sek Studio. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 60. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The Juche Idea (Korean pronunciation: approximately "joo-cheh") is the official state ideology of North Korea. It teaches that "man is the master of everything and decides everything," and that the Korean people are the masters of Korea's revolution. Juche is a component of Kimilsungism, North Korea's political system. The word literally means "main body" or "subject"; it has also been translated in North Korean sources as "independent stand" and the "spirit of self-reliance". The first known reference to Juche was a speech given by Kim Il-sung on December 28, 1955, titled "On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work" in rejection of the policy of de-Stalinization (bureaucratic self-reform) in the Soviet Union. In this speech, Kim said that "Juche means Chosun's revolution" (Chosun being the traditional name for Korea). Hwang Jang-yeop, Kim's top adviser on ideology, discovered this speech later in the 1950s when Kim sought to develop his own version of Marxism-Leninism. The Juche Idea itself gradually emerged as a systematic ideological doctrine under the political pressures of the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s. The word "Juche" also began to appear in untranslated form in English-language North Korean works from around 1965. Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=225153 ... Read more