Series: Asia Pacific Modern

When the crucial years after the Korean War are remembered today, histories about North Korea largely recount a grand epic of revolution centring on the ascent of Kim Il Sung to absolute power. Often overshadowed in this storyline, however, are the myriad ways the Korean population participated in party-state projects to rebuild their lives and country after the devastation of...

In The Narrowing Sea, Hannah Shepherd examines the shared histories of Pusan and Fukuoka over the eight decades from Japan's forced opening of Korea's ports in 1876 to the end of the Korean War in 1953. One city was Korean, the other Japanese; one was a burgeoning colonial port, the other a provincial city buoyed by imperial expansion. Wars, colonisation,...

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, the University of California Press's Open Access publishing programme. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Libraries in French colonial Vietnam functioned as symbols of Western modernity and infrastructures of colonial knowledge. Yet Vietnamese readers pursued alternative uses of the library that exceeded imperial intentions. Bibliotactics examines the Hanoi and Saigon...

The State's Sexuality 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 Park Jeong-Mi conceptualises as a "toleration-regulation regime," the South Korean state did not merely...