Reviews
Resiliency and Opacity: A Review of North Korea: Markets and Military Rule
Coming temporarily out of retirement, Jacques Hersh and Ellen Brun, European leftist intellectuals and Asianists of yore, review Hazel Smith’s mighty tome on markets and military rule.
A Roundtable Review of Sandra Fahy’s Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea
The latest roundtable review brings into focus Sandra Fahy’s Marching Through Suffering, a harrowing and powerful text about the social and psychological implications of famine in North Korea.
Yongusil 72: The End of Ethnic Nationalism? A Review
Change is afoot within the national conscious of the (South) Korean body politic. Sino-NK’s Steven Denney and Christopher Green review the latest piece of scholarship devoted to explaining the latest changes and variations in Korean nationhood and nationalism.
A Roundtable Review of Shine Choi’s Re-Imagining North Korea in International Politics
In a new “neutron star” of a book, sociologist Shine Choi delves into the many ways of seeing North Korea. Sino-NK reviews the argumentative battlefield.
A Roundtable Review of Suk-young Kim’s DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border
Suk-Young Kim’s new scholarly monograph on the performance and emotional perils of Korean division provokes a trio of responses.
Rain on a Strange Roof: A Roundtable Review of Janet Poole’s When the Future Disappears
For the ranks of Korean intellectuals and essayists, the zeitgeist of the 1930s and 40s was both fantastic and pessimistic in equal measure. Scholar Janet Poole intrepidly situates their writings, and their lives, in her new book. Reviewed here by Sino-NK.
Yongusil 63: Black Panthers and the Sun, Benjamin Young on North Korea and Anti-Colonialist connections
Director of Research, Robert Winstanley-Chesters, reviews Benjamin Young’s newly published piece in Japan Focus, “Juche in the United States: The Black Panther Party’s Relations with North Korea.”
Collapsist Narratives and State Strength: Reading The Interview through Han Sorya’s Jackals
Han Sorya’s conception of Americans as “jackals” is a wartime description of an enemy but one that never went away–in a sense like the war itself. In this essay, David Fields surveys the strength of North Korean state narratives, folding in a very famous Korean War short story and a certain controversial Hollywood film.
Anarchy and Assimilation: A Review of Recently Published Books in East Asian Studies
In this dual book review, Dr. Robert Winstanley-Chesters and Steven Denney review Sho Konishi’s Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan and Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, respectively.
