Spirit Power explores the manifestation of the American Century in Korean history with a focus on religious culture. It looks back on the encounter with American missionary power from the late nineteenth century, and the long political struggles against the country’s indigenous popular religious heritage during the colonial and postcolonial eras. The book brings an anthropology of religion into the field of Cold War history. In particular, it investigates how Korea’s shamanism has...

Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life.Based on a detailed study of local ...

This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary auth...

More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled in unwinnable wars with eerie echoes of Vietnam.Looking Back on the Vietnam War brings together scholars from a broad variety of disciplines, who offer fresh insights on the war’s ...

In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history.Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough analysis of the period, Kwon upends c...

Following his prizewinning studies of the Vietnam War, renowned anthropologist Heonik Kwon presents this ground-breaking study of the Korean War's enduring legacies seen through the realm of intimate human experience. Kwon boldly reclaims kinship as a vital category in historical and political enquiry and probes the grey zone between the modern and the traditional (and between the civil and the social) in the lived reality of Korea's civil war and the Cold War more broadly. With captivatin...

A Story of Vietnam is the first comprehensive and inclusive history of Vietnam written in English. It relates Vietnam's past from its origins to the present (2010). It gives as much emphasis to culture as to politics. I call it a story and not a history, because I do not want it to be the usual conventional textbook, overburdened with interminable references and footnotes.A Story of Vietnam can provide a substantial reading material to students who are interested in Asia. To the hy...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent examines Vietnam, its resilient people, its history, and its likely future.A firsthand report on contemporary Vietnam presents a portrait of a nation that is struggling under the hold of Communism and places the Vietnam war in the perspective of a four-thousand-year-old history.Praise for Dragon Ascending“Americans routinely refer to the country’s experi...

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle AwardFinalist, National Book Award in NonfictionA New York Times Book Review “The Year in Reading” SelectionAll wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that liv...

Making sense of the wars for Vietnam has had a long history. The question "why Vietnam?" dominated American and Vietnamese political life for much of the length of the wars and has continued to be asked in the decades since they ended. This volume brings together the work of eleven scholars to examine the conceptual and methodological shifts that have marked the contested terrain of Vietnam War scholarship. Editors Marilyn Young and Mark Bradley's superb group of renowned contributors span...

Framer Framed brings together for the first time the scripts and detailed visuals of three of Trinh Minh-ha's provocative films: Reassemblage, Naked Spaces--Living is**Round, and Surname Viet Given Name Nam.

"An image is powerful not necessarily because of anything specific it offers the viewer, but because of everything it apparently also takes away from the viewer."--Trinh T. Minh-haVietnamese filmmaker and feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in independent filmmaking. In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the "infinite relation" of ...