K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger South Korean economic and cultural transformations. John Lie provides not only a history of South Korean popular music—the premodern background, Japanese colonial influence, post-Liberation American impact, and recent globalization—but also a description of K-pop as a system of e...

By the late twentieth century, Japan had gained worldwide attention as an economic powerhouse. Having miraculously risen from the ashes of World War II, it was seen by many as a country to be admired if not emulated. But by the early 1990s, that bubble burst in spectacular fashion. The Japanese economic miracle was over. In this book, John Lie argues that in many ways the Japan of today has the potential to be even more significant than it was four decades ago. As countries face the prospe...

Multiethnic Japan challenges the received view of Japanese society as ethnically homogeneous. Employing a wide array of arguments and evidence--historical and comparative, interviews and observations, high literature and popular culture--John Lie recasts modern Japan as a thoroughly multiethnic society.Lie casts light on a wide range of minority groups in modern Japanese society, including the Ainu, Burakumin (descendants of premodern outcasts), Chinese, Koreans, and Okina...

Singers generating cultural identity from K-Pop to Beverly SillsAround the world and across time, singers and their songs stand at the crossroads of differing politics and perspectives. Levi S. Gibbs edits a collection built around the idea of listening as a political act that produces meaning. Contributors explore a wide range of issues by examining artists like Romani icon Esma Redžepova, Indian legend Lata Mangeshkar, and pop superstar Teresa Teng. Topics includ...

No one will soon forget the image, blazed across the airwaves, of armed Korean Americans taking to the rooftops as their businesses went up in flames during the Los Angeles riots. Why Korean Americans? What stoked the wrath the riots unleashed against them? Blue Dreams is the first book to make sense of these questions, to show how Korean Americans, variously depicted as immigrant seekers after the American dream or as racist merchants exploiting African Americans, emerged at the ...

The indispensable pocket guide to New York movies, from Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen to Lena Dunham and Noah Baumbach.ALSO AVAILABLE:Close-Ups: Wes AndersonClose-Ups: Vampire MoviesNew York has always been one of the world’s most filmed cities, with its apartments housing tenants like Rosemary's baby and the Royal Tenenbaums, its skyscrapers scaled by the likes of King Kong and graffiti ar...

Rethinking a key epoch in East Asian history, Hyun Ok Park formulates a new understanding of early-twentieth-century Manchuria. Most studies of the history of modern Manchuria examine the turbulent relations of the Chinese state and imperialist Japan in political, military, and economic terms. Park presents a compelling analysis of the constitutive effects of capitalist expansion on the social practices of Korean migrants in the region.Drawing on a rich archive of Korean, Japanese,...

The Global Environmental Crisis presents a new perspective on our inattention and inaction in the face of a major crisis.We cannot proceed without scientific knowledge, but we cannot exclusively rely on it. What we need, in addition to scientific knowledge, is utopian imagination to make us understand the nature of the crisis and to suggest an alternative vision of a viable future.This book is an essential resource for students and instructors across the social sci...