Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again compellingly reveals the shifting historicity of patriarchy and masculinism as centrally intersecting with the very processes of colonial and postcolonial modernization and nation-building. The book's acute analysis of the cultural representations of genders and sexualities forcefully engages us with the most complex and challenging historical periods, ... Read moreevents, and issues, such as, for example, Korean masculinity under the Japanese imperialization policy, 'pro-Japanese' writers and their recantations in the immediate post-Liberation period, and besieged Korean patriarchy under U.S. hegemony in the post-Korean War era. Crisis of Gender and the Nation is a major contribution to multiple fields—the studies of Korean and Asian literature and cinema, of gender and sexuality, of colonialism and postcoloniality, of nationalism and of (neo/post) colonial modernity—all of which most productively crisscross one another in Jeong's book.
Jin-Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego In this expansive and theoretically astute study of the relationship between masculinity and colonialism, Kelly Jeong takes us on an illuminating journey through the entire spectrum of Korean literature and cinema in the twentieth century. This is an important contribution to the studies of colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality, specifically calibrated around the changing crisis of masculinity in a nation where the story of modernity is that of repetition, not arrival.
Shu-mei Shih, University of California, Los Angeles; author of The Lure of the Modern Kelly Jeong makes a major contribution to our understanding of colonial and postcolonial modernity by showing how changing representations of gendered subjects are key to the ways in which Korean intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers negotiate pre-1945 colonial regimes of knowledge, as well as post-1945 nation-building and developmentalism. Jeong's arguments are compelling and new to the field; her work will have a profound impact on the ways in which scholars working in literature, film, and history approach twentieth-century Korean modernity.
Theodore Hughes, Columbia University I recommend this book for readers who are interested in various issues regarding modernity in Korea, including the feminism and nationalism depicted in the literature within the historical period between the 1930s and the 1960s.
Korean Studies
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