Theodore Jun Yoo, The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided
2023; Brill; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1163/18765610-29040007
ISSN1876-5610
Autores Tópico(s)Asian Culture and Media Studies
ResumoToday, one can find books on almost anything Korea related.From North Korean children's literature and the minutiae of missile technology in P'yŏngyang to the gender-bending of modern South Korean K-pop stars amid its continued democratization and rise of individualism.Few books, however, deal with both Koreas simultaneously in a meaningful way and take them as part of a single story.Dan Oberdorfer's The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History and Bruce Cumings' Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History are perhaps the high-water marks of such an approach.But with first release of both in 1997, the field has been patiently waiting new additions.Hyun Gu Lynn's 2007 Bipolar Orders: The Two Koreas Since 1989 was a book with many merits.Theodore Jun Yoo's The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided now joins the conversation.There is an autobiographical aspect to this book.In the opening pages, Yoo describes his family as "wolnammin (those who crossed to the South during the Korean War)" (p.3).This conscious approach to identity reflects the modern approach the work takes.Yet one should not expect an indecipherable mess of postmodernism.What follows instead is an immensely readable and accessible text, free from academic jargon and needless pages of theory.Yet it is an account from which even the most seasoned of Korea watchers will find new knowledge and insight.The Koreas strategically avoids needlessly repeating the same stories that writers have told many times before and instead provides a whole new way of seeing the Korean peninsula.In this sense, the framework the book adopts is as impressive as the content itself.Yoo's stated aim is "to provide a compelling and accessible gateway to understanding contemporary North and South Korea and their respective diasporas through the mundane and the everyday, contextualized in broader frameworks" (p.9).Therefore, he provides a narrative free from Cold War ideology and orientalist analysis.The book instead is filled with stories of Korean individuals and their legacies, both at home and abroad.While the author, as expected, references the nations' leaders throughout, it is the attention he pays to other Korean figures of significance that makes this work special.It begins with the Fauvist painter Yi Jung-sŏp (1916Jung-sŏp ( -1956)), the inventor of Vinalon Ri Sung-gi (1905Sung-gi ( -1996)), and the wrestler Rikidōzan .From there the arc shifts to the writers Cho Se-hŭi (1942-) and Ch'ae In-hun (1936In-hun ( -2018)).Yoo describes how the former's novel A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball delivered a scathing critique of Pak Chŏng-hŭi's reckless industrialization and disregard for society's downtrodden, while the latter's The Square, which he wrote just
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