Korean American Writers Panel on CKS Literary Night

CKS Literary NightAs part of the celebration to mark the 110th anniversary of the first Korean immigration to Hawai‘i, four Hawai‘i-based Korean American writers will read and discuss their work on Thursday, September 26, 7:00 p.m., at the Center for Korean Studies, UH Mānoa. Presenters with UH Press books include novelist Gary Pak (Brothers under a Same Sky; A Ricepaper Airplane; Children of a Fireland) and documentarian Roberta Chang (The Koreans in Hawai‘i: A Pictorial History; When the Korean World in Hawaii Was Young). The other two participants are award-winning author Chris McKinney and poet/fiction writer Brenda Kwon.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, see the CKS announcement, or call the Center at (808) 956-7041.

Related link: Listen to the Hawai‘i Public Radio interview with Gary Pak about his most recent book, Brothers under a Same Sky.

Gary Pak Reads “Brothers” at Box Jelly

GaryPak@BoxJellyOnline newsmagazine The Hawaii Independent has partnered with Box Jelly to present a new event series called Quotes, “evening[s] of smart conversation and great company.” For the inaugural Quotes on Wednesday, August 28, 6:30 p.m., the modern Korean and Korean-American experience will be explored with UH-Mānoa English professor Gary Pak, who will present his new novel, Brothers under a Same Sky. He will be joined by Annie Koh, UHM PhD candidate in urban & regional planning, who will contribute additional commentary and discussion.

Sign up here or at the door. Read an excerpt from the book posted earlier on Hawaii Independent. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Latest in KLEAR Integrated Korean text series

A Resource for Korean Grammar InstructionThis book accompanies KLEAR’s Integrated Korean text series. It contains nearly 1,000 activities on 160 of the most commonly used grammar patterns for beginning and intermediate levels, all sorted by alphabetical order, as well as topics for comprehensive grammar instruction using an interactive approach. Nearly 40 practical activities and lesson ideas for advanced levels are also included. These activities are sorted by skill orientation (e.g., speaking-oriented, reading-oriented, etc.), which will allow them to be used with any Korean-language textbook published in the U.S., Korea, or elsewhere.

A Resource for Korean Grammar Instruction is divided into two main parts: 1) activities by forms for beginning and intermediate levels; and 2) activities by skill for more advanced levels. The first part includes greetings and Hangul, sentence endings, clausal endings, other suffixes, particles, and more. The second covers vocabulary-oriented activities, speaking/listening activities, reading-oriented activities, and writing-oriented activities. Supplementary instructional materials such as Power Point presentations, video clips, photos and images, and sample quizzes are available free for download at www.kleartextbook.com under the Instructor section after a simple login. Instructors who teach Korean as a foreign language in colleges, secondary schools, and community schools and even as private tutors will welcome this easy-to-use book.

2013, 440 pages; ISBN: 978-0-8248-3816-4, Cloth $55.00
KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language

Two New Titles in the Spatial Habitus Series

Architecture and UrbanismAlthough modernization in Korea started more than a century later than in the West, it has worked as a prominent ideology throughout the past century—in particular it has brought radical changes in Korean architecture and cities. Traditional structures and ways of life have been thoroughly uprooted in modernity’s continuous negation of the past. Architecture and Urbanism in Modern Korea, by Inha Jung, presents a comprehensive overview of architectural development and urbanization in Korea within the broad framework of modernization.

“Inha Jung has written a fine volume, full of very well informed accounts of events, insightful analyses of projects, and nuanced ideas about the unique flow of architectural and urban modernization in Korea. Jung is a mature scholar who delivers a well-balanced and original account that is both ambitious in scope and delivered in unencumbered and economical prose, with lavish documentation should one want to go further into particular aspects. It is a book that can easily be read and appreciated by people outside the field, in, say, cultural or Korean studies, as well as by those without disciplinary affiliation who are simply interested in Korea.” —Peter G. Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Harvard University

July 2013
ISBN 978-0-8248-3585-9 / $42.00 (CLOTH)

China's Contested CapitalWhen the Chinese Nationalist Party nominally reunified the country in 1928, Chiang Kai-shek and other party leaders insisted that Nanjing was better suited than Beijing to serve as its capital. For the next decade, until the Japanese invasion in 1937, Nanjing was the “model capital” of Nationalist China, the center of not just a new regime, but also a new modern outlook in a China destined to reclaim its place at the forefront of nations. Interesting parallels between China’s recent rise under the Post-Mao Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist era have brought increasing scholarly attention to the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937); however, study of Nanjing itself has been neglected. In China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing, Charles Musgrove brings the city back into the discussion of China’s modern development, focusing on how it was transformed from a factional capital with only regional influence into a symbol of nationhood—a city where newly forming ideals of citizenship were celebrated and contested on its streets and at its monuments.

China’s Contested Capital provides a nuanced, holistic view of the political, spatial, and social dimensions of Nanjing as the Guomindang capital. The grandiose plans for the governmental complex and the strikingly novel architecture of individual buildings aimed to promote Nanjing, Sun Yat-sen’s ‘Three Principles of the People,’ and the ROC’s governmental structure as modernist templates to the rest of the world. Musgrove’s chronicle of the optimism that propelled the city’s transformation and its eventual disappointment allows us to apprehend as never before the lively drama of Nanjing urban space.” —Peter J. Carroll, Wayne V. Jones Research Professor in History, Northwestern University

July 2013
ISBN 978-0-8248-3628-3 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture
Published in association with Hong Kong University Press

New in the Hawaii Studies on Korea Series

Non-Traditional Security IssuesIn the wake of political succession to Kim Jung Un, the issue of non-traditional security (NTS) is increasingly important. From the lasting effects of the famine of the 1990s to continued food shortages and the growing marketization of North Korean society, the Pyongyang regime is facing diverse and unprecedented challenges. Non-Traditional Security Issues in North Korea, edited by Kyung-Ae Park, offers cutting-edge analyses of emerging North Korean NTS issues by the world’s leading specialists in the field. It looks at these issues and their effects at the local, regional, and international level, as well as examining the international community’s efforts to promote an NTS approach to North Korea. More specifically, the volume addresses the traditional and non-traditional security paradigms, energy security, gender security, transnational organized crime, the internal and external dimensions of North Korea’s food security, the “Responsibility to Protect,” refugee issues and international law, and the role of NGOs in promoting NTS in North Korea.

Hawai‘i Studies on Korea
July 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3739-6 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era

Imperatives of CultureImperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era, edited by Christopher P. Hanscom, Walter K. Lew, and Youngju Ryu, contains translations—many appearing for the first time in the English language—of major literary, critical, and historical essays from the colonial period (1910–1945) in Korea. Considered representative of the debates among and between Korean and Japanese thinkers of the colonial period, these texts shed light on relatively unexplored aspects of intellectual life and take part in current conversations around the nature of the colonial experience and its effects on post-liberation Korean society and culture.

Imperatives of Culture is a landmark in bringing important Korean texts from the colonial period into the English-speaking world. Intellectuals and writers who were central to debates over Korean identity and culture—which in the 1930s and 1940s the Japanese were trying to eradicate—illumine with insight and often brilliance the dilemmas of an ancient nation captured by a curiously ‘late’ (or late-coming) twentieth-century imperialism. These essays also cast their reflection down to the present, as divided Korea enters its seventh decade. This book rewards multiple readings and will be most useful in the classroom.” —Bruce Cumings, Chair, Department of History, University of Chicago

Korean Classics Library: Historical Materials
May 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3821-8 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

UH Press at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, March 21-24, San Diego

AAS Annual ConferenceUniversity of Hawai‘i Press will be exhibiting at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, March 21-24, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego.

Editors Patricia Crosby and Pamela Kelley will be attending, together with marketing director Colins Kawai and Asia studies product manager Steve Hirashima. Please visit us at booths 307, 309, and 311, where we will be offering a 20% discount and free shipping in the U.S. (Free shipping applies only to orders received or placed at the conference.)

Our publishing partners will be exhibiting nearby: Ateneo de Manila University Press/University of the Philippines Press (booth 313), Cornell University East Asia Program (booth 308), MerwinAsia/Seoul Selection/Shanghai Press and Publishing Development (booth 314), NIAS Press-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (booth 312), and NUS Press-Singapore (booth 310). See you in San Diego!

New Catalog Available: Asian Studies 2013

Asian Studies 2013
The UH Press Asian Studies 2013 catalog is now available! The catalog has been redesigned to showcase our new and forthcoming Asian studies titles. (All books published prior to late 2012 and currently in print can be found at our website.) To view the PDF, click on the catalog cover image to the left.

Highlights include:

* An illustrated anthology of well-known masterpieces and unusual writing from 18th-century Edo’s counterculture — An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City, 1750–1850

*Four new titles in the Spatial Habitus series — The Hermit’s Hut: Asceticism and Architecutre in India, China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing, Architecture and Urbanism in Modern Korea, and Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China

* Short fiction from Japan’s foremost Marxist writer, Kobayashi Takiji, including a new translation of an anticapitalist classic that became a runaway bestseller in Japan in 2008, nearly eight decades after its publication — The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle

* A timely collection of essays exploring Japan’s role in global environmental transformation and how Japanese ideas have shaped bodies and landscapes over the centuries — Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power

* An expansive new study on the varied roles Southeast Asia’s monumental remains (Angkor, Pagan, Borobudur, and Ayutthaya, among others) have played in the histories of its modern nations — A Heritage of Ruins: The Ancient Sites of Southeast Asia and Their Conservation

* Close description and analysis of the history, geographical whereabouts, and doctrinal positions of early schools of Buddhism by André Bareau, one of the foremost scholars of Buddhism of his generation — The Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle

* Two volumes in the new series Korean Classics Library — Salvation through Dissent: Tonghak Heterodoxy and Early Modern Korea and Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society

First Volume in a New Series: Korean Classics Library

Salvation through DissentA popular teaching that combined elements of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, folk beliefs, and Catholicism, Tonghak (Eastern Learning) is best known for its involvement in a rebellion that touched off the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and accelerated Japanese involvement in Korea. Through a careful reading of sources—including religious works and biographies many of which are translated and annotated here into English for the first time—Salvation through Dissent: Tonghak Heterodoxy and Early Modern Korea, by George L. Kallander, traces Tonghak’s rise amidst the debates over orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Choson Korea (1392–1910) and its impact on religious and political identity from 1860 to 1906. It argues that the teachings of founder Ch’oe Cheu (1824–1864) attracted a large following among rural Koreans by offering them spiritual and material promises to relieve conditions such as poverty and disease and provided consolation in a tense geo-political climate.

“In this refreshingly original study of Tonghak, Kallander dismantles some of the myths that have sprung up about Korea’s first indigenous organized religion. He situates Tonghak in its historical context, reading the earliest Tonghak texts the way they were meant to be read when they were first composed, rather than the way they have been interpreted by latter generations. Moreover, in a departure from much previous scholarship on Tonghak, he accurately analyzes Tonghak as more religious than political in origin. This work is a significant contribution to our understanding of both Korean religion and Korean history in the nineteenth century.” —Don Baker, University of British Columbia

Korean Classics Library: Philosophy and Religion
January 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3716-7 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

New Edition of Integrated Korean: Intermediate 2

Integrated Korean: Intermediate 2 Text, Second EditionThis is a thoroughly revised edition of Integrated Korean: Intermediate 2, the fourth volume of the best-selling series developed collaboratively by leading classroom teachers and linguists of Korean. All series’ volumes have been developed in accordance with performance-based principles and methodology—contextualization, learner-centeredness, use of authentic materials, usage-orientedness, balance between skill getting and skill using, and integration of speaking, listening, reading, writing, and culture. Grammar points are systematically introduced in simple but adequate explanations and abundant examples and exercises.

Audio files for this volume may be downloaded in MP3 format at http://www.kleartextbook.com.

KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language
December 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3813-3 / $35.00 (PAPER)
Published with the support of the Korea Foundation

UH Press at American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, November 17-20

AAA logoUniversity of Hawai‘i Press is exhibiting at this year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, which is being held at McCormick Place Convention Center, November 17-20.

Press acquisitions editor Patricia Crosby and Asian studies product manager Steven Hirashima are attending. Please visit us at Booth 219.

UH Press at Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting This Month

Holiday Web Sale 2011

The Association for Asian Studies annual meeting is UH Press’ biggest scholarly exhibit/conference: 300 new and recent Asia books and journals will be on display and editorial and marketing staff will be attending. The Press’ publishing partners Ateneo de Manila University Press, Cornell University East Asia Program, KITLV Press, NIAS Press, NUS Press (Singapore), and University of the Philippines Press will be exhibiting in neighboring booths, in addition to newcomer MerwinAsia. See you in Toronto!