Free U.S. domestic shipping on orders of $100 or more
Offer ends November 30, 2023
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS OF ASIA AND THE PACIFIC SERIES
Continue reading “30% OFF on Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific”
This year’s issue of Korean Studies (Volume 46) features a special section, “Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea,” guest edited by Dafna Zur and Susan Hwang. The six articles that comprise this section explore transnational religiosity and Cold War politics, resistance in protest songs, North Korea’s sonic culture, South Korea’s use of K-pop in marketing and more.
Here guest editors Dafna Zur and Susan Hwang discuss the “Music that Moves.”
Left: Susan Hwang (courtesy of author). Right: Dafna Zur (Do Pham / Stanford University)
University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special section came together.
Zur and Hwang: We have been working together for the last few years as members of the LLC Korean Forum at the Modern Language Association. When it was our turn to brainstorm panel ideas for the MLA’s annual convention, we landed on music. We realized that we had a lot in common—we were both trained as literary scholars, but we wanted to explore the relationship between music and text. Our panelists presented their work in January 2021, and this volume is a result of that panel.
UHP: This special section engages with Korean music from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Why was this important to you?
Editors: Although the contributors in our special section come from different disciplinary backgrounds—musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literature, and cultural studies—music is our common denominator. We gathered a group of scholars who were keen on engaging with different musical forms—music as scores, as voices coming from the throats of children and protesters, as part of mass consumption, as background tracks to epic narratives—and who were willing to cross disciplinary boundaries and think about music as a manifestation of cultural and historical phenomena. As many of us were scholars of text rather than music, we often found ourselves outside our comfort zone—at one point, Dafna consulted her father, a composer, on her musical analysis (he is acknowledged in the footnotes!). We hope to encourage others to take up the study of music in its multiple forms.
UHP: In addition to multiple disciplines, the articles cover a substantial period of time, from the colonial period to the 21st century. Overall, do you see any patterns in Korean music over time? Or perhaps change or conflicts?
Editors: Our project demonstrates that a broad historical perspective can highlight both the transnational and local qualities of Korean music. We cover, for instance, the impact of Western music on Korean composers who wrote children’s songs, the mobilization of affect through Christian hymns and sounds of war, and the revitalization of kut in modern practice of “folk” culture and the branding power of K-pop. Besides bringing attention to the qualities of music across time and in different geographic locations, our project also stays attentive to the richness of musical genres—songs, sound effects, accents and vocalization, background tracks—that lend themselves to textual and musical analysis.
UHP: Why, in your opinion, is this special section important now?
Editors: For the last 15-20 years, Korean studies has enjoyed a surge of interest in the study of Korean culture and language, especially among high-school and college students. This success is largely thanks to the explosive popularity of K-pop around the globe. We continue to witness the power of music, such as civic engagement and political solidarity, that emerges from K-pop fandom. Two interrelated questions that the papers in this special section address are, how did the forces of social change and technological innovations impact the way people engage with music, and how did music as an affective force facilitate paradigmatic shifts in modern Korean history? It was important for us to show alternative forms of Korean music that have contributed to its enduring power.
UHP: How do you hope readers will utilize this special section in their own work?
The articles in the special section deal with a wide range of genres and sonorities from different historical periods. There are YouTube links to music in many of them. We hope scholars will find our articles accessible and teachable, and that the articles will contribute to our ongoing efforts to contextualize the current moment of Korean music’s success.
Editor’s Note
Cheehyung Harrison Kim
Special Section
Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea
Introduction to the Special Section
Dafna Zur and Susan Hwang
When Songs Don’t Work: Western Tonalities and Korean Breath in Children’s Songs of the Colonial Period
Yoon Joo Hwang and Dafna Zur
From Waifs to Songbirds: The World Vision Korean Orphan Choir
Katherine In-Young Lee
From McArthur’s Landing to Trump’s Fire and Fury: Sonic Depictions of Struggle and Sacrifi ce in a North Korean Short Story, Film, and Opera
Alexandra Leonzini and Peter Moody
What’s for Sale? Selling Songs and K-pop Idols in Korean Commercials
Roald Maliangkay
Volume 41, Number 1 (2022)
Associate Editor Catherine Swatek and Editorial Board Member Robert E. Hegel remember Rolston in the following introduction:
Given his publication record, one might assume that David L. Rolston is a scholar of narrative fiction. For his first major publication, David served as editor of How to Read the Chinese Novel, a milestone in providing English-language readers a glimpse of reading practices and practical criticism contemporaneous with Ming and Qing novels themselves. Not merely the compiler of the translations that comprise six of the book’s seven chapters, David’s work can be seen throughout the volume, from adding innumerable notes and explanations to the “How to Read” (dufa讀法) translations; to writing essays on the sources, history, and formal aspects of traditional fiction criticism; to compiling explanatory appendices and an extensive bibliography for each of the masterworks covered. This project was completed before David finished his Chicago doctorate.
Find more special features and articles at Project MUSE.
Volume 46, Number 2 (2021)
This Special Section features discussion on 1960’s protect songs to K-pop idols. Editor Cheehyung Harrison Kim notes:
Culture is at once a medium through which we make sense of the
world (for good or ill), a field of empowerment for the underprivileged, and a source of hegemony for the state and corporations. This cultural complexity is discernible in South Korea’s current political landscape, and it is also the very theme explored in this volume’s Special Section “Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea,” dexterously guest edited by Dafna Zur and Susan Hwang. In Katherine Lee’s elegant piece on the World Vision Korean Orphan Choir, musical performance is at the heart of transnational religiosity and Cold War politics. Transnationalism is also the framework of Dafna Zur and Yoon Joo Hwang’s original research on children’s music during the colonial period, when the merger between western style of songwriting and Korean emotionality unevenly transpired in the genre of tongyo. Music as a field of popular resistance is the core of Pil Ho Kim’s audacious piece on South Korea’s 1960s protest songs, which, for Kim, is a pre-minjung expression of the multitude. Susan Hwang’s emotionally prodigious article, too, is on the resistive and resilient aspect of music, which, in the aftermath of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, served as a crucial repertoire for the counter-state. From the opposite side, music as practice of hegemonic efficacy is dealt with in Alexandra Leonzini and Peter Moody’s intricate article on North Korea’s sonic culture, as it is done in Roald Maliangkay’s perspicacious study on South Korea’s use of K-pop in marketing. Whether the hegemonic entity is the state or a corporation, music is, in these two articles, a potent medium of influence.
Find more special features and articles at Project MUSE.
Volume 62 (2022)
As expressed by authors Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase and Wakako Suzuki in the introduction:
The literary genre shōjo shōsetsu emerged in conjunction with the rise of girls’ education in the Meiji period. Early stories were meant to educate readers to become “good wives and wise mothers.” Accordingly, shōjo shōsetsu endured restrictions on the narratives they could tell, limiting the breadth of their authors’ artistic and literary possibilities. Shōjo shōsetsu evolved and diversified in the postwar era and, especially starting in the 1980s, became a means for young female authors to empower themselves. Shōjo shōsetsu have declined in popularity recently as readers consume stories more broadly across media and genres. The goal of this special issue is to contemplate the function, meanings, and problems of shōjo shōsetsu. Instead of merely confining ourselves to a rigid, unified notion of shōjo shōsetsu, we consider shōjo characters from the wider literary world, investigating their roles, functions, and cultural implications.
The new issue includes the following articles:
Introduction: Girls and Literature
イントロダクション：少女と文学
Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase and Wakako Suzuki
Trees That Grow Kimono (1895)
着物のなる木
Wakamatsu Shizuko 若松賤子
Translated by Wakako Suzuki
Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa as the
Territory of the Dispossessed Girl
追い立てられた少女の領域としての『浅草紅団』
Barbara Hartley
Love and Sexuality in Postwar Girls’ Culture: Examining
Tomishima Takeo’s Junior Fictiona
戦後少女文化における恋愛と性愛：富島健夫の
ジュニア小説をめぐって
Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase
Countdown to the Demise of Girls’ Novels
少女小説のカウントダウンの開始
Kume Yoriko 久米依子
Translated and Introduced by Barbara Hartley
Find more articles at Project MUSE.
Volume 60, Number 1 (2021)
The new issue includes the following articles:
Addressing Tensions between Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories: Modeling Hawaiian Fort Pā‘ula‘ula/Russian Fort Elizabeth, Kaua‘i Island, Hawai‘i
Aleksander V. Molodin and Peter R. Mills
To Eat or Not to Eat? Animals and Categorical Fluidity in Shang Society
Yitzchak Jaffe and Roderick Campbell
Gendered Households and Ceramic Assemblage Formation in the Mariana Islands, Western Pacific
Jacy M. Miller, Darlene R. Moore, and James M.
Volume 38, Number 1, (2021)
From the Editor Siyuan Liu:
This issue starts with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s appreciation of Leonard Pronko (1927–2019), noted kabuki scholar and teacher who passed away late 2019. Building on her profile of Pronko for Asian Theatre Journal’s “founders of the fields” series (28: 2, 2011), Sorgenfrei offers a touching personal profile of her former professor as an extraordinary human being.
As evidence to the flourishing field of Japanese theatre studies pioneered by Pronko and his peers, this issue continues with a special section on contemporary Japanese theatre with a combination of articles, reports, a translation, and a performance review essay.
Volume 43, Number 3 (2020)
In the summer of 2019, kiaʻi (protectors) gathered at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu to defend Maunakea, a sacred mountain, against desecration by the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). Thousands gathered at Ala Hulu Kupuna, or Mauna Kea Access Road. Daily protocols were led by cultural practitioners and long-time protectors of Maunakea, intergenerational Native Hawaiian leadership was developed and empowered on Hawaiian terms, a community kitchen was organized, Puʻuhuluhulu University was established as an actual Hawaiian place of learning, and a collective commitment to ʻāina and kapu aloha rooted all who arrived and all who continue to stay in this movement.
The 2019 stand was also an unprecedented opportunity to witness the battle of narratives, as mainstream media and highly paid public relations firms were outmaneuvered by Kanaka- and ally-authored life writing. This special issue features first-hand accounts, academic reflections, creative works, photography, and interviews with kiaʻi from the 2019 front lines and members of the media team.
Volume 32, Number 2 (2021)
Introduction from Guest Editor Antoinette Burton reads:
The technological evangelism of much of anglophone digital humanities discourse should sit uneasily with empire historians, who know what languages of discovery and “new frontiers” have meant in the context of world history, especially where data collection is concerned. To be sure, digitization has made myriad colonial archives, official and unofficial, available via open access platforms. This means that vast stores of knowledge are now at our fingertips—a proximity and immediacy that has reshaped the lived experience of archival research for many scholars, in this case bringing the imperial world not just closer to home but into the hands of anyone who has access to a cellphone. And the revolution in digital tools in the last twenty-five years has given rise to equally vast possibilities for gathering and visualizing evidence as well as for scaling and interpreting data: for worlding, mostly by aggregation and consolidation, what we aim to know about the kinds of colonial pasts that are available and capturable via text and image. Yet, this information empire is not exactly new. Digitization most often reassembles archival collections proper, sometimes remixing them with print and visual culture and typically organizing them through mechanisms and selection processes that are more or less visible depending on the commitment to transparency of the conglomerator. In some cases, those conglomerators are private individuals or government entities; in others, corporate sponsors; in still others, community-based activists. Inevitably perhaps, today’s digital imperial “data” are actually, more accurately, digitally transformed imperial sources. And for colonial subjects, as for the enslaved, data has more often than not meant terror at the scene of the crime.
Volume 33, Number 1 (2021)
The new issue includes the following articles:
“We Want Development”: Land and Water (Dis)connections in Port Moresby, Urban Papua New Guinea
Michelle Nayahamui Rooney
“Keeping an Eye Out for Women”: Implicit Feminism, Political Leadership, and Social Change in the Pacific Islands
Ceridwen Spark, John Cox, and Jack Corbett
Gesturing to the Past: The Case for an Ethnography of Melanesian Poetics
Deborah Van Heekeren
Smart Sanctions, Hollow Gestures, and Multilateral Sport: New Zealand–Fiji Relations and the Politics of Professional Rugby, 1987–2011
Greg Ryan
Volume 59 (2021)
The new issue includes the following articles:
Remembering Okei (1852-1871): Daughter of Aizu, Pioneer of Gold Hill おけいを記憶する：会津の娘、ゴールド・ヒルの草分け
Kristina S. Vassil
From Occupation Base Clubs to the Pop Charts: Eri Chiemi, Yukimura Izumi, and the Birth of Japan’s Postwar Popular
Music Industry 江利チエミ、雪村いづみ、日本の戦後のポピュラー音楽産業を再構築し た軍事占領基地クラブのミュージシャン
Michael Furmanovsky
My Encounter with Women’s Studies 女性学との出会い1
宗子水田
Noriko Mizuta and Bo Tao
Check out this post on Aloha Got Soul about Gabe Baltazar Jr. and take a look/listen from one of his vintage LPs from 1979, recorded with a then-young group of musicians he played with at the Cavalier (located on Kapiolani Boulevard, way back when). Read Gabe’s autobiography, If It Swings, It’s Music, for more on the “Cavalier Days” (pages 157-159) and other great jazz highlights, all in Gabe’s inimitable talk-story style!
For more on Gabe and his music, revisit our post from last May.
Jim Tranquada, author of The ‘Ukulele: A History, will speak at a couple of events in the southern California area — one taking place tomorrow (sorry for the short notice) and the other in April. In each he will be paired with ‘ukulele musicians to create entertaining celebrations of the versatile instrument. The Brittni Paiva concert should be especially awesome!
Saturday, February 23, 2013, 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.
Grant R. Brimhall Library, 1401 East Janss Road, Thousand Oaks
Musician/teacher Tom Kuznkowski will lead the kanikapila (jam session). Bring your ‘uke and join in! For more details, download the flyer here.
Saturday, April 13, 2013, from 2:00 p.m.
Museum of Making Music, 5790 Armada Drive, Carlsbad
Mark your calendars to head over to Carlsbad for “Sincerely, Ukulele,” featuring Jim Tranquada’s book talk, followed by a performance by ‘ukulele artist Brittni Paiva. For details and to purchase tickets, click here.
Even though 2013 is undeniably well underway, reviews and stories from fall 2012 can still make good reading. Here are some we missed posting earlier.
Waves of Resistance author Isaiah Walker was interviewed by Daniel Ikaika Ito/Contrast Magazine for Raynorsurf.com, dispelling not only “the burnt-out, Hawaiian surfer stereotype” but the ivory-tower professor stereotype, as well.
The October 2012 canonization of Saint Marianne focused worldwide attention on Kalaupapa, Moloka‘i, as did this article in Syracuse, New York’s The Post-Standard that quotes Anwei Skinsnes Law, author of Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory.
Glenn Wharton’s The Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawai‘i was reviewed in the new open-access eJournal of Public Affairs. Read the September 2012 review here.
West Hawai‘i Today published a wonderful review geared for Kona residents of Loulu: The Hawaiian Palm in its December 16, 2012 edition. (Note: The photo next to the review shows the plant discussed in the second article appearing on the page.)
Honolulu Weekly‘s Winter Book Issue served up reviews worth repeating of several UHP titles.
• “How ‘Bout Gabe?” on If It Swings, It’s Music: The Autobiography of Hawai‘i’s Gabe Baltazar Jr.
• “Strumming Histories” on The ‘Ukulele: A History
• “Under Western Eyes” on An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands: Letters of Carrie Prudence Winter, 1890-1893
• “Exiles at Home” on Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory
• “Lit Up by Language” on Sky Lanterns: New Poetry from China, Formosa, and Beyond
OK. Onward from here!
Jim Tranquada, coauthor of The ‘Ukulele: A History, had a minute of fame on the CBS Sunday Morning Show that aired October 14 across the U.S. The entire six-minute segment by reporter Seth Doane and producer Kay Lim featured international uke star Jake Shimabukuro, the Kamaka ‘ukulele factory, and teacher Roy Sakuma (impresario of the annual Ukulele Festival Hawaii). Tranquada shared that the instrument now widely identified as a Hawaiian icon actually was introduced by Portuguese immigrants from the island of Madeira, off the coast of Morocco.
As related news, The ‘Ukulele: A History has received thumbs-up reviews from Library Journal and ForeWord Magazine. The former recommends the book for “any comprehensive music collection (and, really, for any popular music collection),” while the latter calls it “a fascinating musical and social history that not only supports Tranquada and King’s argument for a rehabilitation of the instrument’s image, but also sets the stage for a full-scale ‘ukulele revival.” Read the full reviews:
Library Journal | ForeWord
Roughly half a world away, on another island, the “Uke Ireland & Ukuhooley Blog” has posted a comparative review of Tranquada and King’s history with Ian Whitcomb’s recent Ukulele Heroes (Hal Leonard Books). Embedded within that blog post is a video review by Ukester Brown, a ‘ukulele player in Minnesota, who recommends both books, for different reasons. According to the information on the Uke Ireland site, every Saturday there’s a UkuHooley Meetup at the Dun Laoghaire Club in Dublin—perhaps another example of how the ‘ukulele has become an international cultural phenomenon!
