Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.24 (696 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B06XDYC32J |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 395 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2018-02-23 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Charles R. . Kim is Korea Foundation assistant professor of Korean studies in the History Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Tackling a topic that has received little scholarly attention in English, it presents a 'bottom-up' process of Americanization and what the author calls 'de-Japanization' from the 1950s to early 1960s. Positioning the event as part of Korea's transition from the colonial to the postcolonial, Charles Kim offers a wide-ranging and entertaining analysis of the unruly youth culture that drove the events of this April Revolution, the successes and failures of which presaged the tumultuous decades of democratic struggle to come. And while not focused exclusively on the April 19th Revolution of 1960, Youth for Nation fills a significant lacuna on the topic.--Namhee Lee, Univers
He explores how state ideologues and mainstream intellectuals expanded their efforts by elevating the nation’s youth as the core protagonist of a newly independent Korea. In addition to scholars and students of twentieth-century Korea, the book will be welcomed by those interested in Cold War cultures, social movements, and democratization in East Asia.. Although the post–Korean War years are commonly remembered as a time of crisis and disarray, Charles Kim contends that they also created a formative and productive juncture in which South Koreans reworked pre-1945 constructions of national identity to meet the political and cultural needs of postcolonial nation-building. The positioning of women as subordinates in the nation-building enterprise is also shown to be a direct translation of postwar and Cold War exigencies into the sphere of culture; this cultural c