Support H-Net | Buy Books Here | Help Support the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!
- African Studies
- African American Studies
- American Politics
- American Studies
- American South
- American West
- Asian American Studies
- Australian and New Zealand Studies
- British Studies
- Canadian Studies
- Caribbean Studies
- Central Asian Studies
- Chinese Studies
- East Asian Studies
- Eastern European Studies
- European Politics
- French Studies
- German Studies
- Iberian Studies
- India Studies
- Indian Ocean World
- Iranian Studies
- Irish Studies
- Israel Studies
- Italian Studies
- Japanese Studies
- Korean Studies
- Latino Studies
- Latin American Studies
- Mexican Studies
- Middle Eastern Studies
- Native American Studies
- Pacific Studies
- Polish Studies
- Russian and Eurasian Studies
- Southeast Asian Studies
- South Asian Studies
- Turkish Studies
- Ukrainian Studies
- Western European Studies
- World Affairs
- Animal Studies
- Anthropology
- Archaeology
- Business, Management, and Marketing
- Media
- Critical Theory
- Disability Studies
- Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
- Education
- Economics
- Finance
- Geography
- Gender Studies
- Genocide Studies
- Higher Education
- Human Rights
- Journalism
- Language
- Law
- LGBTQ+ Studies
- National Security
- Philosophy
- Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
- Political Science
- Politics & Polemics
- Public Policy
- Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work
- Sociology
- Sound Studies
- Sports
- Urban Studies
- Big Ideas
- Celebration Studies
- Co-Authored
- Cover Story
- Historical Materialism
- History Ex Silo
- Invested Investor
- Landscape Architecture
- Mormonism
- NBN Book of the Day
- NBN Seminar
- Postscript
- Practical History
- Preparing for Life After Grad School
- Psychology and Climate Change
- Interpretive Political and Social Science
Jun 14, 2018
Seoul
Memory, Reinvention and the Korean Wave
Summary
Seoul, as any listener who has visited will recognize, can be a pretty overwhelming place. This is well recognized by Ross King, Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, who notes that cities like this “are experienced as disaggregated places, always already fragmented, bits, moments, feelings, memories” (p. 131). But in his richly illustrated and luxuriously produced book Seoul: Memory, Reinvention and the Korean Wave (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Professor King does an expert job of ‘reading’ (p. 15) this megalopolis with deftness and elegance, interpreting the multiplicity of faces which it presents to visitor and local alike.
Drawing not only on observations of architecture and urban form, his own areas of expertise, King also offers insights from historiography, literature, film, religion, television and popular culture as they relate to the city. Bringing these into dialogue, he builds up a sophisticated picture of the myriad influences and symbolisms at play in Seoul’s urban landscape, and shows how they are layered, juxtaposed and entangled. Reading Seoul, we thus come to apprehend the city in its Korean, its Asian, and its global contexts. Equally importantly, we also learn how to see it as a crucible of overlapping and contending histories, and of successive developmental modernist projects, most recently those tied the ‘Korean Wave’. Anyone interested in Asian modernization at large, urban planning, and more generally in how national and urban transformations fit into wider social and cultural contexts will find a great deal to engage with here.
Related Topics
Your Host
Ed Pulford
Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia.
