When the crucial years after the Korean War are remembered today, histories about North Korea largely recount a grand epic of revolution centering on the ascent of Kim Il Sung to absolute power. Often overshadowed in this storyline, however, are the myriad ways the Korean population participated in
By Kartik Nair, author of Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay HorrorWhat makes a vampire burn in the light? We don’t quite know. But in her stylish short film, Suicide by Sunlight (2018), the filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu gives us a vampire who isn’t afraid of the day. With her protagonist,
By Cheryl Narumi Naruse, author of Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in SingaporeBecoming Global Asia is part of the UC Press Transpacific SeriesThough once widely regarded as a punitive, culturally sterile island-nation, or what William Gibson deemed “Disn
Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century wes
