Charles Kim

I’m a cultural historian of modern Korea with interests in national identity formations, class and gender relations, food and food ways, cultural memory, and Cold War Korea/Cold War Asia. My first book, Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea, explored South Korean public discourse on postcolonial nation building during the formative post-Korean War juncture of the 1950s and early 1960s. The study examined the country’s rocky transition from Japanese colonial rule to the consolidation of an anticommunist sociopolitical system that was geared toward making “late” developmental progress. Positioning South Korea as a key Asian member state of the US-centered “free world” bloc, Youth for Nation delved into how postwar media and statist texts prefigured the April 19th Students’ Revolution of 1960 and informed Park Chung Hee’s ideological program of the early 1960s. My current research on North Korea builds on this earlier work by inquiring into contemporaneous developmentalist processes in the DPRK, with a focus on national culture.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University
M.A., University of California, Los Angeles
B.A., Pomona College

Books

Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea

Charles Kim, Jungwon Kim, Hwasook Nam, and Serk-Bae Suh. Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea. University of Washington Press, 2019.

Suicide and martyrdom are closely intertwined with Korean social and political processes. In this first book-length study of the evolving ideals of honorable death and martyrdom from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910) to contemporary South Korea, interdisciplinary essays explore the changing ways in which Korean historical agents have considered what constitutes a sociopolitically meaningful death and how the surviving community should remember such events. Among the topics covered are the implications of women’s chaste suicides and men’s righteous killings in the evolving Confucian-influenced social order of the latter half of the Chosŏn Dynasty; changing nation-centered constructions of sacrifice and martyrdom put forth by influential intellectual figures in mid-twentieth-century South Korea, which were informed by the politics of postcolonial transition and Cold War ideology; and the decisive role of martyrdom in South Korea’s interlinked democracy and labor movements, including Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation in 1970, the loss of hundreds of lives during the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, and the escalation of protest suicides in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea

Charles Kim. Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea. 2017.

This in-depth exploration of culture, media, and protest follows South Korea’s transition from the Korean War to the political struggles and socioeconomic transformations of the Park Chung Hee era. 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. 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. By designating students and young men and women as the hope and exemplars of the new nation-state, the discursive stage was set for the remarkable outburst of the April Revolution in 1960.Kim’s interpretation of this seminal event underscores student participants’ recasting of anticolonial resistance memories into South Korea’s postcolonial politics. This pivotal innovation enabled protestors to circumvent the state’s official anticommunism and, in doing so, brought about the formation of a culture of protest that lay at the heart of the country’s democracy movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. 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 conservatism went on to shape the terrain of gender relations in subsequent decades. A meticulously researched cultural history, Youth for Nation illuminates the historical significance of the postwar period through a rigorous analysis of magazines, films, textbooks, archival documents, and personal testimonies. 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.

Selected Publications

• “South Korea’s Postdevelopmental Nationalism,” In Routledge Handbook of Nationalism in East Asia and Southeast Asia, Routledge, 2023.
• “Paek Namun.” In Imperatives 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. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013
• “Moral Imperatives: South Korean Studenthood and April 19th.” The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 2 (May 2012): 399-422.

Advisor To

• James Flynn
• Kharis Ralph

Selected Awards

• Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, 2018

History Courses

• History 108 – Introduction to East Asian History ‐ Korea
• History 200 – Historical Studies: East Asian Food Cultures: Past and Present
• History 335 – The Koreas: Korean War to the 21st Century
• History 340 – Cultural History of Korea
• History 600 – Historical Memory
• History 706 – Topics in Transnational History: Cold War Asia
• History 725 – Seminar in East Asian History: Historiography of Modern Korea