A01=Todd A. Henry
alienation
asian history
assimilation
Author_Todd A. Henry
Category=NHF
city spaces
civic assimilation
class and nation
colonial capital
colonial period
colonial state
colonialism
contact zones
conventional nationalist paradigms
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnographic history
government initiatives
historical
imperialism
industrial
japanese history
japanese imperialism
japanese rule
korea
korean history
material assimilation
multiethnic polity
postcolonial
public spaces
sanitation
seoul
shinto festivals
spiritual assimilation
transnational
Product details
- ISBN 9780520293151
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Oct 2016
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Assimilating Seoul, the first book-length study written in English about Seoul during the colonial period, challenges conventional nationalist paradigms by revealing the intersection of Korean and Japanese history in this important capital. Through microhistories of Shinto festivals, industrial expositions, and sanitation campaigns, Todd A. Henry offers a transnational account that treats the city's public spaces as "contact zones," showing how residents negotiated pressures to become loyal, industrious, and hygienic subjects of the Japanese empire. Unlike previous, top-down analyses, this ethnographic history investigates modalities of Japanese rule as experienced from below. Although the colonial state set ambitious goals for the integration of Koreans, Japanese settler elites and lower-class expatriates shaped the speed and direction of assimilation by bending government initiatives to their own interests and identities. Meanwhile, Korean men and women of different classes and generations rearticulated the terms and degree of their incorporation into a multiethnic polity.
Assimilating Seoul captures these fascinating responses to an empire that used the lure of empowerment to disguise the reality of alienation.
Todd A. Henry is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.
