A01=Crystal Mun-hye Baik
ancestral communities
Author_Crystal Mun-hye Baik
Baik Cheol
Buddhist mourning rites
Category=JBFG
Category=JBSF11
Category=JBSL
chronic depression
colonial complicity
colonialism
diaspora
diasporic family album
diasporic grief
disability
eclipse
Enji Chung
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
erasure poetry
estrangement
family letters
family separation
feminist writing
ghosts
Japanese colonialism
Jeju Island
jesa ceremony
Korean diaspora
Korean shamanism
Korean War
letter-writing
memory
memory keeper
memory studies
military occupation
mourning ritual
mourning rituals
North Korea
patriarchy
photograph
protection spell
protest culture
separation
silence
solar eclipse
South Korea
translation
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033769
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, Crystal Mun-hye Baik offers an intimate cultural history of war, illness, banishment, and estrangement through the experiential lens of her family. Beginning with her father's death and mother's psychiatric hold in 2022, Baik situates her parents’ lives within the enmeshed narratives of Japanese colonialism, war, and transoceanic migration, examining Korean diasporic grief as a felt form of thinking and writing, rather than an object of study. In doing so, she reckons with diasporic genealogies of precarity that have configured the everyday lives of her parents and ancestral communities. Blending different genres from narrative prose to visual essay, epistles to ancestral mourning rites, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun is a meditation on the personal and ethical entanglements scholars must confront when they are implicated in the histories of violence they study.
Crystal Mun-hye Baik is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and is the author of Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique.
