Publication News

We are very proud to announce the publication of Passages 2009-2010. Building on the inaugural volume, this year's draws from a much wider range of student research - U of T Summer Abroad program in Shanghai; ASI400 class trip to South Korea; and, as always, research notes on East and Southeast Asia by Dr.David Chu Scholarship recipients. What is more, we are absolutely delighted to have received submissions from graduate students from Columbia University, Fudan University and Harvard University. This marks an important step of the Passages - and the APR - expanding its international reach. Above all, we are indeed privileged to publish an op-ed from Mr. Gordon Chang, forbes.com columnist and author of "The Coming Collapse of China".
Yao Adam Liu, Faith Pang, Sherry Lu

Janet Poole teaches Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her translation of Yi T'aejun's "Eastern Sentiments" was recently published by Columbia University Press. A brief description of the book from the publisher's website has been copied below. For further information please visit the source: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14944-0/eastern-sentiments

The Confucian gentleman scholars of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) often published short anecdotes exemplifying their values and aesthetic concerns. In modern Seoul one scholar in particular would excel at adapting this style to a contemporary readership: Yi T'aejun.

By Ken C. Kawashima

Published by Duke University Press
March 2009

From the publisher:

Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism.