Ji-Yeon O. Jo, “Homing: An Affective Topography of Ethnic Korean Return Migration” (U Hawaii Press, 2018)

05/31/18 • 62 min

For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homing will prove an invaluable text. In it Ji-Yeon Jo, Associate Professor of Korean language and culture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, weaves together an array of fascinating and often moving personal accounts from members of the longstanding Korean communities in China, the former-Soviet Union and the United States who have moved ‘back’ (a complicated term as she explains in this podcast) to South Korea, mostly since the 1990s. Basing her work largely on personal interviews, Professor Jo also offers rich background on how the Chinese, Soviet and US Korean diaspora communities became established in the first place, and how and why it was that many of them elected to return to the Korean peninsula in recent decades. But this book is much more than just a historical summary or collection of interview findings, for it develops a sophisticated set of arguments which highlight, in the author’s own words, “diasporic diversities and specificities” among each of the Chinese, Soviet, and American groups (p. 3). It is via professor Jo’s tracing of parallels and divergences between returnee diaspora experiences, and the theoretical optic through which she considers these, that the book’s wider theoretical questions emerge to the fore and we are encouraged, again in professor Jo’s words, to “rethink legacy migration through the lens of trans-border belongings” (p. 21). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

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Michele Zack, “The Lisu: Far from the Ruler” (UP of Colorado, 2017)

Recent years have brought a burgeoning interest in how highland people in mainland Southeast Asia live and communicate along and across the boundaries geographically assigned states whose lowland people and their rulers were once but are by now no longer so far away. In The Lisu: Far from the Ruler (University Press of Colorado, 2017), Michele Zack offers an account of how one group dispersed across the geographic territory of three countries—Yunnan Province in China, and the northernmost reaches of Myanmar and Thailand—is responding to the challenges of the present. Initially researched in the 1990s and completed following further travel and interviews done in the 2010s, Zack’s book is attentive to how much the ways and means of being Lisu are changing with the times, and also committed to a view that they do have an essential coherence. Not just a shared language but a character and outlook that makes them familiar to one another, she writes, distinguishing them not only from the people of the lowlands and their rulers, but also other “less anarchic” highlanders. Michele Zack joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss her time spent travelling and researching among Lisu along the borderlands of China and Southeast Asia over two decades, and to share her experiences and tips on starting, stopping and starting a book all over again. Going to the Asian Studies Association of Australia biennial conference? Join us for a special New Books in Southeast Asian Studies panel (Session 2.4), with Holly High, Patrick Jory and Lee Morgenbesser. Check out the conference website for details. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

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Patrick Lopez-Aguado, “Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity” (U California Press)

How do systems of incarceration influence racial sorting inside and outside of prisons? And how do the social structures within prisons spill out into neighborhoods? In his new book, Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity (University of California Press, 2018), Patrick Lopez-Aguado answers these questions and more. Focusing on a juvenile detention center, an alternative education center, and a job placement center in California, Lopez-Aguado uses his ethnographic data and interviews to better understand sorting within prisons. Finding that prisons sort inmates based on race, geographical location/neighborhoods, and connections inside the prison, these group labels often have negative consequences inside and outside prison walls. This book also speaks to other issues of incarceration, including “secondary prisonization”, or how incarceration affects families of the incarcerated, as well as the lingering effects of incarceration on the individual after they leave. Within the system, respondents often rely on “cliquing” up for survival and comradery with both style and space serving important roles in constructing identities. Lopez-Aguado pays particular attention to the ways in which race and gender are defined not only by other inmates but also by the system itself. Overall, this book presents a holistic view of the “carceral social order” and the consequences for those inside and outside its walls. This book is interesting and accessible to a wide audience; key terms and concepts are defined clearly and given thorough examples. This book would fit perfectly into a Criminology course at the graduate level and could be the basis for an upper level undergraduate Criminology course. Social stratification and race scholars will also find this book of interest. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology