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"Offering a critical account of the ways in which the US deployed its war power under liberal auspices throughout the Cold War, this book casts a geopolitical lens onto cultural productions preoccupied with black freedom, Asian liberation, and Pacific Islander decolonization against the backdrop of U.S. militarism in the Asia-Pacific region. The book examines the centrality of this militarism to the political and cultural imagination of racialized subjects in an era of serial U.S. "police actions" abroad and what writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois described as a police state at home, contending that U.S. informal warfare relied on racial counterintelligence campaigns that structured not only America's hot wars in Asia but also its approach to radical activism, racial protest, and urban riots on the domestic front. As the author demonstrates, even as U.S. war politics may have taken the guise of anti-racist, multicultural alliance-building and marshaled the rhetoric of mutual defense, they gave rise to dissident visions of human rights that converged in a critique of the unilateralism of U.S. militarism, one that did not point in the direction of today's interventionist human rights politics. The book is in critical conversation with a spate of recent publications that might be called "Afro-Asian," but unlike these last, which tend to emphasize cross-racial solidarity, it highlights racial collusion, collaboration, and alignment with the post-1945 U.S. war machine as a paradoxical effect of the securitized "anti-racism" of the so-called Pax Americana. For Asian writers, artists, and filmmakers, Ōe Kenzaburo, Nakazawa Keiji, Byun Young-Joo, and Carlos Bulosan, the imagination of postcolonial or post-imperial justice is troubled by the period's deferral of decolonization. Literature by Miné Okubo, Chang-rae Lee, and Robert Barclay variously takes immigration, repatriation, or relocation as its theme, yet looming over this conditional incorporation into the postwar U.S. body politic is the specter of America's militarism in Asia. If these works by Asian American and Pacific Islanders implicitly query whether material redress is satisfied through U.S. citizenship or economic assistance, the major African American writers examined in this study critique civil rights as too narrow a horizon for racial democracy. Positing Jim Crow as war without end, they seek a vernacular for racial justice that transcends national boundaries, an ...

Turning on the logic of the spectacle, U.S.-based campaigns on North Korean human rights, in calling for intervention, have wielded two images aimed at outing North Korea's "hidden truths"? the image of the starving child circa the 1990s and the contemporary satellite image of what appear to be labor camps. Focusing on the use of online virtual geo-imagery programs like Google Earth in the human rights mapping of North Korea, this essay situates post-9/11 "liberation technology" within the framework of the unending Korean War, a war whose failed "liberation" of Korea from the global forces of communism haunts North Korean human rights critique today. By examining mid-century bomber photographs and contemporary human rights satellite images of North Korea, this essay inquires into the homology between technologies of militarized intelligence and war, on the one hand, and technologies of human rights that aim to expose North Korea, on the other. Both modes of apperception, this essay argues, strive to delegitimize and destroy rather than faithfully represent the enemy. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

Introducing the core concerns animating this two-part thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies (December 2013 and March 2014), this essay offers a historicized overview of the consolidation of contemporary human rights as the dominant lingua franca for social justice projects today. Highlighting what the rights framework renders legible as well as what it consigns to unintelligibility, this essay examines the antinomies of contemporary human rights as an ethico-political discourse that strives to reassert the dominance of the global North over the global South. Relentlessly presentist in its assignment of blame and politically harnessed to a regime-change agenda, the human rights framing of North Korea has enabled human rights advocates, typically "beneficiaries of past injustice," to assume a moralizing, implicitly violent posture toward a "regime" commonsensically understood to be "evil." Cordoning off North Korea's alleged crimes for discrete consideration while turning a willfully blind eye to the violence of sanctions, "humanitarian" intervention, and the withholding of humanitarian and developmental aid, the North Korean human rights project has allowed a spectrum of political actors-U.S. soft-power institutions, thinly renovated cold war defense organizations, hawks of both neoconservative and liberal varieties, conservative evangelicals, anticommunist Koreans in South Korea and the diaspora, and North Korean defectors-to join together in common cause. This thematic issue, by contrast, enables a range of critical perspectives-from U.S.- and South Korea-based scholars, policy analysts, and social justice advocates-to attend to what has hovered outside or been marginalized within the dominant human rights framing of North Korea as a narrowly inculpatory, normative structure. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

This volume develops an understanding of Korean American girls in the Korean American church between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. Christine J. Hong analyses and evaluates girl's formation around self, gender, and understandings of God in the context of Korean American mainline protestant congregational life. The book utilizes a practical theological qualitative study and develops a hybrid methodology using a feminist ethnography with de-colonial aims and indigenous research methods. Its goal is to facilitate practical theology's aim of enabling transformative experiences in communities of faith. The study asks and answers the question: what is the experience of being a Korean American girl in the Korean American immigrant church? Hong asserts that cultivating a better understanding of how Korean American girls develop concepts of self, gender, and God will help practical theologians, particularly religious educators, pinpoint, unpack, and evaluate the complexities of bi-cultural identity and faith formation

Since 1998, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-private, grant-making organization funded almost entirely by the U.S. Congress via the U.S. State Department, has been, directly or indirectly through its four core institutes, supporting right-wing, neoconservative South Korean human rights and defector groups. In addition to technical assistance, this support has included $6.7 to $11.9 million from 1999 to 2010, with an additional $3 million starting January 2009 directly disbursed to many of these groups by the State Department under then newly elected Barack Obama. This article contends that NED's "human rights" work is part of a much larger strategy of destabilizing the North Korean government in line with U.S. interventionist aims against its foes. By funding international conferences and defector critiques of North Korea (including strategic testimony provided before Congress in the push for passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004), NED has fostered a North Korean human rights knowledge economy that has substantially shaped public images and opinion about North Korea in South Korea, the United States, and around the world. At the same time, NED's radio broadcasting, propaganda leaflet drops, and other incursionary media have sought to sow discord in North Korea. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

In theological education, we do the work of deconstructing and reconstructing teaching and learning for the sake of our collective decolonial futures. Decolonial Futures: Intercultural and Interreligious Intelligence for Theological Education invites teachers to imagine what that future might hold and how it might take shape.

Hong, Christine: Reframing North Korean human rights : introduction#Han, Ju Hui Judy: Beyond safe haven : a critique of Christian custody of North Korean migrants in China#Hong, Christine: The mirror of North Korean human rights : technologies of liberation, technologies of war#Shin, Sanghyuk S. ; Choi, Ricky Y.: Misdiagnosis and misrepresentations : application of the right-to-health framework in North Korea

Suh, Bo-hyuk: The militarization of Korean human rights : a peninsular perspective#Bae, Jong-yun ; Moon, Chung-in: South-Korea's engagement policy : revisiting a human rights policy#Song, Dae-han ; Hong, Christine: Toward "the day after" : national endowment for democracy and North Korean regime change#Kyungyon, Moon: South Korean civil society organizations, human rights norms, and North Korea#Kim, Haeyoung: Stifled growth and added suffering : tensions inherent in sanctions policies against North Korea#Liem, Paul: Peace as a North Korean human right#Smith, Hazel: Crimes against humanity? Unpacking the North Korean Human rights debate