Double Book Launch: Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun and Brutal Fantasies Knowledge Sharing

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Cost: Free

Please join us for a double book launch! Dr. Crystal Mun-hye Baik (University of California, Riverside) and Dr. Christine Kim (University of British Columbia) will be in conversation about their recent book publications and shared interests in how we write Korean diasporas and imagine genealogies impacted by war, militarism and imperialism. This conversation will be moderated by Dr. Vinh Nguyen (McMaster University). Light refreshments will be provided.

Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun
In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun (Duke UP, 2026), 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.

Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War

In Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War (Duke UP, 2025), Christine Kim examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. Drawing on films, fiction, and defectors’ life writings from the last two decades, Kim analyzes how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. She recasts these stories through Asian American and Global Asian frameworks that move beyond common Cold War binaries to critique how US imperialism persists in global understandings of North Korea. Kim shows how human rights discourses simultaneously instrumentalize and dehumanize North Korea while demonstrating that North Korea is a site of contradiction that complicates Western interpretive constraints. She also explores the Korean diaspora’s complex relationship with North Korea and highlights the vulnerability and marginalization of diasporic subjects. In so doing, Kim pulls back the veil on prevailing cultural myths enshrouding North Korea, offering alternative ways of understanding its role in global and regional imaginaries.
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