Books by John Lie

Contends that ideas of race, ethnicity, and nationality can be subsumed under the rubric of "peoplehood." Far from being transhistorical and transcultural phenomena, race, ethnicity, and nation, the author argues, are modern notions - modernity here associated with the rise of the modern state, the industrial economy, and Enlightenment ideas.

K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger South Korean economic and cultural transformations. John Lie provides not only a history of South Korean popular music-the premodern background, Japanese colonial influence, post-Liberation American impact, and recent globalization-but also a description of K-pop as a system of economic innovation and cultural production. In doing so, he delves into the broader background of South Korea in this wonderfully informed history and analysis of a pop culture phenomenon sweeping the globe.

Race, ethnicity, and nation, Lie argues, are modern notions, associated with the rise of the modern state, the industrial economy, and Enlightenment ideas. The state is responsible for the development and nurturing of feelings of belonging associated with ethnic, racial, and national identity; but also for racial and ethnic conflict, even genocide.

This is an account of how South Korea was transformed from one of the poorest and most agrarian countries in the world in the 1950s to one of the richest and most industrialized states by the late 1980s.

Multiethnic Japan challenges the received view of Japanese society as ethnically homogeneous. Employing a wide array of arguments and evidence--historical and comparative, interviews and observations, high literature and popular culture--John Lie recasts modern Japan as a thoroughly multiethnic society.