This volume contains translations—many appearing for the first time in the English language—of major literary, critical, and historical essays from the colonial period (1910–1945) in Korea. Considered representative of the debates among and between Korean and Japanese thinkers of the colonial period, these texts shed light on relatively unexplored aspects of intellectual life and take part in current conversations around the nature of the colonial experience and its effects on post-liberation Korean society and culture. The essays, each preceded by a scholarly introduction giving necessary historical and biographical context, represent a diverse spectrum of ideological positions and showcase the complexity of intellectual life and scholarship in colonial Korea. They allow new perspectives on an important period in Korean history, a period that continues to inform political, social, and cultural life in crucial ways across East Asia. The translations also provide an important counterpoint to the imperial archive from the perspective of the colonized and take part in the ongoing reevaluation of the colonial period and “colonial modernity” in both Western and East Asian scholarship. Imperatives of Culture is intended in part for the increasing number of undergraduate and graduate students in Korean studies as well as for those engaged in the study of East Asia as a whole and a general, educated audience with interests in modern Korea and East Asia. The essays have been carefully selected and introduced in ways that open up avenues for comparison with analyses of colonial literature and history in other national contexts.

Will the tidal wave of globalization lead us to a bland and uniform cultural landscape dominated by a unified cultural perspective? Will cultural imperialism triumph in the twenty-first century? Or will culture, which drives human behavior through religion, language, geography and history, maintain its influence on the human consciousness? In The Cultural Imperative, Global Trends in the Twenty-first Century, Richard D Lewis explores these questions and proposes his thesis in this sweeping new book that examines the forces that keep us from taking off our cultural spectacles and explains how cultural traits are to deeply embedded to be homogenized, as predicted by so many others.

In this bold interdisciplinary work, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that asceticism has played a major role in shaping Western ideas of the body, writing, ethics, and aesthetics. He suggests that we consider the ascetic as "the 'cultural' element in culture," and presents a close analysis of works by Athanasius, Augustine, Matthias, Grünewald, Nietzsche, Foucault, and other thinkers as proof of the extent of asceticism's resources. Harpham demonstrates the usefulness of his findings by deriving from asceticism a "discourse of resistance," a code of interpretation ultimately more generous and humane than those currently available to us.

The first complete survey in English of Ionesco's contributions to the stage and a new recognition of their political content

Global projects bring many advantages and challenges. Cultural Imperatives in Perceptions of Project Success and Failure is one of the few, if not the first, reports of research that examines the interaction of culture and views of project success in a comprehensive way. In this highly complex issue, the authors lay out their research and results in a logical, deliberate manner that does much to ease the way along the path to understanding. There is much to be learned by all in the study background and the data analysis itself.

In Civilizational Imperatives, Oliver Charbonneau reveals the little-known history of the United States' colonization of the Philippines' Muslim South in the early twentieth century. Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao were sites of intense US engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity during an age of global imperialism. Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, Charbonneau argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines rested upon a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for US military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, embedding itself into governance strategies used across four decades. Although it took place on the edges of the Philippine colonial state, this fraught civilizing mission did not occur in isolation. It shared structural and ideological connections to US settler conquest in North America and also borrowed liberally from European and Islamic empires. These circuits of cultural, political, and institutional exchange—accessed by colonial and anticolonial actors alike—gave empire in the Southern Philippines its hybrid character. Civilizational Imperatives is a story of colonization and connection, reaching across nations and empires in its examination of a Southeast Asian space under US sovereignty. It presents an innovative new portrait of the American empire's global dimensions and the many ways they shaped the colonial encounter in the Southern Philippines.