Simon Fraser University
Engaging the World

Institute For Transpacific Cultural Research

Institute For Transpacific Cultural Research / Events / Double Book Launch

Double Book Launch

When: Thursday, October 1, 7 pm

Where: Nooroongji Books, 1666 Johnston St Unit 6. After hours entrance to the Net Loft is through the EAST (Alimentaria) side door only.

The event is free and open to the public. Register for a ticket on Eventbrite. 

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.

About the Authors

Crystal Mun-hye Baik is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar and memory worker who resides in the unceded territory of Tovaangar. Currently, she is Chair and Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Baik is the author of two books, including Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy (Duke University Press, 2026), and serves as the co-editor of the Critical Militarization Studies Book Series with the University of Michigan Press. She is a recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship and an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant, and serves as the Co-PI of Demilitarization in Theory & Practice, supported by a SSHRC Connection Grant. 

Christine Kim is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia and a faculty affiliate of UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration program. Before joining UBC, she was faculty at Simon Fraser University where she was a founding co-director of the Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Her research and teaching interests lie in Asian diaspora, the Cold War, imperialism, and race. She is the author of Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War (Duke UP, 2025), The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012). 

About the Moderator

Vinh Nguyen is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Vinh’s memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction, the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and the Toronto Book Awards. He is the author of the academic book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience, which won Outstanding Achievement in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Shelly Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies from the American Studies Association. He is also co-editor of two academic volumes: Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives.