A Fractured Liberation

Drawing from diaries, military records, literary works, and his own family’s history, Chang ponders what could have become of ‘Korea’s Asian Spring.’ * New Yorker *An engaging history in an approachable style for a wide audience. – Stephen Mercado * Asian Review of Books *Well-researched, compelling and unapologetic in its addressing of uncomfortable truths. Chang skillfully illustrates the ways in which the US government weaponised Korean people against themselves to further propel the US’s Cold War anti-Communist aspirations while, at the same time, horrifyingly employing Japanese colonial techniques of governance to weaponise the southern portion of the Korean peninsula as its own Eastern Hemisphere chess piece. – Taeyeon Song * Mekong Review *Shine[s]…a valuable light on a little-known but important piece of history. * Kirkus Reviews *The US military occupation of Korea after World War II lasted only a few years, but they were fateful ones, as Kornel Chang shows. A Fractured Liberation is an absorbing, poignant account of a political tragedy: how a newly freed country teeming with democratic movements was plunged into autocracy and permanently, painfully divided. – Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United StatesAs the child of a Korean catapulted from the chaos and the broad possibilities of post–WWII Korea into a future he never could have predicted, I’ve been fascinated by this period, and struggling to understand it, for years. The lack of deep-diving histories has slowed me down and frustrated me. Now Kornel Chang, with A Fractured Liberation, has changed all that. His book is indispensable. – Susan Choi, author of Trust ExerciseMost Americans know nothing about the US occupation of southern Korea from 1945 to 1948, but it deeply shaped postwar Korean history and was a crucial antecedent to the origins of the Korean War. Kornel Chang has written a brilliant analysis of this episode that will be of equal value to the specialist and the general reader. Lively, very well written and researched, often funny, but also deadly serious, it deserves a wide audience. – Bruce Cumings, author of The Korean War: A HistoryA Fractured Liberation is a fascinating study of a moment in South Korean history that could have set the peninsula on a radically different course. Using new materials and written in a lively, engaging style, Chang’s work illuminates a host of hitherto neglected reformist figures, both Korean and American, and their heroic but tragically unsuccessful efforts to avoid a permanent division of Korea. – Carter J. Eckert, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea

Kornel Chang is the author of Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands, winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Prize in History. He is Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University–Newark.