Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)

Baik, Crystal Mun-hye

ISBN 10: 1478038640 / ISBN 13: 9781478038641

Published by Duke University Press, 2026

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781478038641

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun: An Elegy (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478038640
• ISBN 13: 9781478038641
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, 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.

About the Author

Crystal Mun-hye Baik is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and is the author of Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique.