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9781478033769 Academic Inspection Copy

Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun

An Elegy
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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.
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.
"In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, Baik balances research and storytelling with expert precision. Her beautifully crystalline prose illuminates the historical depth of intimate lives and the personal stakes of social experiences. Sentence after sentence, insight after insight, this elegy grips the reader and holds them in communal embrace until the very last word. A monumental achievement."--Vinh Nguyen, author of, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse
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