Paik Nak—chung is one of Korea’s most incisive contemporary public intellectuals. By training a literary scholar, he is perhaps best known as an eloquent cultural and political critic. This volume represents the first book—length collection of his writings in English. Paik’s distinctive theme is the notion of a “division system” on the Korean peninsula, the peculiar geopolitical and cultural logic by which one nation continues to be divided into two states, South and North. Identifying a single structure encompassing both Koreas and placing it within the framework of the contemporary world—system, Paik shows how this reality has insinuated itself into virtually every corner of modern Korean life.