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This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary authority. The result was the birth of a powerful modern theater state that sustains North Korean leaders’ sovereignty now to a third generation. In defiance of the instability to which so many revolutionary states eventually succumb, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in modern history. Kwon and Chung make an innovative contribution to comparative socialism and postsocialism as well as to the anthropology of the state. Their pioneering work is essential for all readers interested in understanding North Korea’s past and future, the destiny of charismatic power in modern politics, the role of art in enabling this power.
The first biography of a key and complex American religious figure of the nineteenth century, considered by many to be the "father of Shaker literature." Richard McNemar (1770–1839) led a remarkable life, replete with twists and turns that influenced American religions in many ways during the early nineteenth century. Beginning as a Presbyterian minister in the Midwest, he took his preaching and the practice of his congregation in a radically different, evangelical "free will" direction during the Kentucky Revival. A cornerstone of his New Light church in Ohio was spontaneous physical movement and exhortations. After Shaker missionaries arrived, McNemar converted and soon played a prominen...
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive historical-geographical lens to the development and evolution of correctional institutions as a specific subset of carceral geographies. This book analyzes and critiques global practices of incarceration, regimes of punishment, and their corresponding spaces of "corrections" from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines individuals' experiences within various regulatory regimes and spaces of punishment, and offers an interpretation of spaces of incarceration as cultural-historical artifacts. The book also analyzes the spatial-distributional geographies of incarceration, particularly with respect to their historical impact on comm...
Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home" has been designated as the official state song and performed at the Kentucky Derby for decades. In light of the ongoing social justice movement to end racial inequality, many have questioned whether the song should be played at public events, given its inaccurate depiction of slavery in the state. In Slavery and Freedom in the Bluegrass State, editor Gerald L. Smith presents a collection of powerful essays that uncover the long-forgotten stories of pain, protest, and perseverance of African Americans in Kentucky. Using the song and the museum site of My Old Kentucky Home as a central motif, the chapters move beyond historical myths to bring into sharpe...
A rare glimpse into North Korean propaganda—in parades, posters, murals, theater, and films
Arranged around a set of provocative themes, the essays in this volume engage in the discussion from various critical perspectives on Korean geography. Part One, "Geographies of the (Colonial) City," focuses on Seoul during the Japanese colonial occupation from 1910–1945 and the lasting impact of that period on the construction of specific places in Seoul. In Part Two, "Geographies of the (Imagined) Village," the authors delve into the implications for the conceptions of the village of recent economic and industrial development. In this context, they examine both constructed space, such as the Korean Folk Village, and rural villages that were physically transformed through the processes of...
This authoritative reference work investigates the roots of the Sacred Harp, the central collection of the deeply influential and long-lived southern tradition of shape-note singing. Where other studies of the Sacred Harp have focused on the sociology of present-day singers and their activities, David Warren Steel and Richard H. Hulan concentrate on the regional culture that produced the Sacred Harp in the nineteenth century and delve deeply into history of its authors and composers. They trace the sources of every tune and text in the Sacred Harp, from the work of B. F. White, E. J. King, and their west Georgia contemporaries who helped compile the original collection in 1844 to the contrib...
Six Kentucky historical dramas, too This “murder for love” story charmed the world with its great lure for romanticism. In 1825, Solomon P. Sharp, a promising politician in Frankfort, Kentucky, was murdered at his doorstop by the apprentice that idolized him. Jereboam O. Beauchamp claimed he was defending the honor of his wife, Anna Cooke, who accused Sharp of fathering her child and abandoning her; both were executed and buried in the same grave. Songs, poems, novels, and plays responded around the globe. Even Edgar Allan Poe tried his hand at it in his drama Politian, but to safeguard himself changed the names, setting, date, and title. Its fiction failed to interest Poe and his public...