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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.
An understanding of contemporary North Korea’s literature is virtually impossible without an investigation of its formative period, 1945–1960, which saw a gradual transformation from the initial "Soviet era" to a Korean version of "national Stalinism." This turbulent epoch established a long-lasting framework for North Korean literature and set up an elaborate system of political control over literary matters, as well as over the people who served in this field. In 1946 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leader Kim Il Sung described the country’s writers as "soldiers on the cultural front," thus clearly defining what the nascent Communist regime expected from its intellectu...
"Socialist doctrines had an important influence on Korean writers and intellectuals of the early twentieth century. From the 1910s through the 1940s, a veritable wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the cultural scene with differing agendas as well as shared demands for equality and social justice. In The Proletarian Wave, Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture by focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression. The book combines a general overview of the literary left with the intellectual portraits of four writers whose works exemplify the stylistic range and colonial inflection of socialist culture...
The present age of omnipresent terrorism is also an era of ever-expanding policing. What is the meaning — and the consequences — of this situation for literature and literary criticism? Policing Literary Theory attempts to answer these questions presenting intriguing and critical analyses of the interplays between police/policing and literature/literary criticism in a variety of linguistic milieus and literary traditions: American, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and others. The volume explores the mechanisms of formulation of knowledge about literature, theory, or culture in general in the post-Foucauldian surveillance society. Topics include North Korean dictatorship, spy narratives, censorship in literature and scholarship, Russian and Soviet authoritarianism, Eastern European cultures during communism, and Kafka’s work. Contributors: Vladimir Biti, Reingard Nethersole, Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu, Sowon Park, Marko Juvan, Kyohei Norimatsu, Péter Hajdu, Norio Sakanaka, John Zilcosky, Yvonne Howell, and Takayuki Yokota-Murakami.
North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), is firmly fixed in the Western imagination as a barbaric vestige of the Cold War, a “rogue” nation that refuses to abide by international norms. It is seen as belligerent and oppressive, a poor nation bent on depriving its citizens of their basic human rights and expanding its nuclear weapons program at the expense of a faltering economy. Even the North’s literary output is stigmatized and dismissed as mere propaganda literature praising the Great Leader. Immanuel Kim’s book confronts these stereotypes, offering a more complex portrayal of literature in the North based on writings from the 1960s to the present. The stat...
This book is the fifth in an annual series. It provides up-to-date information on the politics, economy and society of both South and North Korea. Each volume is structured as follows: The first part offers the reader an up-to-date analysis and commentary on the following topics: "Domestic Politics and the Economy in South Korea", "Domestic Politics and the Economy in North Korea", "Relations between the two Koreas", and "Foreign Relations of the two Koreas". A detailed chronology of relevant events in the year preceding publication complements this first part. The second part consists of some eight to ten refereed, original articles with contributions on contemporary Korean affairs in fields such as politics, economy and society. For regular and professional observers of Korea in business, politics, the media and academia, this book series is an indispensable resource both for keeping track of developments, and for gathering new insights.
Korea 2012: Politics, Economy and Society contains concise overview articles covering domestic developments and the economy in both South and North Korea as well as inter-Korean relations and foreign relations of the two Koreas in 2011. A detailed chronology complements these articles.
Korea 2012: Politics, Economy and Society contains concise overview articles covering domestic developments and the economy in both South and North Korea as well as inter-Korean relations and foreign relations of the two Koreas in 2011. Additional papers deal with topics such as South Korea’s foreign trade drive, the death of Kim Jong Il, South Korea as a middle power, the portrayal of North Koreans in ROK cinema, graphic novel representations of food issues in post-famine North Korea, and North Korean views of foreigners. A detailed chronology complements the articles.
In Surviving Imperial Intrigues, Sangpil Jin explores how successful Korean neutralization could have radically transformed the balance of power equation in East Asia. He conducted multilocational archival work, analyzing documents from the Austro-Hungarian Empire Ministry of Foreign Affairs, British Foreign Office, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, German Foreign Office, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russian Foreign Office, Russian State Naval Archive, and US State Department, as well as perusing private papers and newspapers. What surfaced in these readings were disparate voices of multiple actors and their agendas concerning Korean neutrality and dynamic international relations ...
In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korea, public health priorities in maternal and infant welfare privileged the new nation’s reproductive health and women’s responsibility for care work to produce novel organization of services in hospitals and practices in the home. The first monograph on this topic, Imperatives of Care places women and gender at the center of modern medical transformations in Korea. It outlines the professionalization of medicine, nursing, and midwifery, tracing their evolution from new legal and institutional infrastructures in public health and education, and investigates women’s experiences as health practitioners and patients, medical activities dir...