Yongusil 76: Writing North Korean Social History in London

By | September 12, 2015 | No Comments

Writing North Korean history can be a lonely process. As a series of recent posts by Chuck Kraus from archives along the Sino-Korean frontier makes clear, it can also be frustrating. Moments of clarity and community are necessary. Fortunately, a workshop yesterday in London at the esteemed School of Oriental and African Studies brought together a number of scholars to discuss the practice and praxis of historical scholarship emerging out of the archives, publications, and oral histories of North Korea. (Or, if one prefers slightly more distinct terminology, we can call it northern Korea after 1945 and the DPRK after 1948).

The workshop was organized by Owen Miller, the author of several significant articles and translations on North Korean history, who has turned his gaze of late to what he calls “colonial and postcolonial industrialisation and proletarianisation” in Hamhung. Miller’s paper yesterday argued that the transformations of the colonial era must be reckoned with if we are to understand socialist transformation in the early years of the DPRK, specifically practices concerning the mobility (or immobility) of labor. Drawing from published statistics, a wealth of South Korean scholarship, as well as Marxist theory, Miller lent sinew to the oft-repeated but seldom substantiated claim that North Korea’s foundations were not purely socialist. He grappled with the Korean War (showing, in one particularly shocking statistic, how North Korea’s industrial Arbeiterklasse was decimated from 245,000 in 1949 to 165,000 in 1953) and described how the DPRK made it a criminal offense to leave one’s factory without permission, an echo of “labor passports” and Japanese colonial practices.

By contrast, Andre Schmid’s paper argued that at least one important aspect of daily life — that is, criticism or “comradely advice” — in the early years of the DPRK had nothing to do with the colonial period. In a compact and convincing presentation entitled “Toward a History of Criticism and Class Culture in Postwar North Korea,” Dr. Schmid described distinctive voices as they emerged from Party journals of the mid-1950s, showing how evolving complaints about class identity were expressed. While these sources delineated a radically new and specifically socialist practice in the DPRK, they were also very lively. Even as they highlighted anxiety among propagandists, sources also described the imperfect and occasionally drunk misbehavior of cadre and state workers; these vernacular sources, Schmid said, “provide a glimpse into the unruly place that North Korea was in the 1950s.”

Party newspapers formed one fundament of Cheehyung Harrison Kim’s paper, which described the extensive movement of North Korean children into China and the countries of the Eastern Bloc during and just following the Korean War. Dr. Kim, who teaches at the University of Missouri and has written about the vinylon industry in Hamhung, began his paper with a stunning recording of a song by composer Kim Sun Nam, and brought together unexpected resonances from the period of international socialist solidarity, arguing that the 10,000 North Korean children spread across various facilities in Eastern Europe served as a form of collateral for North Korea’s heavy loans. Vladmir Tikhanov‘s comments on all three of the above papers crystallized the debate, which ended up centering on the various presenters’ definitions of political economy; there was no shortage of theory amid the documents presented.

If questions of economy and theory held serve in the afternoon, the morning session was anchored firmly in archives and archival research practice. Koen de Custer’s comments on all three of the papers began with an evocation of Carolyn Steedman’s book, Dust (Manchester University Press, 2001), cautioning against romanticizing the archive unduly. “You don’t know most of the time what you are looking at,” he noted, further arguing that “There is not a single source that will tell us what happened.”

These salutary injunctions were prompted by a trio of papers by Suzy Kim, Carl A. Young, and Sino-NK’s own Adam Cathcart.  Carl Young’s work on Chondogyo (about which he has just published an authoritative study) showed how thin the membrane truly was between religion and politics in early North Korea, using files from Record Group 242 in the US National Archives to discuss the regional and occupational character of Chondogyo believers in the 1940s. Suzy Kim’s paper was a meditation on reading photographs and images from the same group of captured documents, indicating that “internationalism” in early North Korea was more than a simple matter of socialist obligation, but had to be seen within the web of colonial-era popular culture. The issues put forth in Dr. Kim’s prize-winning book (reviewed by Sino-NK, and discussed at greater length in an interview) were brought to light and used as a reference point in most of the presentations in one way or another, and Adam Cathcart’s presentation on the Sinchon Massacre during the Korean War was no exception.

The conference also included a rousing roundtable, enriching commentary from Ambassador James Hoare, and a General Council meeting of the British Association of Korean Studies, the ever-churning organization which was one of the sponsors of the event. So absorbing was this entire event that no photographs were snapped; no live tweets were sent. Yet, the participants and audience members surely have their notebooks, minds, and hard drives full of vigorous new arguments and questions about how historians — not political scientists, arms control wonks, policymakers or media studies scholars, historians — are to approach the intimidating heights that yet await.

 

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