Sino-NK

Popular mythologies have it that North Korea is a nation lost in time, floating in temporal limbo, a dinosaur of ideology and governance. Hopefully readers of Sino-NK and the Yongusil will follow our often plaintive assertions that this is of course entirely not so. While Pyongyang’s commitment to acute nationalism, vigorous uncompromising expressions of autarky, and a tendency to the ahistorical or histrionic are certainly undimmed in our contemporary era, times in North Korea are certainly a-changing. But perhaps times are changing because they always have been. While Pyongyang’s focus on the charisma of the Kim family (its own overwhelming legacies and futures manifested and projected as dramatically as ever), Sino-NK has analyzed the advent of economic systems and practices which ultimately are entirely disconnected from that charisma. Private citizens are forced to rely on their own initiative, rather than the benevolent fatherly love of a Leader, be he called “Great Leader,” “Dear Leader,” or “Respected Comrade.” We have also traced the minutiae of its diplomatic exchanges with the wider world, as the sands of geo-politics have shifted and displaced a North Korea rooted in unstable ground. We have also examined developmental policies as they have ebbed and flowed, and music and cultural praxis as its subjects and styles have transformed from the martial to the mini-skirted. North Korea, like any nation, is a space and place of permanent transition.

How fitting, then, that the Catalan journal, Tiempo Devorado, published by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, should seek to address issues north of the 38th from a similar perspective. In an extraordinary volume, born of interactions at 2014’s 1st World Conference of North Korean Studies in Seoul, Jelena Prokopljevic, Barcelona-based Serbian architect and researcher focused on architectures of socialism and post-socialism, has collected a number of intriguing and deeply scholarly interventions and considerations of North Korea’s “invisible transition.” Prokopljevic herself and Charles Armstrong of Columbia University offer what surely will become a landmark piece of analysis on the urban structures and constructions of North Korea. “Socialist Postmodernism: Conceptual and Comparitive Analysis of Recent Representative Architecture in Pyongyang, Astana and Ashgabat, 1989-2014” firstly periodizes Pyongyang’s architectural production in a way we have not seen before, exploding the myth of North Korea’s coherent adherence to the architectural practices of socialist modernity before, secondly, reframing the contemporary built environment within the connected urban landscapes of contemporary post-socialist Central Asia. Considering Pyongyang’s recent architectural styles alongside those of Astana and Ashgabat allows for a different future view of North Korean construction, one which builds the future within a melange of styles and influences from internationalist, nationalist and post-nationalist futurity.

Prokopljevic and Armstrong’s fine words are not alone, but joined by a considered piece of analysis from Balazs Szalontai of Kookmin University, “If the Neighbourhood Catches Fire, One Will Also Come to Grief: Chinese Attitudes towards North Korea’s Confrontational Acts, 2009-2014.” Szalontai, in an extraordinarily close reading of a huge collection of Chinese, Russian, Hungarian, and North Korean texts, weaves an intricate narrative of both Beijing and Pyongyang’s diplomatic exchanges and difficulties during a time of nuclear endeavor on the part of North Korea and rapid geo-political escalation when it comes to China’s importance. Arriving in 2014 with newly emboldened Russian Federation paying serious if playful geo-politics with its railways and transport infrastructure, Szalontai demolishes the notion that North Korea or China never engage in transitions in diplomatic or relation terms, presenting a fascinating tapestry of interaction and reaction.

Eric Ballbach of the Freie Universtät Berlin moves the volume’s analysis intriguingly from the external to the internal, presenting in “Constructions of Identity and Threat in North Korea’s Diplomatic War Discourse,” a rarely considered mirror to the extensive analysis and modeling of other nations’ conception of North Korea as threat or risk. Ballbach, making extensive use of North Korean theoretical and media texts, examines using a methodological framework of poststructural discourse, the United States as North Korea’s eternal other against which a revolutionary bastion must be built and maintained and through which both geo-political transformation and expensive and diplomatically destructive nuclear necessity can be both undertaken and born.

The volume also includes a brilliant piece of scholarship from Sino-NK contributor Tatiana Gabroussenko of Korea University, which feels like a next step following her fine monograph “Soldiers on the Cultural Front.” “Well Nourished Beauty: Culinary Symbolism in the Mass Culture of North Korea, 1960-2014” outlines the place of food and the space and place of its consumption within the cultural narratives of North Korea in a way which we cannot remember having read before. Again using some fascinating North Korean texts, Gabroussenko unveils a presentational world in which food is to be displayed and present, yet not eaten, where hunger in the face of absence is reified in extraordinary poetry (“Today the dead heroes of Paektu Mountain/See us smiling and dancing in the snowflakes,/With only fresh snowflakes in our bellies…” — Hang Cheong-gyu, quoted by Gabroussenko, p. 8), and the most basic of goods are glorified far beyond their humble origins as potato extracts.

Finally, aside from the contribution of Sino-NK’s Director of Research, a short form version of which has already appeared at Sino-NK, Avram Agov recounts the reality of encountering and treating a tuberculosis outbreak in North Korea. Benjamin Young, in a most insightful review, explodes some lop-sided mythologies about heritage management and its analytic potential, and Roger Mateos Miret and Jelena Prokopljevic in a helpful interview with Dr. Jongchul Park, President of the Republic of Korea’s “Korean Association of North Korean Studies,” consider the nature, notions, and practices of North Korean studies south of the DMZ, especially in light of the foundation of the globally minded and aspirational World Conference of North Korean Studies. The Yongusil here invites the reader to allow some of their own time to be consumed by this satisfying and potentially landmark volume.