Essays
Shin Dong-hyuk: Finally Poised For Effective Activism
Personal narratives are co-created by teller and receiver, and each is mutually responsible for the outcomes. According to Eric Foley, CEO of Voice of the Martyrs Korea, Shin Dong-hyuk’s extraordinary life story is like any co-created narrative, and only by taking a different stance toward it can we arrive at an honest accounting.
Footsteps and Deterritorializations: “And did those feet in ancient times…”
Rodong Sinmun reports on a wintery children’s pilgrimage to North Korea’s northern border, the place where, four score and ten years ago, Kim Il-sung crossed the Yalu. Political geographer Robert Winstanley-Chesters investigates the implications of their reenactment.
Moscow vs. Vladivostok: Prospects for a Russia-North Korea Summit
Did Kim Jong-un already meet Xi Jinping in northeast China? And will the North Korean leader show up in Moscow this coming May? A guest voice assesses the potential.
Collapsist Narratives and State Strength: Reading The Interview through Han Sorya’s Jackals
Han Sorya’s conception of Americans as “jackals” is a wartime description of an enemy but one that never went away–in a sense like the war itself. In this essay, David Fields surveys the strength of North Korean state narratives, folding in a very famous Korean War short story and a certain controversial Hollywood film.
Hagiography of the Kims & the Childhood of Saints: Kim Il-sung
In this essay Christopher Richardson explores the childhood hagiography of Kim Il-sung, “the master narrative from which all others derive,” and in so doing locates the origins of regime durability and state legitimacy.
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