North Korean Studies in North America* — A Critical Overview of Recent Trends— Suzy Kim

North Korean Studies in North America*

—A Critical Overview of Recent Trends—

Suzy Kim**

1. Confucian Thesis : A Culturalist Approach

2. State Patriarchy Thesis : A Gendered Approach

3. Conclusion : Toward a Transnational History

* My gratitude goes to Jae-Jung Suh for putting me in touch with Yksawaŏ hynsilŏ , and for his insightful comments in revising this essay.

** Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Asian Languages and Cultures Assistant Professor of Korean History

대표논저 : 

2010 “Revolutionary Mothers : Women in the North Korean Revolution, 1945~1950” ComparativeStudiesinSocietyandHistory ; 

2010  “(Dis)Orienting North Korea” CriticalAsianStudies ; 2013 EverydayLifeinthe

NorthKoreanRevolution,1945~1950 

====

The last decade has seen a steady climb in the number of publications on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (hereafter North Korea), accompanied by a much greater diversity of topics and approaches in its study than any previous period. Indeed, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for best fiction went to a novel that dealt specifically with  North Korea.1) This essay limits its scope to a discussion of major scholarly monographs published in the last decade. Journalistic accounts, memoirs, and policy-driven publications that deal with security issues are excluded despite their usefulness, as are unpublished dissertations.2) Moreover, the essay deals with scholarship originally published in North America in the English language irrespective of the author’s location. A critical overview of any scholarship is bound to be a delicate endeavor, and my intention is not to single out or ignore any particular research. Rather, the essay will highlight approaches that are representative of, and make significant contributions to, the recent “cultural turn” in North American scholarship on North Korea. The turn is significant not just because it opens new avenues of inquiry but also because it raises serious empirical and theoretical questions. While there is an increasing range in North Korean studies with sophisticated application of theory, common conventions across the disciplines reproduce what I call a “timeless” North Korea. In doing so, they stop short of situating North Korea in global historical time, and end up with an essentialist depiction of the country as a sui generis entity that has defied time.

1) Adam Johnson, TheOrphanMaster’sSon (New York: Random House, 2012)

2) For an earlier overview that includes a more comprehensive treatment with the inclusion of films, photography collections, memoirs, and journalist accounts, see Charles Armstrong, “Trends in the Study of North Korea,” JournalofAsian Studies, Vol. 70, No. 2 (May, 2011) : 357~371

Throughout much of the Cold War, the “other side” was typically seen through the lens of totalitarianism, most eloquently theorized byHannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism(1951). Having lived through the Nazi era, she described the system as one which governed all aspects of everyday life through the hegemonic influence of a charismatic leader upon atomized individuals. Since then, the concept has been critiqued, not only for its unrealistic representation of lived Nazism and Stalinism, ascribing the kind of total power that the two systems could only dream of actually achieving, but also for its generalized principles that would seem applicable to almost any society at some level.3) Countering such Cold War frameworks that ascribed total unity – internally but also internationally within the socialist bloc – historians began to look at indigenous dynamics to study places like North Korea as more than a pawn of the Soviet Union.4) Such approaches led to an emphasis on traditions and continuities within Korean history, characterizing North Korea as a neo-Confucian family state. Several works that fall under this framework were pioneers in the study of North Korea, making significant contributions to its understanding beyond Cold War binaries. In fact, my own work is deeply indebted to this scholarship.

 

3) See introduction in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and NazismCompared(New York : Cambridge University Press, 2009).

4) Bruce Cumings was one of the first to do this in TheOriginsoftheKorean

War, vols. 1 and 2 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1981, 1992) ; Dae-Sook Suh followed with KimIlSung:NorthKoreanLeader(New York : Columbia University Press, 1995).

Nonetheless, I offer some preliminary challenges to this frame in an attempt to critique my own previous work and rethink possibilities forfuture research. The remainder of the essay is a two-pronged critique, first of the characterization of North Korea as a Confucian state, and second of the related, but slightly different, depiction of North Korea as a state patriarchy. In the conclusion, I make general note of publications that combine an increasingly diverse array of sources in the study of North Korea with their attendant limitations before pointing to a series of edited volumes that bring together a variety of views into a single collection. I end with observations on emerging research in North Korean studies, and how best to position the field for exceptional scholarship.

Mun Woong Lee first espoused the family state thesis in his 1976 publication of his dissertation research as one of the first anthropological studies produced on North Korea, using interview data from North Korean defectors.5) Bruce Cumings incorporated the study into his formulation of the corporatist thesis, essentially tracing North Korea’s collectivism to the long legacy of Confucianism in East Asia and the recent impact of Japanese imperialism.6) Filling out Lee’s family

state thesis, Cumings theorized North Korean corporatism as one which incorporated much of traditional politics that saw the body politic as organic with each of the members interconnected in the function of the whole through a benevolent leader. While conservative variants fixated on an idealized past and ethnic purity to forge a race-based nation through fascism, Cumings saw North Korean corporatism as “neosocialist” that replaced class with family as a model for politics.7) This model was used to explain the collective ownership of the means of production, the hierarchical organization of society with mass organizations that mediate between the people and the state, and extreme deference to the leader as a fatherly figure. Consequently, North Korea was viewed as more nationalist than socialist or communist in all arenas from the economy to society and politics.
5) Moon Woong Lee, “Rural North Korea under Communism : A Study of 
Sociocultural Change,” RiceUniversityStudies 6 (1) (Winter 1976) : 1~176

6) Bruce Cumings, “Corporatism in North Korea,” JournalofKoreanStudies 4.1 
(1982) : 269~294. See also Bruce Cumings, NorthKorea:AnotherCountry 
(New York : New Press, 2003) ; The Confucian thesis is widely popular in South Korean and Japanese scholarship as well, but is outside the scope of this essay ; For a sample bibliography of this literature, see Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, NorthKorea:BeyondCharismaticPolitics(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 37~38 fn 43 and 46.

7) Brian Myers represents the former argument that North Korea derives its “racist nationalism” from Japanese fascism, rejecting studies of North Korea that have looked at its communist, Stalinist, Confucian, or anticolonial roots. See B.R. Myers, TheCleanestRace:HowNorthKoreansSeeThemselves AndWhyI― t Matters(Brooklyn : Melville House, 2010). Although I share his reservations on the Confucian thesis, my differences with his overall argument should be obvious. I have excluded discussion of his latest work here as it is polemical and sensational, clearly not intended to be a scholarly monograph. For an extended critique, see Suzy Kim, “(Dis)Orienting North Korea,” CriticalAsian Studies Volume 42, No. 3 (September 2010) : 481~495

Likewise, Charles Armstrong traced the roots of North Korea’s familystate to Confucianism and Japanese emperor-worship, characterizing familism in North Korea as “a kind of political religion” due in large part to the “particularly East Asian or ‘Confucian’ resonances of filial piety and maternal love”(383~384). ) Korea’s Confucian history became the basis for Armstrong’s claim that “North Korean familial nationalism” replaces “the rather abstract, class-oriented language of socialism with a more easily understandable and identifiable language of familial connection, love and obligation” and the hereditary succession of leadership only served to confirm the “theocratic” nature of North Korean politics, “reminiscent of European medieval theology, Japanese emperor-worship, and Confucian kingship”(384~385).

Most recently, Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung reintroduced the family state thesis with some revisions. ) They described North Korea’s version of Confucianism as a form of “invented tradition” that collapsed the traditional distinction between political loyalty and filial piety, conflating the absolute ethical principle of filial piety with the conditional loyalty to the sovereign(60~63). Discussing the theories of partisan state by Japanese scholar Wada Haruki and the family state by Mun Woong Lee to describe North Korea under Kim Il Sung, the coauthors argued that these theories were no longer adequate to describe North Korea after his death in 1994 since his personal charisma had to be transferred to enable hereditary succession. Here they described North Korea as a “theater state,” a concept coined by Clifford Geertz in his study of premodern Bali and used by Wada, but tweaked by the two anthropologists so that it can be conceptualized as a “modern political practice” with “elements of improvisation and innovation”(66) rather than a static concept. Combining Geertz’s anthropological work on culture with Max Weber’s theorization of political power, the authors used the theater state to explain how North Korea overcame the difficulties of instituting charismatic authority (as opposed to bureaucratic or traditional authority) in durable form. According to Kwon and Chung, Kim Il Sung’s past partisan history was performed as a state project of instituting charismatic authority in the aftermath of his death by privileging the Korean People’s Army under the Military First Politics, equating the two Arduous Marches from the 1930s colonial period with the 1990s famine period.

Even before Kim’s death, the theater state created a “landscape of longing” with “succession art” beginning already in the 1970s with the building of the Grand Mansudae Monument, and the introduction of Kim Il Sung badges, mass produced in 1972 in time for his sixtieth birthday. The production of revolutionary operas under Kim Jong Il’s direct supervision also paid homage to Kim Il Sung’s partisan struggle. In the aftermath of Kim’s death, the construction of the Korean Workers’ Party Memorial, the K msusanŭ Memorial Palace, and the Eternal Life Tower solidified the “politics of longing.”

As masterful an interpretation as this is of what is going on “on stage” in the theater state, there is a strange feeling that the stage is full of props but there is no one there. Reminiscent of numerous pictures of North Korea circulating through the internet, there are giant buildings and monuments but without any people, and no human face to go with a country that never stops being dehumanized.10) The authors are of course sympathetic to the plight of the people, but the people and their part on the stage are remarkably absent. How can there be a “politics of longing” without naming who the actors are, who is backstage, designing and putting on the show in the theater state? Who is doing the longing and for what?

In this regard, the notion of the theater state is thorny for both discursive and theoretical reasons. Discursively, comparisons to ritual and pageantry in Meiji Japan, Qing China, Chos nŏ Korea, and premodern Bali applied to modern-day North Korean examples end up depicting North Korea as backward in historical time, despite the authors’ intention to the contrary. This is further reinforced by the adoption of Weber’s linear analysis of political power from traditional to charismatic to bureaucratic authority. The same goes for the description of the relationship between the state and its people in North Korea as a form of gift exchange in a moral economy. In this framework, politics becomes purely functional and instrumental with no way to explain social reception, complicity, and participation by those living in the theater state. Indeed, references to the “theater” creates a binary between what is seen and unseen so that places like Pyongyang become the proverbial Potemkin village purely for display, a merefa ade, while the people suffer somewhere backstage just so that theç show can go on.

10) For a critique of visual representations of North Korea, see David Shim, Visual PoliticsandNorthKorea:SeeingisBelieving (New York : Routledge, 2014).

Theoretically, the adoption of Weber’s framework to look at symbolic politics and the semiotics of power inadvertently divides politics from economics, which enables the authors to describe how North Korea places politics above the economy, “dismissive of everyday economic concerns and matters because, by its very nature, charismatic authority strives to be extraordinary and enchanting, to go beyond and ultimately transcend ordinary, routine, everyday life”(44). This rehearses another of the pervasive views about North Korea, that the regime cares little for the well-being of its people, willing to starve its citizens to maintain power. However, a more expansive look at the use of political campaigns (or “rituals”) and propaganda (or “symbols”) shows how much politics is mobilized for economic production. One of the cornerstones of socialism that made it so explosive was precisely the connection forged between politics and the economy (divorced by classic liberalism) so that wage labor was politicized as exploitation. Unfortunately, the authors themselves miss the everyday life of the people to only see the spectacle on stage in the theater state, leaving out the story of what goes on when the show is over.

Inadvertently, North Korea becomes a mere spectacle, suspended in time, essentially unchanged in its operational logic since its founding to carry on its charismatic politics. Even while acknowledging variations across time, this kind of description is replicated in numerous approaches from anthropology to cultural studies. One of the most enduring tropes that result from this emphasis on the leadership is the parent-child relationship as an analogy for North Korean state-society relations to produce the state patriarchy thesis to which I now turn.

 

Feminist scholars have justifiably criticized North Korea for its preservation of stereotypical gender roles and sexual hierarchy, without necessarily imputing Confucian legacies. For example, Sonia Ryang has argued that the consolidation of power by Kim Il Sung led to his position as the patriarch of a paternalistic state, “effeminizing” (read disempowering) its people.11) A number of scholars, including political scientist Kyung-Ae Park, would agree while still attributing the problem to Confucian influences.12) Although the state patriarchy thesis is thus often used in conjunction with the Confucian thesis, they offer distinct  analytical approaches in so far as the Confucian thesis is based on mapping continuities in Korean history while the state patriarchy thesis relies on a structural analysis of gender that may or may not trace contemporary North Korean gender formations to Confucianism. In this section, I discuss continuities between the Confucian and state patriarchy theses, and then move on to focus on challenges faced by the gendered approach.

 

11) Sonia Ryang has, thus, argued that it is not the legacy of Confucianism that is at the heart of gender construction in North Korea, but rather the distinct cult of leadership and its patriarchal discourses. Ryang concludes that the top-down legal measures for women have not led to gender equality and the continued emphasis on family and motherhood has institutionalized gender inequality. See Sonia Ryang, “Gender in Oblivion : Women in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea),” JournalofAsianandAfricanStudies 35, 3 (2000). Similar characterizations of North Korea as a “state patriarchy” is also pervasive in South Korean scholarship.

12) Kyung-Ae Park, “Women and Revolution in North Korea,” PacificAffairs, Vol. 65, No. 4(Winter 1992~1993) : 527~545 ; Kyung-Ae Park, “Economic Crisis, Women's Changing Economic Roles, and their Implications for Women's Status in North Korea,” PacificReview, Vol. 24, No. 2(May 2011) : 159~177

In the same year as Kwon and Chung’s publication, Sonia Ryang published an “ethnology” using literary texts as her main source, broadly in agreement with the former authors that “North Koreans became more performance oriented”(27) after Kim Jong Il’s official designation as heir in the 1980s.13) She argued that North Korea had shifted from the more intellectual environment of “absolute logocentrism” during the 1960s and 1970s when people had to recite quotes by Kim Il Sung and attend self-criticism sessions to a more “sensory-oriented” approach, reformulating the image of the leader “from sagacious to benevolent, theoretical to ethical, and ideological to spiritual”(25~26). Ryang’s work, thus, hinges on a binary split between rationality and emotion (“logos” versus “sensory”) to describe changes in North Korea. If Geertz provided the theoretical framework for Kwon and Chung, Ryang’s choice is Ruth Benedict, who pioneered the use of culture as a window into a nation’s personality and character.

13) Sonia Ryang, ReadingNorthKorea:AnEthnologicalInquiry (Cambridge : Harvard University Asia Center, 2012)

Despite her refutation of the Confucian thesis, Ryang’s use of official publications replicates the emphasis on the leader. Her reading of North  Korean literature leads her to conclude that Kim Il Sung is “all-pervasive” becoming so versatile as to lose his gender and age in the process of veneration “by showing no vulnerability or humanly emotional movement in the Great Leader’s love, which is constant, never changing or diminishing, and only ever growing”(54). In the development of his cult of personality during the 1980s, Ryang points to triangular relationships depicted in novels whereby the leader is always the medium through which romantic relationships are conjugated as couples promise to fulfill their devotion to the leader together. From these examples, she concludes that the male-male relationship takes precedence over the male-female relationship, creating a homoerotic relationship between the leader and his subjects. While the reason for doing so is understandable, this view presupposes that the leader is masculine as the patriarch of the state. Alternative readings are possible, and perhaps more convincing, if we do not assume North Korea to be a state patriarchy. The leader’s relationship to the people is not homoerotic precisely because it is not romantic love, but selfless motherly love, a point to which I will return in the conclusion.

Moving beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of history and anthropology, Suk-Young Kim approached the study of North Korea from theater and performance studies.14) As a performance theorist, a discussion of potential differences across the various mediums analyzed, including stage performances, films, parades, mass games, and visual arts would have proved useful, rather than categorizing them all as propaganda. 

14) Suk-Young Kim, IllusiveUtopia:Theater,Film,andEverydayPerformancein NorthKorea (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2010)

In that sense, the book is less about the performing arts in North Korea than about how they are used as forms of propaganda, reminiscent of Cold War discourse. Despite the new disciplinary approach, the Confucian and state patriarchy theses have endured across the disciplines into Kim’s work. Kwon and Chung would later share her main point that “North Korea attempted to create a new foundation myth about the father of the socialist state…in the form of urban folklore and theatrical and cinematic performances, to the point that theater became a ritual for shaping the realities of everyday life”(7). It is to her credit that her argument goes much further as she tackles the question of audience reception in the theater state, stating that the people as the “audience gradually came to accept the ideal characters of theater productions as part of reality”(188).

However, this depiction of North Korea as one big stage precariously erases the boundary between illusion and reality. While scholarship after the postmodern turn would have to question any solid distinction between the two, to say that all of North Korea is theatrical renders it fake and fictional, only an illusive representation with nothing of substance behind that illusion. Pyongyang becomes a stage for the self-glorification of the leader rather than actual “functional places serving the needs of their inhabitants”(85). For example, the author repeats US State Department pronouncements that thousands of North Korean people are mobilized to play shoppers, drivers, and pedestrians in Pyongyang “to show others that the North Korean people enjoy full-fledged daily lives in a bustling city,” concluding that “the North Korean state is uninterested in the actual people’s livelihood, in the same manner that the Stalinist regime neglected the atrocities of the gulags”(104, 264). While it would be difficult to deny that there are serious human rights problems and an abundance of propaganda to the contrary in North Korea, surely North Korea, like elsewhere, encompasses the mundane and the banal beyond the spectacle on stage.

By contrast, art historian Jane Portal examined North Korean art within the larger context of how states use art for political ends, employing images of American presidents carved into Mount Rushmore in the United States as an example.15) By incorporating multiple ways art is used from the veneration of the leadership for nationalist ends to depictions of idealized visions of everyday life, Portal situated North Korean propaganda in the context of billboards and advertisements. She showed how people everywhere are exposed to various forms of propaganda, and yet are able to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

One of the main challenges facing the gendered approach is to combine the study of masculinity and men with women’s studies in the realization that women and men, masculinity and femininity, must be examined together. After all, this was the rationale for the shift toward gender studies within the discipline of women’ studies. Still, this remains a challenge as gender is more often equated with women and femininity. Suk-Young Kim judiciously included discussion of both femininity and masculinity in her work, but in two separate chapters, each dealing with the representation of men and women. 

15) Jane Portal, ArtUnderControlinNorthKorea(London : Reaktion Books, 2005)

Her discussion of masculinity focuses on workers and soldiers as ideal citizens where she contends that “North Korean society as a whole prefers to imagine itself as masculine or male-centered rather than feminine or female-centered”(166). Her subsequent chapter on femininity, however, shows women as the focal point of performances in North Korea. In this respect, the author’s performance studies approach could have taken better advantage of its obvious affinity with Judith Butler’s theorization of gender as essentially performative. Butler’s attention to situational contexts that give rise to certain performances could be productively applied to Kim’s chapter titled “acting like women in North Korea.” Rather than tracing a linear development of North Korean women’s fashion from the 1960s traditional hanbok (chos nbok in North Korea) to the 1970s military uniform and then theŏ 1980s mix of fashion codes, the different dresses and uniforms better represent the synchronic situations in which femininity is performed in North Korea. Using Butler’s theorization of gender performativity, North Korean fashion may illustrate women’s own responses to consumer desires, rather than just another way for the patriarch to discipline the female body as “docile subjects of state discipline”(238).

North American scholarship is notable for its high degree of theoretical sophistication in its discussion of North Korea, and yet it is better at taking advantage of well-established theories to make sense of singular aspects of the country than situating it within global historical time with shared experiences and characteristics as other societies.16) Ironically, while the original theories start from the particular to arrive at the general, their application to North Korea ends up essentializing it as exceptional, whether as a Confucian family state or a state patriarchy.

As a result, much has been made of Confucian influences in both Koreas from explanations for South Korea’s economic “miracle” to North Korea’s “dynastic” succession. What is lost, however, when North Korean discourses are located within Confucianism is the gendered dimension to its family metaphors. North Korean references to love and duty cannot be placed neatly within Confucianism for the simple reason that the maternal role is not of major concern within Confucian patriarchal discourse. Without denying historical continuities and the important scholarship pioneered by historians who took seriously indigenous Korean factors, I propose to bring socialism back in to the discussion of North Korea and to position North Korea within the global transnational history of state socialism. In short, North Korean familism is better understood within larger socialist trends rather than as an extension of Confucian state patriarchy. Calling for radical selflessness in the interest of the collective through maternalist discourses and practices, North Korean familism was not a Confucian alternative or addendum to socialism, but mutually constitutive with thevery principles of socialism.17)

16) An important step in this direction was made by Charles Armstrong, Tyrannyof theWeak:NorthKoreaandtheWorld,1950~1992(New York : Columbia  University Press, 2013).

Rather than using ahistorical models like state patriarchy based solely on the status of women, prescriptions for women and men examined together show rather variegated gendered practices that defy simple applications of gender binaries. As I have tried to show elsewhere, the maternal imagery and trope of motherhood has been applied as a model not only to women, but also to men from ascriptions of maternal qualities to the Great Leaders to the local male party cadre. The emphasis on workers and soldiers as representative of the ideal citizen in North Korea did not take place at the expense of peasants and women. North Korean records from its inception clearly show how much interest there was in documenting, not only the number of peasants and the different types of peasants between rich, middle, and poor peasants, but also the changes in peasant lives, particularly with the 1946 land reform.18) Unlike Chinese emphasis on workers and soldiers, early North Korean documents show no references to soldiers as a demographic category. Instead of soldiers, North Korea created a separate class called samuw nŏ (office worker), deliberately left ambiguous so as to incorporate all those who fell outside the peasant and working classes. Unlike the Soviet Union but like China, peasants were idealized as virtuous and pure as represented in the revolutionary operas, in which women were portrayed as the most militant, part of a transnational socialist feminism in the making.19)

 While the cultural turn in North Korean studies has made great strides to move beyond state-centric analyses, it stops short of reaching the “everyday life” of the people it purports to study. In North America, as well as in South Korea, recent publications gesture to everyday and ordinary life as a way to indicate going beyond the headlines and official propaganda to reveal the “real” North Korea.20) The term is used without theorization, however, much like Confucianism or state patriarchy, a problem I have tried to address in my work. Methodologically, an increasing variety of sources from refugee testimony to survey statistical data are used for empirically driven  research, particularly among political scientists and foreign policy experts.21) Ralph Hassig, Kongdan Oh, Stephen Haggard, and Marcus Noland used interviews and quantitative survey data from North Korean refugees in South Korea and China, and Patrick McEachern conducted a close reading of official media to note institutional differences between the North Korean government, the Korean Workers’ Party, and the Korean People’s Army.22) As a result, there is renewed realization that there are materials that can be effectively used to produce engaging scholarship on North Korea. However, problems remain.

17) This argument is more fully developed in Suzy Kim, “Mothers and Maidens : Gendered Formation of Revolutionary Heroes in North Korea,” Journalof KoreanStudies Volume 19, No. 2(Fall 2014, forthcoming).

18) For a full history of this period, see Suzy Kim, EverydayLifeintheNorth KoreanRevolution,1945~1950 (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013).

 

19) Suzy Kim, “Socialist Feminisms Compared : the Flower Girl and the White-Haired Girl,” unpublished paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting (2014).

20) Andrei Lankov, North of the DMZ : Essays on Daily Life in North Korea(Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2007) ; Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, The

HiddenPeopleofNorthKorea:EverydayLifeintheHermitKingdom(Lanham,

Md. : Rowman and Littlefield, 2009) ; Barbara Demick, NothingtoEnvy:

OrdinaryLivesinNorthKorea(New York : Spiegel and Grau, 2009) ; SukYoung Kim, IllusiveUtopia:Theater,Film,andEverydayPerformanceinNorth Korea(Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2010) ; Andrei Lankov, The RealNorthKorea:LifeandPoliticsintheFailedStalinistUtopia(New York : Oxford University Press, 2013); and my own, Suzy Kim, EverydayLifeinthe NorthKoreanRevolution,1945~1950(Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013). For a full review of Hassig, Oh, and Demick see, Suzy Kim, “(Dis)Orienting

North Korea,” CriticalAsianStudies Volume 42, No. 3(September 2010) :

481-95. Admittedly, I myself used the Confucian thesis in the latter piece.

 

21) Hazel Smith, HungryforPeace:InternationalSecurity,HumanitarianAssistance, andSocialChangeinNorthKorea(Washington DC : Institute for Peace, 2005) ; Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, FamineinNorthKorea:Markets,Aid, andReform(New York : Columbia University Press, 2007) ; Ralph Hassig and

Kongdan Oh, TheHiddenPeopleofNorthKorea:EverydayLifeintheHermit

Kingdom(Lanham, Md. : Rowman and Littlefield, 2009) ; Patrick McEachern, InsidetheRedBox :NorthKorea’sPost-TotalitarianPolitics(New York :

Columbia University Press, 2010) ; Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, WitnesstoTransformation:RefugeeInsightsintoNorthKorea(Washington DC : PIIE Press, 2011)

22) For a full review of their work see, Suzy Kim, “Review of Witnessto Transformation by Stephan Haggard & Marcus Noland and InsidetheRedBox by Patrick McEachern,” JournalofAsianStudies 72:1(March 2013) : 210~213 ; Suzy Kim “Review of FamineinNorthKorea:Markets, Aid, andReform by

Stephan Haggard & Marcus Noland,” JournalofAsianStudies, Volume 69,

Issue 1(March 2010) : 286~288

There are clear limitations to both quantitative and qualitative methods. Refugees do not represent a random sample of the North Korean population but a particularly disaffected segment of NorthKorean society that have chosen to leave. The northeast provinces are overrepresented due to the close proximity to the border and as the worst affected areas of the 1990s famine. Refugees are often paid for their interviews and surveys, and prone to exaggerate their education, occupation, and social status as a way to enhance their value. Moreover, lack of requisite language skills cast doubt on some research results. North Korean press materials used by McEachern, for example, were translations from the original Korean.

These limitations open fertile ground for dialogue with scholars in South Korea, many of whom have accumulated vast amounts of empirical data across time, sensitive to changes in North Korea without being beholden to Western-derived theories (although many continue to subscribe to the Confucian and state patriarchy theses). Due to connections to issues of integration and reunification in South Korean scholarship, there is also much more direct engagement with North Korean people, whether in the form of in-depth interviews with settlers in the South or attention to the details of social life in North Korea. Given the respective strengths and weaknesses of North Korean studies in North America and South Korea, both could gain from genuine scholarly exchange in the years ahead. Attempts in this direction, overcoming the constraints of a single discipline and author, have been made with a number of edited volumes that include contributions by scholars in South Korea, either in translation or originally written in English, to combine multiple disciplinary approaches and a diverse array of perspectives.23)

 

23) Sonia Ryang, ed., NorthKorea:TowardaBetterUnderstanding(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2009) ; Kyung-Ae Park and Scott Synder, eds., NorthKorea inTransition:Politics,Economy,andSociety(Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) ; Jae-Jung Suh, ed., Origins of North Korea’s Juche: Colonialism,War,andDevelopment(Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, 2013)

It should be obvious by now that my discussion has not fully taken into account emerging scholarship in literary and film studies despite my emphasis on the cultural turn. Following in the footsteps of Brian Myers, Tatiana Gabroussenko most recently published a monograph on North Korean literature, and Steven Chung published his research on films by Shin Sang-ok that incorporates discussion of his pursuits in North Korea.24) The most recent batch of doctoral dissertations on North Korea has an increasing focus on literature and film.25) It is no accident that I have failed to address those works here. For the study of North Korea to truly become diverse and productive, it must leave the confines of North Korean studies. Research on North Korea needs a balance between the breadth of area studies and the depth of disciplinary methods. North Korean literature and film are best studied among other literatures and films for proper analysis of their merits. But too often, North Korea is relegated to the margins as “North Korean studies” even within Korean studies. References to Korean literature and Korean film in North American scholarship generally designate only the South. In many ways, then, a more rigorous scholarship on North Korea in each of the respective disciplines remains to be written, and another review of the field in the next decade may yield a very different horizon.

 

24) Brian Myers, HanSoryaandNorthKoreanLiterature:TheFailureofSocialist

Realism in the DPRK(Ithaca : Cornell East Asia Series, 1994) ; Tatiana Gabroussenko, SoldiersontheCulturalFront:Developmentsintheearly historyofNorthKoreanliteratureandliterarypolicy(Honolulu : University of

Hawaii Press, 2010) ; Steven Chung, SplitScreenKorea:ShinSang-okand

PostwarCinema(Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

25) Doctoral dissertations that incorporate North Korean film and literature include, 

Cheehyung Kim, “The Furnace is Breathing : Work and the Everyday Life in North Korea, 1953~1961,”(Columbia University, 2010) ; 

Dafna Zur, “The  Construction of the Child in Korean Children’s Magazines, 1908~1950,” (University of British Columbia, 2011) ; 

Immanuel Kim, “North Korean Literature : Margins of Writing Memory, Gender, and Sexuality,” (University of California, Riverside, 2012) ; 

Dmitry Mironenko, “A Jester with Chameleon Faces : Laughter and Comedy in North Korea, 1953~1969,” (Harvard University, 2014). 

Still, the vast majority, or approximately 75 percent, of all dissertations that include North Korea or DPRK in its title or keyword, falls under political science or international relations. The ProQuest dissertation database shows a steady increase in the number of dissertations from only ten produced in the

 

1960s, remaining relatively stable until the 1990s when the number jumped to 23, no doubt due to the increased attention on the North Korean nuclear issue. The 2000s produced 46 dissertations, and the last four years has produced 42 dissertations, projected to double the number from the previous decade.