Graphic novels (kurimchaek) are a major art form in North Korea, produced by agents of the regime to set out its vision in a range of important areas. This book provides an analysis of North Korean graphic novels, discussing the ideals they promote and the tensions within those ideals, and examining the reception of graphic … [Read More]
Booklist: North Korean arts and culture
Songs for “Great Leaders”: Ideology and Creativity in North Korean Music and Dance
Publisher description: Famously reclusive and secretive, North Korea can be seen as a theatre that projects itself through music and performance. The first book-length account of North Korean music and dance in any language other than Korean, Songs for “Great Leaders” pulls back the curtain on this theatre for the first time. Renowned ethnomusicologist Keith Howard moves … [Read More]
Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction
Publisher description: 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 … [Read More]
A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power
Publisher description: It opens with a double kidnapping . . . Madame Choi, South Korea’s most famous actress, is lured to Hong Kong, drugged and smuggled out on a ship. When her ex-husband, Shin Sang-Ok, Korea’s most acclaimed director, goes to look for her, he vanishes too. The pair wake to find themselves in North … [Read More]
Dear Leader
Publisher description: Dear Leader contains astonishing new insights about North Korea which could only be revealed by someone working high up in the regime. It is also the gripping story of how a member of the inner circle of this enigmatic country became its most courageous, outspoken critic. Jang Jin-sung held one of the most senior … [Read More]
Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-ok and Postwar Cinema
Publisher description: Shin Sang-ok (1926–2006) was arguably the most important Korean filmmaker of the postwar era. Over seven decades, he directed or produced nearly 200 films, including A Flower in Hell (1958) and Pulgasari (1985) and his career took him from late-colonial Korea to postwar South and North Korea to Hollywood. Notoriously crossing over to the North in 1978, … [Read More]
Key Papers on Korea: Essays Celebrating 25 Years of the Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, University of London
Key Papers on Korea is a commemorative collection of papers celebrating 25 years of the Centre of Korean Studies (CKS), SOAS, University of London that have been written by senior academics and emerging scholars. The subjects covered in this collection reflect the different research interests and different strengths of the CKS and include historical perceptions of … [Read More]
North Korean Cinema: A History
From the publisher’s website: Like many ideological dictatorships of the twentieth century, North Korea has always considered cinema an indispensible propaganda tool. No other medium penetrated the whole of the population so thoroughly, and no other medium remained so strictly and exclusively under state control. Through movies, the two successive leaders Kim Il Sung and … [Read More]
Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
Often depicted as one of the world’s most strictly isolationist and relentlessly authoritarian regimes, North Korea has remained terra incognita to foreign researchers as a site for anthropological fieldwork. Given the difficulty of gaining access to the country and its people, is it possible to examine the cultural logic and social dynamics of the Democratic … [Read More]
Exploring North Korean Arts
This book is a cooperation between the MAK and the University of Vienna and contains a number of in-depth essays by international writers on a wide spectrum of issues, and with much detailed background information. The relationship between art and ideology is examined, how modern and traditional values are dealt with, as well as the commercial … [Read More]
Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy
From the publisher’s website: 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 … [Read More]
Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea
Publisher description: No nation stages massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea. Even amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, the financially troubled country continues to invest massive amounts of resources to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can … [Read More]
Korean Pop Music – Riding the Wave
Publisher description: Korean popular music has in the last decade become a significant model for youth culture throughout Asia. Yet, although the Korean music industry is both vibrant and massive, this is the first book-length work devoted to the subject to appear in English. The book offers a comprehensive account, written by thirteen scholars of … [Read More]
Han Sorya and North Korean Literature (+ Jackals)
This first and only study of North Korean literary history by a Western scholar deals with the crucial role played by Han Sōrya, chairman of the DPRK’s Federation of Literature and Art from 1948 to his purge in 1962, both in devising the iconography of Kim Il Sung’s personality cult and in defining the early … [Read More]