Symposia
Sino-NK 2013 Rewind: Pop Politics and the Narrative of the Bizarre
Sherri L. Ter-Molen takes the “outside” tack on North Korean cultural production and media engagement in 2013. From Dennis Rodman to Jang Sung-taek via Angry Birds and the Samjiyon.
Sino-NK 2013 Rewind: North Korean Literature at Masik Speed
Benoit Berthelier examines North Korean cultural production from the “inside,” revealing literary outputs determinedly in step with current manifestations of the urgent–and of Kim Jong-un himself.
Sino-NK 2013 Rewind: Saegyehwa Politics and South Korea in the Age of Globalization
Steven Denney investigates politics and the political in the ROK during 2013, a new Park era, but the continuation of Saegyehwa/Globalization politics.
Sino-NK 2013 Rewind: The Byungjin Line and North Korea in an Era of Songun Politics
Extensively analyzed on Sino-NK in 2013, for the second of a pair of Sino-NK 2013 Rewind pieces, Peter Ward returns to Byungjin’s source with an investigation of its ur-text, April’s “Nuke and Peace.”
Benoit Symposium: Capitalist Dreams in the Communist Utopia: North Korea’s The Schoolgirl’s Diary
Engaging with a contemporary North Korean film, Sherri Ter Molen unpacks the usage of symbols derived from foreign–and what are often seen as hostile–sources within a distinctly North Korean cultural product.
Benoit Symposium: Writers in the DPRK: The Invisible Stars
The author of “Soldiers on the Cultural Front,” Tatiana Gabroussenko analyses the conundrum of literary production in North Korea, a cultural space seemingly reverential of the product but deliberately ambivalent, if not actively hostile, towards the producer.
Benoit Symposium: From Pyongyang to Mars: Sci-fi, Genre, and Literary Value in North Korea
History and the past are subjects close to North Korea’s institutional and cultural heart, but what about cultural expressions of the potential future. In this essay, Benoit Berthelier explores the science fiction output of Pyongyang.
Benoit Symposium: Practice and Praxis of Cultural Production in North Korea: A Virtual Symposium on Production, Authorship, and Tone
A scholar at INALCO (Institute National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) in Paris, Benoit Berthelier has joined Dr. Robert Winstanley-Chesters to co-edit an expansive virtual symposium on aesthetic and cultural production in North Korea. To start things off, Berthelier offers an opening salvo in what promises to be a splendid ride.
