North Korea’s Militant Nationalism and People’s Everyday Lives: Past and Present

In this lecture, Jin Woong Kang will explore how North Korea’s anti-American state power has operated in individuals’ everyday practices by focusing on its post-war militant nationalism. Existing studies have neglected an aspect of North Korea’s nationalist power that has been neither necessarily top-down nor violent, but rather productive and diffusive in people’s everyday lives. While the regime’s anti-American mobilization has come from above, people’s politics of hatred, patriotism, and emotion have been reproduced from below. Along this line, Dr. Kang will examine the historical and social changes in North Korea’s militant nationalism and people’s ways of life through a comparison between two periods: from the 1950s through the 1980s and from the 1990s through the present. Dr. Kang will focus on how the state’s anti-American power was legitimated by people’s solid micro-fascism from the 1950s through the 1980s, and how it has been contested and recreated through both change and persistence in people’s micro-fascism from the 1990s through the present. Jin Woong Kang is a sociologist of North Korea. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Yonsei University, South Korea and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He studies and teaches the areas of North Korean state formation and the political sociology of divided Korea. His dissertation “Understanding the Dynamics of State Power in North Korea: Militant Nationalism and People’s Everyday Lives” explores how North Korea’s anti-American state power has been reproduced in people’s everyday practices. He is currently conducting research on both North Korean refugees’ lives in South Korea and the experiences of Korean immigrants in the United States, particularly with respect to domestic violence and encounters with the American criminal system. At Yale, he will teach the seminar “Understanding North Korea.”