Abstract

This paper analyzes Hwang Sok-yong’s visit to North Korea in 1989 and his associated travelogue to examine the popular view of South Korean society toward North Korea in the 1980s as well as changes in inter-Korean relations. The novelist Hwang became the first South Korean writer to visit the North since the division of Korea. His unauthorized visit to North Korea was a culturally and historically significant event that showed how the new détente created in the 1980s was projected on the Korean Peninsula in a transformative way. Additionally, his travel journal contributed to changing the way South Koreans perceived the cultural signs of North Korea and how they pictured their northern counterpart. Hwang’s travelogue warrants serious research in that it brought a new perspective to the discourse on North Korea through the previously unimaginable concept of “visiting North Korea” and laid a foundation upon which the genealogy of the North Korea travelogue could be rewritten after the lengthy hiatus following the establishment of our independent government in 1948. This paper aims to delve into the case of Hwang to illustrate how the South’s perception of the border between the two Koreas was being reconstructed based on the politics of encounter and the imagination of actual contact.