“North Koreans” and Other Virtual Subjects: Kim Yeong-ha, Hwang Seok-yeong, and National Division in the Age of Posthumanism

Theodore, H. (2008). “North Koreans” and Other Virtual Subjects: Kim Yeong-ha, Hwang Seok-yeong, and National Division in the Age of Posthumanism. The Review of Korean Studies, 11(1), 99-117, https://doi.org/10.25024/review.2008.11.1.005

copy

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which contemporary South Korean literature negotiates new forms of transnational identity by way of post-Cold War representations of “North Korea” and “North Koreans.” Focusing on recent bestselling works by the contemporary writers Kim Yeong-ha, Hwang Seokyeong, and Kim Hyeon-jeong’s 2003 film Double Agent, this article shows how the figure of the “North Korean” no longer points to communist threat or anticapitalist, revolutionary potential, but to a generalized separating out of people from place. If the ethnonational/developmental coincidence performed daily in 1970s/1980s South Korea has been replaced by a certain cynicism/critical distance that informs the position of the neoliberal subject of globalization, the seamless movement of the “North Korean” into this regime in Kim Yeongha’s Empire of Lights (2006) demonstrates its powers of assimilation. In Hwang Seok-yeong’s Princess Bari (2007) and Kim Hyeon-jeong’s Double Agent, it is the very impoverishment of “North Korea” and its failure as a state that enables a reworking of a minjung subject in the form of a linkage with a transnational working class, an alliance that the text cannot locate in the now prosperous, technologized South. The adaptable, mobile figure of the “North Korean” thus becomes a contemporary site for the postnational, posthuman rearticulation of the grand recits of the 1970s and 1980s, developmentalism and anti-authoritarian resistance.

keywords: Contemporary literature, Hwang Seok-yeong, Kim Yeong-ha, Kim Hyeon-jeong, national division, migrancy, North Korea, technology

Reference

Agamben, Giorgio, (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press

Baudrillard, Jean, (1983) Simulations, Semiotext(e)

Derrida, Jacques, (2005) On Touching Jean-Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press

Foucault, Michel, (1983) This Is Not a Pipe, University of California Press

Hwang, Seok-yeong, (2007) Baridegi (Princess Bari), Changjak gwa Bipyeong

Karatani, Ko-jin, (1993) Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Duke University Press

Kim, Yeong-ha, (2006) Bit eui jeguk (Empire of Lights), Munhak dongne

김영하, (2006) 만약 이 소설이 잘 읽힌다면, 작가세계

Kim, Weon-gil, (1998) Yi Ho-cheol soseol eui byeonmo gwajeong yeon’gu (A Study of the Process of Transformation in Yi Ho-cheol’s Novels), Seoul daehakkyo daehagweon hyeondae munhak yeonguhoe

10.

La Capra, Dominick, (1998) History and Memory after Auschwitz, Cornell University Press

11.

Lee, Namhee, (2005) Representing the Worker: The Worker-Intellectual Alliance of the 1980s in South Korea, The Journal of Asian Studies

12.

Lippit, Akira, (2005) Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), University of Minnesota Press

13.

Nelson, Laura, (2000) Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea, Columbia University Press

14.

Ong, Aiwha, (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press

15.

Song, Jesook, (2001) Family Breakdown and Invisible Homeless Women: Neoliberal Governance during the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea, Positions

16.

UNESCO, (2007) , Korea Journal

바로가기메뉴

Article Contents

Vol.11 No.1

“North Koreans” and Other Virtual Subjects: Kim Yeong-ha, Hwang Seok-yeong, and National Division in the Age of Posthumanism

Abstract

Reference

The Review of Korean Studies