Chibae wa chach'i: Singminji sigi ch'ollak ŭi sam kungmyŏn kujo (review)

Book Reviews137 NOTES 1.Those who rebuilt the completely decimated northern cities following the Korean War had an opportunity to enshrine the Kim dynasty, and enshrine they did, turning the northern landscape into in a dynastic theme park (Portal, pp. 81-104). In 1956, while Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality that Stalin had built in the Soviet Union, a father-son team was building one at the other end ofEurasia. Secular idols now abound, and with the death of the father, Kim Il Sung (Kim Il-söng), the county has a golden mummy with a mausoleum to match. He mirrors Mao in Beijing, Ho in Hanoi, and Lenin in Moscow, preserved forposterity. Only Stalin's mummy got the axe; his body cremated and architecturally sealed in the Kremlin wall. 2.Portal recounted this competition in an earlier book—Korea: Art and Archaeology (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000)—but now offers much more analysis ofNorth Korean cases. 3.Kim reputedly has a personal film collection of over fifteen thousand titles and used to watch a movie nearly every night. 4.Democracy's leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, also knew the value of film, and his Office of War Information (OWI) made the American Armed Forces available to Hollywood for any and all patriotic films its studios would make, an arrangement Washington continued into the Korean War and the early years of the Vietnam War. And make they did, one World War II classic from Warner Brothers, Casablanca, took only six weeks to shoot at the Burbank studio. But neither Stalin nor FDR had Hitler's luck in the form of Leni Riefenstahl, whose greatest gambit teamed Hitler and Wagner at a Nuremburg rally in Triumph ofthe Will. Even today the Berlin government forbids this most awesome propaganda film to be shown in Germany! 5.See, for example, Victoria E. Bunnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 6.Were I to quibble, I would point to the insufficiency of background information for each poster (e.g., year of production, artist name, production studio). Heather and de Cuester provide translations of poster texts along with the occasional caption—and additional information can be discerned by readers by scrutinizing the poster texts. That being said, I hope that a future edition oíNorth Korean Posters includes an appendix that compiles all available data for each poster. Chibae wa chach'i: Singminji sigi ch'ollak üi sam kungmyön kujo [Domination and autonomy: The three conjunctural structures ofcolonial-period villages] by Yun Hae-dong. Seoul: Yoksa Pip'yöngsa, 2006. 448 pp. Tables. Won 30,000 (cloth) Over the past two decades the historiography of colonial Korea (1910-1945), in Korean as well as other languages, has benefited considerably from a diversification of perspectives. Scholars specializing in various fields such as literature, 138The Journal ofKorean Studies gender studies, historical sociology, and the history of education have looked anew at the colonial era and in the process greatly expanded our knowledge and understanding of the period once labeled the "dark age" (amhük sidae) of Korean history. They have, notably, challenged the conventional dichotomy between "good nationalists" and "evil collaborators" (or "pro-Japanese faction" [ch'inilp'a]) and uncovered many forms of continuity between colonial Korea and postcolonial (supposedly "postliberation") North and South Korea. Yun Hae-dong has been at the forefront of the new wave ofKorean-language scholarship on colonial Korea. Employing the concept of "grey zone" (hoesaek chidae), he emphasizes the problems ofcollapsing complex and diversified interactions between the colonized Koreans and the Japanese colonizers into a stark black-and-white template of"resistance" versus "collaboration."1 In so doing, he has produced compelling studies that point toward much more than what some detractors have dismissed as simplistic critiques of the absolutist and exclusionary tendencies of nationalist ideology, or worse the cynical "rehabilitation" of collaborators' legacies. Rather, Yun appears determined to develop a comprehensive , critical perspective on Korean modernity itself—combining "thick" descriptions ofthe local and everyday "life-world" (lebensweit) and far-reaching investigations into the technologies as well as the disciplinary, administrative, and surveillance institutions practiced by the Japanese colonial regime...