Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction by Immanuel Kim (review)

It was in the 1980s that South Koreans began to study North Korean literature in earnest. Prior to that time, North Korean literature studies in South Korea was mainly supported by the government and took on a role of revealing the brutal reality in North Korea. In 1988, the prohibition on reading or studying the works of writers who had traveled to the North was lifted. Although North Korean art and literature are bound to the politics of the Cold War, South Korean scholars have acknowledged North Korean literature as an academic subject, endeavoring to apply objective and rational methodologies to understand it.

Scholars have turned to various methodologies in reading North Korean literature. South Korean scholars have critically studied “Juche Literary Theory” (Juche munhak ron) as a creative system, and have read the social, cultural, and political elements of the present age symptomatically. Considering the boundary between art and propaganda, North Korean literature is much more inclined toward the latter than the former.

As a researcher who has studied North Korean literature for quite some time, it is a great pleasure to encounter the fresh perspective presented in Immanuel Kim’s Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction. Like a pharmacon, which is can be both medicinal and poisonous, North Korean literature exhibits the characteristics of both propaganda and art. Readers can interpret the text with respect to an ideological state apparatus or in a completely different way. The more various the reading method, the more North Korean literature transcends repetitive meaning. Kim’s Rewriting Revolution demonstrates one such new way of reading. The book eschews “the expectation of finding samizdat literature in North Korea” (2) often assumed by Western scholars. Instead, North Korean literature is presented as an echo of a propaganda machine. I am in favor of the author’s opinion that “the virtue of an echo is that it is not the same and will never be the same as that which produced it” (3). This view may help to address South Korean scholars’ attempts to interpret North Korean literature symptomatically. The book excels by moving beyond a symptomatic reading, attempting “to expose the limits of political discourse that is designed solely to transform individuals in fiction to become Kimilsungist revolutionaries” (6).

Immanuel Kim tries to show that “irony, instability of political meaning, undecidability of concepts, and play have always been at work within the supposedly impervious political discourse in North Korean literature” (7) in “the portrayal of women, the nuclear family, and the state in literary works of the 1980s” (8) through Derrida’s deconstructive method. Kim also analyzes the projection of changing family values, sexual inequality, and gender norms as unique to North Korean fiction of the 1980s. According to Kim, North Korean literature in the 1980s, which explores women’s sexual desire, marital disillusionment, sexual discontentment between husband and wife, and divorce, shows that women’s agency has been a comprehensive part of the political framework of traditional gender identity.

Chapter One, “Desexualizing Motherhood: The Lost Referential of Women,” provides the historical context for forging a revolutionary family based on political discourse delineating the state-prescribed mother, Kang Pansŏk (Kim Il Sung’s mother). “The discourse of elevating Kim Il Sung and his family was a state-sponsored strategy of regulating and sterilizing the people of their sexual desires, implementing revolutionary love that transcends all carnal desires,” (25) writes Kim. Kang’s body was “the vessel that housed the savior of the DPRK, a tale analogous to the hagiography of Mother Mary” (29). Chapter 1 clearly shows that such political discourse is not about two women, Kang Pansŏk and Kim Chŏngsuk, but about iconography, a metonym of the teleological function of the state that reproduces revolutionary individuals. In North Korean literature Kang Pansŏk speaks a male discourse, endorses the patriarchal society, and represents motherhood. However, Kim’s analysis also notes that “Kang...