No abstract

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, I 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. I 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.

In this article, I challenge the existing cultural approach that assumes a virtual Confucian transformation in North Korea. We can understand North Korea’s modern revival of Chosŏn Confucianism as an ideological phenomenon, created by political elites who reinvent and manipulate forms of Confucianism to legitimate their domination. The image of the so-called family-state, for which the cultural approach has argued, actually comes from the regime’s political discourses. I focus on how North Korea has systemized and transformed its ruling idea, the Chuch’e ideology, through its uses of Confucianism. Kim Jong Il’s ideas of sociopolitical life and loyalty and filial piety (ch’ung-hyo) are a reinterpretation of Chuch’e ideology and are reflected in the regime’s extreme political discourses. I argue that North Korea’s political power is not a projection of Confucian culture, but that the reverse is true. Based upon this fundamental claim, I explore how North Korean political elites have used Confucianism in order to legitimate their political power and how modern discursive uses of Confucianism in politics have reinterpreted Chuch’e ideology.

After the Korean War (1950–53), the two militarized Koreas governed each and every member of society in similar ways through their disciplinary politics of antagonistic nationalism. The existing studies of state formation in the two Koreas have neglected an aspect of state power that was neither necessarily top‐down nor violent from above but also reproduced from below. In both South and North Korea, especially from the 1960s to the 1970s, state power had internal dynamics that penetrated the day‐to‐day activities of most citizens and led them to actively accept and participate in nationalist rule. This article explores an understudied aspect of the two Koreas' state power that was disciplinarily diffused in people's everyday practices through reproduction of aggressive nationalism from below and the organic construction of the individual body and nation.

This article explores the historical changes in the national identity of the Korean minority in China from the period of Japanese colonial invasion through to the present. Existing studies have taken an ethno‐cultural approach to the Korean minority's dual identity, but they have ignored the importance of political identity‐formation which creates, re‐creates, and transforms national identity. The Korean minority's national identity has been determined by political and economic factors rather than ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In this regard, the Korean minority's double‐minded self‐understanding of its own nationhood has shifted from an ethnicity‐centred dual identity to a nationality‐centred dual identity. This article notes that the Korean minority's national identity has been created and re‐created by political identity‐formation, and its imagination of ethnicity has been transformed through this political process.