>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:18 >> SONYA LEE: My name is Sonya Lee, a reference specialist at the Korean Collection at the library. Really thank you for joining us for the lecture, it's a history of North Korea without Kim LLsung possible? Using the Library of Congress, North Korean Collection to rethink those Korean history by Dr. Andre Schmid. Dr. Andre Schmid is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of East Asian studies at the University of Toronto. As historian of North Korea, he has visited the library annually for the North Korean Collection, I don't know how many years, about 10 years, something like that, yeah. So, he's well-known for his award winning 2002 Book, The "Korea Between Empire 1895 to 1919" published by Columbia University Press. I heard he currently he is working on the book on North Korea. Probably he can tell you more about his book later on. North Korea is often referred to as a hermit kingdom, due to the state enforced isolation from outside word. The library has over 10,000 items, and then 274 journal titles from North Korea. This primary source provide the users with a greater access to old and new Korean materials for free. One of the strength of the Library of Congress is that it contains the biggest collection of North Korean materials published in particular from the 1940s and 1950s. Some of the records are not only unique to outside of North Korea, but are probably no longer available in North Korea. Our collection has be vital to the scholars and government officials trying to understand the policies relate to North Korea. As attention high on the Korean peninsula and the more scholars and then [inaudible] to study North Korea, our collection has continued to provide a critical role in leading this field. The materials covers the reach and comprehensive breadth of subject but the major subject they use recently are nuclear weapon, of course, and nuclear program in North Korea, the total import and export statistics, international relations, circus, physical culture, and sports. And cinema, even children's literature. Now, without further ado, please give a big welcome to Dr. Andre Schmid. ^M00:03:04 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:08 ^M00:03:11 >> ANDRE SCHMID: Thank you for the introduction, it's a true delight to come to the Library of Congress, As Sonya was mentioning, I've been here many times over the last few years, spending many hours with the collection. I've got many friends in the library, now and I wanted to thank Dr. Shou [assumed spelling] for inviting me to come back to meet those old friends and hopefully make some new ones. I also wanted to thank the head of the Korea Collection, Sonya Lee, who over the last few years has really put up with a lot of pestering questions on my part and irk some inquiries. She's really opened up this remarkable collection that the library has to me in ways that. Interference from my microphone? No. I'm not sure what that is. Anyway, I've had the opportunity to spend many hours in the collection and it's been a lot of fun actually. You don't usually associate North Korea and fun in the same section. Yet what I want to try and do today with you today is talk a little bit about the materials that I've been using, give you a little bit of a glimpse into the 1950s and 1960s. And maybe take a step further to suggest that the materials in this library, combined with some new and different historical questions can actually help us rethink some of the fundamental assumptions about the way we've thought of North Korean history, which in turn might help us rejig the ways we think about North Korea today. What I hope to do is to show you how by reading everyday materials, right, that people throughout North Korea were reading on a daily basis, published in Pomnyum, yet held here in this great library, you can possibly get beyond a type of Cold War analytical dead end in our histories, which tend to over emphasize the power of the Kim family and the power of the North Korean state. Something we generally just don't talk about. I'll try to do so by examining through these newspapers, these magazines and these journals two crucial issues in postwar North Korea, namely population mobility, the way people were moving around, and urban consumption, eventually getting to questions of fashion, like on the slide. This first slide I have up here. I've titled my talk "Is a history of North Korea without Kim LLsung possible? It might be reworded to ask why are we so obsessed with Kim LLsung and his two offspring Kim Pyong-il and Kim Jong-il. The answer would seem to be obvious, right? No other country has a single family that has been able to amass such extreme personal power over the course of the twentieth century. The stature of the Kim family horrifies us, at the same time as it gives us a type of almost perverse pleasure. A strange combination of observable in everyday newspaper and TV coverage. We've seen it this week. Right so it's typical to find in a newspaper like "The Washington Post" that writers and editors continually invoke the inflamed rhetoric of North Korea. So, I was talking about newspaper coverage in every day. So, this notion that we are both horrified and yet at the same time take pleasure. And we can see this in our newspapers and the way editors and writers regularly refer to the inflamed rhetoric of North Korea. Vocabulary like the seas of fire, the running dogs of imperialism are reproduced in our newspapers both taking a pleasure at the somewhat idiosyncratic and bizarreness of the language. At the same time as it is almost a sense of horror that there's a political culture where such rhetoric is taken seriously. And with all that sound, I forgot to show you my images. So, our TVs are filled with images originally [inaudible] and Pomnyum, marching soldiers goose stepping their way through downtown Pomnyum. Most recently, with missiles always overlooked by portraits of the leader. Mass games are constantly on our TVs. Again, playing on our fears about North Korea. But I think for my generation, there's also a certain type of nostalgia in these images. A nostalgia for almost the comforting days of the Cold War, where this type of representation of communism was so familiar to people of my generation. This leads to rather bizarre website such as this one, Kim Jong-un looking at things, which is just a constant reproduction of these on the spot types of images. I'm going to come back to this, because I think what this image does is it captures that as much of these images certainly have a place in reminding us that North Korea is a deeply repressive country. These images also come with a deep paradox. If we scratch a little bit deeper what we can see is that the consequence of our own fascination, this strange combination of horror and pleasure, is that such ways of writing and visualizing North Korea, actually reproduce a version of the very Pomnyum propaganda that we profess to be horrified by. Indeed, our coverage comes close to repeating within our own analytical frameworks and our own conceptual categories. Some of the central tenants of the North Korean personality cult. This might seem to be a strange thing to say that we're being influenced by North Korean propaganda. Yet, nowhere is this more clear than our own obsession with the Kim family, which in so many ways reproduces the same obsession about leadership that's coming out of Pomnyum. In our own histories just like in North Korean histories, Kim LLsung remains virtually the sole historical figure. The only agent of historical action, decision and change. I'll give you one quick example on how this works itself out. It's common for research on North Korea to simply use a speech of Kim LLsung as a historical source to account what happened on a certain issue. Embedded in this type of methodology is an assumption that because we believe North Korea is a totalitarian country, there are no limits to the personal rule of Kim LLsung. What Kim says in any given speech translates into action on the ground with virtually no mediation. Now, when we think about the twentieth century more globally, right, it's hard to imagine the history of any other country where such a methodology just quote the leader is acceptable or appropriate. When it comes to North Korean history, however, what Kim says goes, as far as history is concerned. Moreover, there's no way out. It's a dead-end. We use high-level North Korean propaganda, speeches, declarations of party congresses, the editorials of the main newspaper, legal statutes, TV news broadcast, etcetera as our sources. ^M00:10:08 All of which have the promotion of the personality cult of one of their priorities and that the key assumption of Kim is at the center of all this action and this is what we reproduce in our own studies. There's a circularity in this, and I think we can find it in a website like this right. It's talking about Kim Jong and looking at things. But what's not in the title is that we are looking at the website, right. We're constantly looking at the leadership for what they're up to. And a source like this gives us no way of talking about anything but the leadership. So, just like Kim Jong and looking at things, this website, we can laugh at the way Kim is exalted. But we can't get outside its bounds, right. The pictures are still of Kim, and we keep looking at them. We roundly criticized the personality cult and instead of calling him the great leader we might think of him as the great despot right. In other words, we flip the normative assessment on its head. Yet our criticism does not challenge the fundamental narrative framework, or offer alternative sources of historical agency. It's difficult to dislodge fixation with the Kim family and at the risk of overstating things, perhaps it's time that we admit that the greatest testament to the power of the personality cult is it reaches out from Pomnyum to influence our very own histories of North Korea. This type of circularity and analytical dead-end was once the case with Mow in China. Was certainly the case with Stalin and the Soviet Union, and all the studies of Stalinism. But it's been decades since historians have moved beyond such cartoonish understandings of Stalin and Mow and, with more complicated understandings of the relationships between leaders, states and societies. Yet not so with North Korean history right. Kim remains transcendent to a history that he himself makes rather than being a historical figure who's made by his arrow in this assumption. This transcendence is arguably the single most important feature of the personality cult and we see it in our own histories. So, and this is a confession or a self-criticism in North Korean language right it's not so much that if you ask anybody is Kim LLsung transcendent, they're going to say yes. But the framing of the history puts them in such a position that his relationship with all other social forces is such that he has that exalted position. This would seem to imply that my answer to the question is a north, is a history of North Korea without Kim LLsung possible, has got to be no, it's not possible, right? If Kim is history after all how can there be a history without him. But here's where I want to say not so fast. And I want to turn to the materials of Library of Congress. The materials contained within the walls of this building allows us to escape this type of analytical predicament, or dead-end, as I called it. They do so by offering an amazingly rich array of sources. Sources that North Koreans read in their everyday life, from women's magazines that in the 1950s and 1960s are talking about unhappy housewives and all the social problems around the home. Much in the way that Betty Friedman is talking about the problem with no name in this country. We can read workers newspapers to find criticisms of fellow workers who come into the factories drunk and getting into fights with their bosses right. This is not a highly disciplined workforce if you take these stories at face value. From a worker magazine, let's see if I can get here. So, here's one women's magazines that talks about unhappy housewives. Here's a cartoon from a workers' magazine that is using a cartoon to sort of poke fun at the dizzying speed of changes in the late 1950s. You can see in the first frame the workers going off to work and when he comes home, there have been so many houses built, right that he can't find where he lives right. And we're all familiar with this idea of the dizzying speed of change and the fact that this is a cartoon building on an understanding of the humor of the reader right. We know that this is a widespread phenomenon. We can read children and science magazines, popular science magazine that show us that the current crisis on the peninsula has a cultural history in the veneration of nuclear technology; from x-rays to weapons that are seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement right. And so very much more. I've just listed a few of the journals that are here I think in her introduction, Sonya said there were 247 or 274, 74 journals in the library so the idea is often claimed that we don't have sources to study North Korea only holds if you're interested in finding out the inner secrets of the Kim family or the machinations of the highest reaches of the party. For anyone interested in a broader approach to history right, the Library of Congress is this rich playground of possibilities. For my own period, the 1950s and '60s in which I'm writing a book on, I can't even come close to reading all that is available in this building, right? And frankly, I never thought that would be the case. I've never thought you'd be able to tell me that there's more than I can possibly as a primary source to do North Korean history. Now, where did all these journals come from. I don't know a lot about the history of the collection but it's an important question to ask, given that the United States does not have foreign relations with North Korea, how did these come right. As terrific as a librarian that Sonya is, she can't just walk into a bookstore in Pomnyum and buy books. You may notice on this particular slide right on the missile head, there are three initials scrolled FDD, that stands for the Foreign Documents Division. A section of the CIA that beginning in the 1950s started acquiring materials from around the world for intelligence purposes. This is one of those classic Cold War projects, productions of knowledge projects. The sort of know your enemy type of project that begins acquiring these magazines. I don't know if this is the source of all of the magazines because they don't all have those initials on them. But you can also see another clue, I think I missed a slide. Yeah, I missed a slide, sorry. So another clue is that there's all these postal stamps. I think in the display that Sonya's created in the library, you can see that because the United States did not have direct relations with North Korea, they had to go through third parties to acquire the materials. So you see stamps from Prague, from Warsaw, from Moscow, I seen one from Hong Kong, which was the most curious one. So, clearly whoever was purchasing these materials in the foreign documents division was approaching third-party countries, sellers and other socialist countries to get these materials. The results of the collection is unrivaled in the United States. In South Korea where national security laws still restrict what we can say or write about North Korea. There's no equivalent collection whatsoever. Some of you may know that the Ministry of Unification has released some materials that are in the central library it's called the [foreign word] that doesn't come close to reproducing what is in this collection, especially for the early periods. The only library that possibly has a collection rivals the Library of Congress, is in Russia, the National State Library, the former Lenin Library, which acted as a type of repository for all the socialist world. All these journals enable us to do just really follow all sorts of lines of inquiry. I want to do sort of two quick case studies for you today. The first one is on population movement. Population movement, the mobility of individuals has always been a contentious issue, on both sides of the demilitarized zones. Especially in years after the war. It was used by both North and South Korea in their propaganda battles to attack the other side's legitimacy. You know the logic of voting with your feet. Ever since this time, the inability of North Korean subjects to choose where they lived, has served as one of the key pieces in for example, recent human rights writing about the north to show the lack of freedom in the north and the repressive nature of its rule. And this is certainly true. From the North Koreans' perspective however controlling the mobility of individuals was considered necessary for central economic planning. Only by knowing where everyone lived could in theory, labor be allocated to the most urgent sectors of the economy. And this was key to claiming and all socialist economies that they could be more efficient than the capitalist counterparts. Yet of course such control was not so straightforward and we can see this in the specialty economic journals that are in this library's collection. The main one of which is called Economic Research, Kim Jong-il. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as the country was recovering from war, the economists writing this magazine constantly noted the elusiveness of the population. And I want to just cite one particular piece published in 1959 by an economist and Kim en Jong [assumed spelling] who is nobody special right? ^M00:20:01 He's just an economic planner who is writing and he's writing with a sense of frustration at the inability of central state institutions to stop people from coming to the cities from the countryside. He complains that for that year fully 30% of the new labor force in the industrial and transport sectors had come from the countryside. If we do the math, that means that despite legal prohibitions more than 114,000 workers came to the cities from the countryside against the plans of the party. It's an incredibly large number. But it's probably also underestimated. Because that's only two sectors of the economy and it doesn't include construction which was the biggest one. And it just counts workers, it doesn't include their families right. So, we have hundreds of thousands of people in this period moving against the wishes of the party. How did this happen, especially given everything that we've come to understand about the power of the state. The many resources of the Library of Congress allow us to piece together a little bit of the story. I'm going to give you a very quick version of what that story is, and it centers on the way North Korean factories were organized, right. Something that probably you didn't expect me to talk about is factory organization. But after the war, after the devastating bombing that wiped out most of the factories, there was this desperate need to heighten production and the party did not have very much economic expertise right. Most of the party cadres are coming from the peasantry. And what they decide to do is they decide to give those few people that do have economic knowledge control of factories, right. It's partly a soviet system. It's called the single manager system. But these people are given power to sign contracts, to build housing, and most importantly the local party officials are being told do not interfere with these economic managers, these factory managers, right. Because we want above all else to increase production and as part of that goal they're given the right to fire workers and to hire workers. The problem is that at this particular point in North Korean history there's an extreme labor shortage. There's too much death during the war right. North Korean population falls by something like 12 to 13% during the North Korean war, during all of the Second World War, the only country in Europe that lost a bigger percentage of its population is Poland, right. So, it's affecting simply the number of bodies that are available to participate in the labor force. There's still all sorts of inefficiencies in the way labor's been allocated, but these managers are under incredible pressure. So, they do two things in this context. One is they begin poaching workers from other factories. Right? There's all sorts of articles that criticize them for what is called a disorderly practice. But there's no way to stop them from doing this. But most importantly, they move to evade the controls that sought to stem flows of people from rural to urban areas. They basically ignore central directives and begin hiring people that want to move to the cities. So, if from the central perspective, planner sought to deal with depressing labor shortage by trying to balance right from a macro perspective where labor would flow. From that micro perspective, from those managers that have this political pressure on them to increase production, they don't care about central attempts to balance labor force across the country. They care about their immediate need to increase production. So, their short-term production needs trumped the long-term national plans of the center. This just becomes one of the way many places where we can see that central plans for the economy are undermined through tensions with often the very different interests of localities. Now there are many other factors of the story. By 1962 right, so this is 9 years after the end of the war, the state is still having trouble making complete population registers. There are many complaints, especially in the countryside. People are just missing from the registers and this gives them the ability to move to the cities to leak out of the system. The new construction of apartment building created new types of spaces that were actually very challenging to put under surveillance, allowing families often to double up inside these apartment buildings. Factory managers could also set up their own housing to make space for new urban arrivals from the countryside. All of these factors show that by the mid-1960s, when my research stops all indications are that due to these tensions between national and local level planners and factory managers and the still limited abilities of the state implement its regulations, people were moving into the cities outside the designs of central planners. State power clearly had its limits. Moreover, people had their own ideas of where to live, and factory managers had their own ideas of how to go about hiring workers. They worked in way to be allocated workers from central state. Whatever the regulations may have been on the books they're willing to take the risk and local state institutions were unable to stop them. Here, we can see the analytical dead-end I discussed earlier working itself out in a slightly different form. Our conventional understanding of population as static, unable to move was derived from reading Kim LLsung's speeches from the legal statutes that are on the book and combined with our Cold War assumptions about totalitarian power. This led us to believe that Kim's words and the laws were thoroughly implement. But this certainly wasn't the case. And as I tried to show the danger when doing North Korean research is that we take intentions as outcomes, right, a basic historical falsie. Indeed, even that frustrated 1959 economist that I mentioned earlier suggested as much. He wrote, and this was one of the more shocking things that I read when I was first starting off my research. He goes and says Kim LLsung's words have been simply ignored. I never though I'd see the written in North Korea. But you do find all sorts of indications of that type. In this economist frustrations then we can see that as much as he would've liked people to follow the words of Kim LLsung's speech. They didn't. There was a much more complicated socioeconomic and cultural history shaping the demographics of the peninsula. One that can't be captured through notions of totalitarianism alone, or simply reading through these high-level sources. Let me shift to my second case study now. I want to give you a really quick history of consumption. Most historians of consumption under state socialism have long recognized a fundamental ambivalence. On the one hand socialism's promise of a mass utopia included a certain assurance of a level of material comfort for the population right through consumption. On the other hand, Stalinist economic models invested in heavy industry, ensuring an emphasis on those sectors of the economy, the underserved the very consumption that was promised of the population. And this was no different in North Korea right. Where similar decisions about the priorities and economic investment were made after the war. The ambivalence became manifest not just at top-level policy positions, but at the personal level of everyday life. In large number of pieces of advice literature that are available to us in this library, that sought to teach people how to be good socialists so to speak. There was this wide-ranging discussion about labor and participation reconstruction, about production. Yet, the issue of consumption, how should a good socialists consume, was for the most part reduced to a single simple point. The importance of saving and not wasting. An emphasis on frugality on self-help all these were promoted to act as a type of key to accelerating the growing material prosperity of the country. This emphasis on frugality in turn led to a type of unease or anxiety in the way that consumption came to be represented in the press, in the media, in the early years after the war. And sort of interesting in this anxiety. Early reporting about the construction and use of apartments for example, captures this sense of ambivalence. Starting in 1954 well I forgot this slides. So, this slide is the classic type of cartoon that we talked about saving with. The first one, [foreign word] means saving, right? So, you've got a happy family with the worker who saved properly. The second one is about alcoholism, the worker who's spending all of his money on booze and look what happens to his family. This this type of cartoon. This type of discourse is through the media in these years. And much of this discourse focused on apartments. Since 1954, the party began to make massive investments in workers apartment buildings, transforming cityscapes of the peninsula, as I hinted at earlier. Yet, despite all the celebration of how these apartments represented the success of the revolution, the press was much more comfortable about treating these buildings in terms of the construction rather than their inhabitation. ^M00:29:58 Thus, you get this type of photograph. It's about the monumentality of the building. The pictures are generally from outside. When photographers did venture into apartments, the photos are almost always cropped, closely onto a family in a genre that might be called the happy family photo without really allowing the camera to pan across the space of the apartment. There's a certain reticence to show the apartment as a space of consumption. And indeed, there's a critique at this time, as we can see in this cartoon here there's sort of a fear that women would get too comfortable inside the apartments and not be interested in going out to work. And here's one where we can see at the top a woman is sleeping in, and she's doing her makeup and her sort of comfort in his apartment space that makes her late taking her kid. All right complaining at the end. So again, there's this reticence to show the apartment as a space of consumption. Here I'm going to make a bit of a jump and jump to the 1960s where you get a shift, and the shift is quite stunning, I only saw it last time I was here at the Library of Congress in November. There are two specific journals called [foreign words], New Life, that begin in 1963, and I'm not quite sure why it's 1963. Suddenly offering long and many articles of what we would today call lifestyle coverage. As one article in this period asked, where does a rooms sense of harmonious beauty or taste of cultural refinement come from. That's not easy to answer in a few words. And indeed, there were many words in these pages later to try and talk about this. That type of question where it's invoking cultural refinement, harmonious beauty, would just had no presence in the press just a few years earlier. So, these articles talked about how to arrange the furniture in one's home right. They began to discuss how to hang pictures on the wall. Should you have vertical versus horizontal pictures. Should you have sunlight or curtains. Clearly the preference for pictures were landscapes there's discussions about what color is best for what type of room or even color charts for people to choose from. By this point we get no sense of reticence or ill at ease. In fact, when you look at these type of pictures you can begin to see that the camera is taking a step back and it's beginning to show more about the objects through which people lived their everyday life. Right? So, here's one chockablock would not have met the design criteria of any article I've ever read in North Korean presses too jammed with tables and plants, right. Here's another one and here this is featuring two of the main consumer items from this period, the radio in the sewing machine. So, very much a well-off family. Right? Anybody know what's in the middle of the table there? Goldfish. This goes as well for the way furniture is discussed. You can see these ones. There's absolutely no people. You can see the painting. You can see that there's no Kim LLsung portrait on the wall. Again, a very different sensibility of what could have been discussed in an earlier period. This transfers over to fashions as well. In particular, women's clothing. I'm not going to talk about this, because I'm running out of time, but I just want to show you some of these images from this period. And we can see that there begins in the 1960s new forms of femininity that have a lot to do with new forms of clothing that aren't the typical here's one of the color charts for clothing. ^M00:34:16 ^M00:34:25 So we have these new forms of femininity that don't fit into what until this point fashion had largely been either your work uniform or you know the [foreign word] what in South Korea is called the hanbok, the traditional Korean dress. There are all sorts of questions that we can ask about these types of images, these types of consumption, right. We can ask legitimately how many people were actually consuming like this, right? We don't have good answers for. We can also ask what did it mean that this was being publicly discussed right. This isn't a type of secret form of consumption that only high party officials are doing behind closed doors. These are pictures that are circulating in magazines that have tens of thousands, some of them have over 100,000 copies being printed. Just like in this country, even if you can't afford everything that you see in the magazine you can consume the images right and the promise of what this might mean about the future, about possibilities. We can ask what does this consumption mean about postwar class formations and uneven distribution of goods. It's also possible that we wonder whether there were certain groups that taking advantage of that ambivalence towards consumption that I spoke of earlier pushed the promise of material comfort to create a space to speak of consumption in new ways. This would put these consumers, or these writers about consumption, together with the factory managers and the urban migrants, that I spoke about in my earlier case study as people whose behavior in these important rounds moves beyond the type of top-down directives of the leadership in the party. In other words, another location of historical agency. However one chooses to interpret this consumption, one thing is clear is if we're to read Kim's speeches the resolutions of party congresses or even the main newspaper, the [foreign word], right we would miss out completely on the significant economic and cultural changes. So, the problem I described earlier of taking intentions as outcomes, we can add the further problem of simply not looking in places where we can locate socioeconomic and cultural changes. Ones that are not being unilaterally produced by the leadership or the party, but which in fact contribute to shaping the possibilities of postwar politics in North Korea. So, let me conclude by doing what a historian should never do, make a few comments about the current situation in North Korea. Most observers know that since the early 1990s there have been a lot of changes afoot in North Korea. Some of the indications of these changes commentators often speak about, what population mobility. People are moving around in lots of new ways. New forms of consumption, where women's fashions are often talked about as are the new style of apartments that are going up in city. There are many more, I just wanted to highlight that the three areas that I sort of talked about in this talk, are referred to today in order to track changes. These changes are often read as indicating a decline in the capacity of the state to rule the country right. People are doing stuff that the state doesn't want to. Some commentators go so far as to predict the imminent collapse of North Korea. We know that going back to the Clinton years at least this assumption even shaped certain parts of American policy towards the north. Now as a historian, I'm not in the business of making predictions other than knowing that if you continue over decades to predict the collapse, you eventually might be right. I can't help but notice that these predictions of the demise of the North Korean state often take as a background against which they measure these changes the very cartoonish understanding of North Korean history that have attempted to draw out that concentric totalitarian no alternative historical agency type of history. Yet if you consider the history of population movement and consumption to try to offer you today, we can see that there's always been a much more complicated and fluid history in the relationship between the Kim family, the different segments and levels of the state, and the population. If we escape the type of Cold War era style histories of North Korea, then the context of the many changes that are being remarked upon today begins to shift. And so, the meaning of today's changes also begins to shift. Always there have been limits on state power in North Korea. The state has always had to adjust to changes in social and economic forces, and one of the virtues of this collection at the Library of Congress is that it allows us actually to begin to try and explore some of these other areas of historical agency. Some of the social, economic, cultural, and gendered forces that shape the history with which the party, with which the Kim family is actually having to deal with. And I'll conclude my remarks there and I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you. ^M00:39:36 [ Applause ] ^M00:39:40 Yes, in the back there please? Could you tell me your name, maybe? ^M00:39:47 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:40:39 Right, it's a great question, right. Because especially in the '50s and the 1960s North Korea sees itself firmly within a socialist word. There is all sorts of circulations of movies and magazines. North Koreans are participating in conferences throughout the eastern bloc. And I think the trick to answering your question is partly which eastern European, or which other socialist country you're comparing with because there's an enormous variety of these questions within socialist blocks. So, one place I would start would be for example, the design of housing. So, one of the things we could find in the library here is that there are architecture journals where we can see all the types of designs of apartments that are being constructed in North Korea. And even all sorts of models that were never actually constructed. We see that somebody, I don't think there was a single decision made on this, but there is no communal housing in North Korea. It's all designed for the single nuclear family. It's two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and you can shut the apartment door, right? So, unlike in China, if that's our comparison, it's right at this point in China of course that communal housing is being developed. Very different from the situation in North Korea. So, in China the assumption that this architecture design could help breakdown, or weaken the bonds of the family because it's considered to be the bastion of futile values or Confucian values, right? In North Korea, and I think it's partly because of the colonial experience in North Korea, there is an attempt to use architecture to firm up the nuclear family actually. If I were then to look at the designs with what's going on in the Soviet Union at this period, we know that Khrushchev right at this moment is part of his anti-Stalinist drive is actually using everyday life design and material comfort as one of the ways of criticizing the Stalinist era and opening up new possibilities for the Soviet population. What we see going on in North Korea is more in tune with that. So, you see the circulation of housing designs, or these exhibitions. But, there's an important distinction is that the Soviet Union in its cities it's much wealthier than North Korea, right? So, in terms of the material culture, the objects, I think there's no comparison, and even less though with east Germany, right? so, you're right that it's important to see North Korea in that broader socialist world context. But we have to also be careful that there's a lot of variety within that context. I've always been curious what's going on in Cuba at this particular time. I don't know that but, yes? ^M00:43:32 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:43:56 So, you know my sense is that there aren't as many links with China as there are with the eastern bloc. Partly, you have to remember that the North Koreans set up their country in 1945 four years before the revolution, right? And so, there's actually this sense that we got there first in a way. Through the 1950s, so let me address your question by maybe talking about fashion, women's fashion. My understanding of most of the literature on the People's Republic of China is that scholars emphasize how after the revolution there was that sort of de-feminization of women in China, but for the most part dress becomes more masculine orientation. There's less emphasis on femininity. North Korea, that never happens. If anything, what happens after the declaration of equality this would have been 1946, North Korea is the first country in Asia to declare the equality of the two genders, right? And while you have that druidical influence, emphasis on equality, you've got all sorts of other ways of speaking about femininity, naturalizing femininity. So, in North Korea for example, there's an emphasis on the way women speak, speech is promoted, there are specific feminine ways to speak, which is an important way of naturalizing gender difference, which becomes important for the segregation of labor, right? There's all sorts of complications when we begin naturalizing that distinction. So, unlike with China the issue with the way femininity is being promoted, actually becomes very important for understanding the way the economy works, and understanding actually political power. I don't think you can understand the direction of the personality goes without understanding some of these fundamental assumptions about gender that developed in the 1950s. My understanding is that that's very different from what goes on in China at that time. ^M00:46:07 ^M00:46:14 Any other questions? Yes sir? ^M00:46:19 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:46:30 That's the hardest, single hardest thing for me to try to get at, right? Because you're getting through a style of rhetoric that is influenced by the party, and you know there's this upbeat, we're all happy type of rhetoric which we know is produced by the party. And you can't really write outside of that, right? So, if you want to grumble, you have to do it in very careful ways in the press. You certainly can't do it in the high-level press. So, everybody knows the [inaudible] right? You read that and the form of rhetoric is really standardized, right, it's the political discourse of political study sessions that everybody writes about. You shift your focus and you go down to the newspaper called the [inaudible] one character difference it's put out by one of the workers' union. And the tone of writing is completely different. The types of stories are completely different. So, one of the pieces that fascinated me is there's all these worker criticisms of each other, right? And here you get maybe not a sense of the mood toward the regime, right? That's the type of thing that you see kind of expressed in the opposition, but you get a sense of the tumult of precarity, or tumultuousness of precarity. It's these types of materials where you can read about street parties that get completely out of hand because everybody's drunk, right? Somebody writes in a letter to the editor and goes this isn't, you know proper communist morality. These people don't have a proper education, right? The truth of it is there was just this party on the street that work the guy up and he's complaining, he's invoking the party's rhetoric to complain about these workers, right? So, in that we get a sense of the variety of life. We get a sense of a lot of the social and economic problems. So, I'll give you one other example, I printed out in one of the slides, alcoholism is something that's talked about, right? So, there's one of the first factories opening coming on after the war that Kim Jong beer factory. Okay, yet throughout the press, right, there's all these complaints about workers coming to work drunk, right? About spending too much money. And one of the, in fact one of the ways that you can get a sense that the material standards of living are going up, especially since we don't always trust North Korean statistics, is you can see the social commentary, bout workers in their dormitories. And there's all sorts of problems with gambling and drinking. And the reason it's offered, right sort of the indirect way of getting the question. The reason this is explained is because workers have gotten too much money and there's not enough pride. But it's quite amazing, so basically you know they're keeping busy by gambling and drinking because they've got too much money. It's an interesting way of getting at the material life question in the end from this period. So, it's you know these types of materials I think give us a better sense of the complex social relations at the time. At the very time that these workers are talking, and giving us a sense of the rambunctiousness on the streets, right, you read party history that comes out just after this. ^M00:50:05 And you know everything is about the leader, and unity of the party, the harmoniousness of the; that's just not true, that's fantasy right? But those party histories are being written in part because that's what they're trying to promote. The history has to be seen itself as a tool to promoting what doesn't exist. All right, and so these types of materials give us a chance to not just read those top-level materials, but get a sense of the messiness at this period. But I can't answer the question, what is the mood of the population towards the party or toward Kim LLsung. I will say that in the 1950s and early 1960s, right? As much as we hear about Kim LLsung in the headlines and stuff, again looking into the type of understanding we have today of personality cult just didn't exist then in the 1960s. So, while I'm up working on that personality cult, we're actually missing is a very careful history of how that looks in south and up, and the unevenness of it. So, you can find, there's some children's journals in the collections, by about 1960 you can see that for some reason the children and the youth journals began printing Kim LLsung's name in a bigger type. Other newspapers and journals don't. Right? There's this unevenness. So, my question, I see that again, it's not something I study, my question then is you know some of these features of the personality cult that we've come to know and expect. How did they develop, if there's this type of unevenness between different media outlets, it doesn't appear that it was a central order, that said everybody shall now write with a bigger script for Kim LLsung's name, right? So, the question is are people then, for their own political purposes at that time taking certain initiatives to participate in what they see is a political direction that some people are pushing, right? I don't know what the answer is, it's not what I've been studying in particular, but you can see that that unevenness is something that needs to be talked about in order to have a better sense of the complexities, even around the rise of the personality cult. So, the way, if I were to go back to this sort of argument I'm trying to make in my talk is, I don't think we can understand the personality without having a better understanding of the diversity of social and cultural experience in the 1950s and the 1960s because the personality cult comes out of that and depends upon the forms of discourse that existed in that period, right? So, by simply focusing on the outcome, we miss out on a lot. ^M00:53:05 ^M00:53:09 Oh, sorry, can I ask here there's another question, sorry. ^M00:53:12 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:53:37 Sure. Sure. So, that's a huge issue, thank you for asking it. And it even goes back to the first question that I was asked, a different form of comparison. So, you know South Korea's the other North Korean's constantly you can't read a newspaper without reading reportage about South Korea in the North Korean press. What's a little bit different from the German example, which was raised earlier is that, you know by the end of the 1950s you can argue that urban areas in North Korea were materially much better off than many people in South Korea. So, the housing that we see being built is happening in North Korea before it happens in South Korea, right? So, in the German case, there's always this sense of East Germany not being adequate enough and trying to catch up with the west, right? In North Korea, there's not this sense of catching up with South Korea at all, if anything there's this trumpeting, like these types of photographs from apartment buildings I show are about our successes. And if I had wanted to pursue this as a theme, I would have shown you they have all sorts of newspaper articles reprinted from South Korea. It's one of the big surprises that I found out. So, in South Korea in the 1950s and 1960s, there was actually sort of a conservative critique of the South Korean government about the sort of disarray of creating morals in South Korea, right? Comes from a conservative position. Ironically, that conservative critique of South Korea in things like the [inaudible] and the like, was used in North Korea, it gave North Korea fuel, right to criticize South Korea in their own press. They quote stories from the South Korean press. They use photographs from the South Korean press. They pay really close attention to the media in South Korea in the sort of battle for legitimacy, you could write and entire book just on the ways, the images of South Korea are used in that type of competition. A little bit like what goes on between PRC and Taiwan too, right? ^M00:55:50 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:56:12 Sure, so that would be typical of South Korean arguments about Marxism and being anti-national, right, it's sort of a betrayal of the tradition, yet what's also forgotten is that you look at the North Korean in 1950s and 1960s and their historians are publishing all sorts of books about the length of Korean history and they talk about Korean history in the ways that eventually South Korean historians move towards. So, the emphasis on [inaudible] and the north. Some of you know Korean history know that there's a lot of talk about these [inaudible] right? In 1955 they're already publishing one of the key scholars complete works in North Korea, well before they're available in South Korea. So, they're not making the argument that we're better Koreans than the south so much in terms of invoking history. They make that claim based on economics and they make the claim on the continued American military presence in South Korea, which is a whole other issue, right? >> SONYA LEE: And we have to close it and [inaudible]. So, actually Dr. Andre Schmid will be at the [inaudible] to lunch. And he'll be here until Thursday. So, you can ask more questions and then come back to our reading room, yeah. Thank you for the sharing. ^M00:57:46 [ Applause ] ^M00:57:50 And then, actually we have a display of North Korean materials at the reading room, Dr. Schmid mentioned about stamped item, the FDD, we have that. And you can see the cartoon actually showing 1955 North Korea was opposed the nuclear weapons. Yeah, it's in, I happen to find this so you can check there. And then especially check the display case because there is a really rare, I'm not saying really old, but rare materials from before or until the Korean War 1950. It's kind of deteriorating material. That's why we have protect that. It's really valuable materials. So, you can check that. Thank you for coming all of that, enjoy all of you in joining us. And it was a pleasure to see all of you, okay. Bye. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.com