Remaking a Transborder Nation in North Korea: Media Representation in the Korean Peace Process (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal of Communication, 2020
Recently, North Korean media has engendered greater connectedness with the outside world. One important goal of the North Korean regime is to create ties with Koreans living outside the country through its official website. Analyzing media representation of a transborder Korean nation, this article discusses the shifts that have occurred in the recent context of the peace process on the Korean peninsula. I argue that the transborder nation- building in North Korean official media reveals a hybrid form of patriotism and nationalism that juxtaposes loyalty to the nation and loyalty to the state. North Korean media thus emerges as a critical site where the two loyalties coexist, demonstrating an attempt to provide the impression of a whole—albeit divided and dispersed—Korean nation.
Media landscape in North Korea: How strong is the wind of change
While most of Asian countries have seen a massive transformation of media landscape in the last two decades, North Korea remains a strictly closed regime with the state’s total control over the media system. The 2014 Press Freedom Index ranks North Korea as the second least free media environment in the world, only after Eritrea, the position it has consistently held since the index was introduced in 2002 (Reporters without Borders 2014). While the country in the horn of Africa remains in the world’s blind spot, North Korea has always been a focal point in global media, with any news coming out from the “world’s most secretive state” (Sweeney 2013) is received with much excitement. Many awaits the end of this information draught as recent political, social, economic, and technological changes have made this secretive country more exposed to the outside world, which are expected to challenge the regime’s total information monopoly over the society. Among these are the increasing exposure of North Koreans to outside foreign media, including foreign broadcast radio, televisions, and DVDs (Kretchun and Kim, 2012), and the appearance of “clandestine journalism” (Maslow 2012: 273-276), which claims to be some kind of citizen journalism within the country (Chiu 2010), and the more availability of new communication technologies such as the internet and USB sticks. These new developments have made the current media and information environment in North Korea much more complex than perhaps any previous time in its history, when little was written beyond official North Korean propaganda and anti-North Korean propaganda (Amstrong 2011: 357). This chapter attempts to give a more systematic understanding of the media landscape in North Korea within the new context.
2007
an outside member of this dissertation committee, shared his time for suggesting a bright idea, reviewing, and commenting whenever needed. There were special friends (scils_kr) who shared intellectual as well as emotional experiences with me during the past several years at Rutgers. I also would like to thank Joan Chabrak who serves as an administrative secretary for her constant encouragement and friendship. I'd like to show my special thanks to all my family-Yung, Paul, Stephen and Sunny-for their being with me. Although I couldn't be much help when they needed me, they still loved me and trusted my decision. Once again, I'd like to say "I love you." v
Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives
2014
Why do we care and are so easily made to care about North Korea? What do we care about exactly when we pay attention to places like North Korea? What does our care accomplish? To answer these questions, who 'we' are and how we care about North Korea need as much interrogation as what is going on inside North Korean government, society, economy and imagination. The book explores issues of relations, i.e. how we relate to, stand in relation and establish relationships in and through frameworks of security, human rights, humanitarianism and development. To frame the 'North Korea problem' as a problem of relations is to highlight how shifts away from objectifying North Korean actors and things are possible. In this book, I examine the intercultural dimensions of Western and South Korean encounters with North Korea that have achieved wide circulation among experts and laypersons alike (albeit to different degrees and significance). I examine various popular cultural genres - graphic novels, memoirs, photography, films and novels, but no, I do not talk about the American macho/misogynistic James Bond movie and Team America.
Mass Media Hype and the‘Long tail’of Globalisation: A North Korean Example
International journal of journalism & mass communication, 2016
This article comments on the contemporary manifestations and implications of mass media hype in the Internet age, with a particular application to conditions of post-industrial journalism. Newsworthy events can take on the characteristics of a 'long-tail' with a global distribution. Such a 'long-tail' of media hyper-activity can occlude 'secondary effects' including aporias in representation and media presence online. An example is discussed from Internet news representation of North Korean militarisation.In this context, concepts of censorship, cultivation and pseudo-event remain as relevant as ever, despite-and perhaps even more so because of the proliferation of available information in post-industrial journalism. While the article affirms that there are advantages in the digitalisation of journalism in the post-industrial era, issues of gate-keeping can be seen to be compromised in aspects of content dissemination, audience interpretation and media availability.
Discursive construction of Hallyu-in-North Korea in South Korean news media
This chapter explores how North Koreans have been represented in recent South Korean news media coverage of the consumption of South Korean popular culture called Hallyu or the Korean Wave. By examining how South Korean news frames the Hallyu phenomenon in North Korea, it addresses how the otherness of North Korea and its people as the audiences of Hallyu is constructed and reconstructed through media discourse. Chapter 9. in Kim, Youna (Ed).(2018). South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea. Routledge.
Nordic Representations of North Korea: A Study of Newspaper Sources
Review of Korean Studies, 2018
International media regularly portray North Korea as abnormal, run by a leadership depicted in turns as evil, incompetent, all-powerful, and farcical. Such representations provide reason for publics not to question American-led preferences, dominant until 2018, for sanctions and threats over dialogue when responding to weapons development. How does a region beyond the Asia-Pacific, home to potential mediators in inter-Korean relations, view North Korea? The Nordic countries maintain functioning relationships with Pyongyang and have explored involvement in bringing North Korea and other parties into dialogue. We examine the sources used in Nordic news reports on the country in order to identify whether these relationships push media representations away from the " demonization " paradigm so common elsewhere. We find that while demonizing viewpoints are regularly expressed, linkages do contribute to more empathetic, humanizing portrayals. The Nordic example is demonstrative for thinking about ways to build support for peaceful solutions on the Korean peninsula.
The Affective Politics of Citizenship in Reality TV Programs Featuring North Korean Resettlers
Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 16(1): 145-163, 2019
This study examines the dynamics of cultural politics in the reality TV shows featuring North Korean resettlers in South Korea. Given the existing studies focusing on the role of media representation reproducing a dominant ideology for the resettlers, the paper focuses on the specific media rituals of the NKR2 programs, which can be seen as a product of a neo-liberalist localization process of the global media industry. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how the NKR2 programs interrupt the current dynamics of emotions in regard to North Korean resettlers in South Korea. It argues that shaping civic identity as an effect of the NKR2 show, cultural politics of citizenship in South Korea on North Korean resettlers serve the formation of relatively conservative and sexist civic identity.
2017
This study uncovers the dynamics of cultural politics in the recently emerging reality TV shows featuring North Korean resettlers (NKR2 show, hereafter) in South Korea, by postulating that more things are going on in these reality shows than the given role of media apparatus reproducing a dominant ideology for the resettlers as observed in many previous studies. The analysis showed the dynamics of the cultural politics of the recently shaped emotions involved in the distributional structure of emotions through specific devices and rituals operated in these programs. The present study paid closer attention to the fact that the emergence of the NKR2 program showed the border-crossing behaviors of the resettlers with a focus on the repressive feature of North Korean societal system. At the same time, the programs revealed the conservative ideologies of the resettlers by working through media rituals. Consequently, the programs reflected the distinctive features of civilization and cult...