The Art of Monument Politics: The North Korean State, Juche and International Politics

ABSTRACT

This article examines North Korea’s political monuments as sites of domestic and international politics. It uses feminist and postcolonial concepts and critical methods to attend to what most prevailing approaches to Korean studies neglect: the problem of international hierarchy and how the patriarchal North Korean state negotiates the hierarchical, gendered and racialised structures of international politics. In doing so the article focusses on two structures built in the 1970s: the Mansu Grand Monument, which was built to commemorate the head of state, Kim Il Sung, and The Non-alignment Movement is a Mighty Anti-imperialist Revolutionary Force of Our Times, a book published to mark North Korea’s entry into the Non-Aligned Movement. Historical studies commonly present the 1970s as a period when juche as North Korea’s principle of self-reliance and its role in Third World inter-state politics solidified. Reading the two cultural artefacts together as interlinked monuments, I make two main arguments that critically expand this historical view: rather than simply a fixed political principle, juche is a visual-textual process; and these monuments are artefacts that not only legitimise domestic “authoritarian” rule – as is widely acknowledged – but also help us (to) better understand the North Korean state’s relationship to the international.

KEYWORDS:

• North Korea
• juche
• international politics
• monuments
• Mansu Grand Monument
• non-alignment
• visual politics
• feminism
• postcolonialism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editorial team of this Special Issue but in particular Roland Bleiker who was tasked with seeing me/this article to completion during a global pandemic. Thank you for your patience. I would also like to thank the librarians of the Asian Collection in the National Library of Australia, in particular Ji-yeon Cho who was so welcoming and helpful in showing me around the Korean collection in 2018. Rosie Nicholson, my research assistant in 2021, also helped get the details right – thank you.

Notes

1. Photographic images of Mansu Grand Monument are in wide circulation online; see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansu_Hill_Grand_Monument; https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=mansu; https://www.youngpioneertours.com/mansudae-grand-monument-faq/.

2. Kim Jong Un opened the Fatherland Liberation War Martyrs’ Cemetery in 2013. I thank an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this new development since Kwon and Chung’s study.

3. This is the same site as that examined by Kwon and Chung, but Kim uses this English name for the site and spells the location as Daeseong Mountain (2013, p. 183).

4. All O & Ha translations that appear in this article are my own.

5. The reprint in Figure 1 appears in a Korean-language-only travel guidebook, Pyongyang, published by the National Agency of Tourism (Kuka Gwangwang-guk) and thus can be interpreted as intended for domestic visitors (Kim et al., 1999). An almost identical photograph appears in a trilingual Korean–Chinese–English version, Chosun gwan-gwang (DPR Korea Tour), published by the Tourist Advertisement Agency (U & Yun, n.d.).

6. The original pamphlet forms of the individual pieces in the collection can be found in the National Library of Australia.

7. Gills (1996) notes that the Bandung proceedings were translated and circulated in North Korea to mark the occasion despite its (and South Korea’s) exclusion.