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About the Author: Immanuel Kim (George Washington University)

Immanuel Kim is a Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at The George Washington University. He is a specialist in North Korean literature and cinema. His book Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction explores the complex and dynamic literary culture that has deeply impacted the society. His second book Laughing North Koreans: Culture of the Film Industry is on North Korean comedy films and the ways in which humor has been an integral component of the everyday life. Dr. Kim has also translated a North Korean novel called Friend by Paek Nam-nyong.

About the Book: Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction 

North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), is firmly fixed in the Western imagination as a barbaric vestige of the Cold War, a “rogue” nation that refuses to abide by international norms. It is seen as belligerent and oppressive, a poor nation bent on depriving its citizens of their basic human rights and expanding its nuclear weapons program at the expense of a faltering economy. Even the North’s literary output is stigmatized and dismissed as mere propaganda literature praising the Great Leader. Immanuel Kim’s book confronts these stereotypes, offering a more complex portrayal of literature in the North based on writings from the 1960s to the present. The state, seeking to “write revolution,” prescribes grand narratives populated with characters motivated by their political commitments to the leader, the Party, the nation, and the collective. While acknowledging these qualities, Kim argues for deeper readings. In some novels and stories, he finds, the path to becoming a revolutionary hero or heroine is no longer a simple matter of formulaic plot progression; instead it is challenged, disrupted, and questioned by individual desires, decisions, doubts, and imaginations. Fiction in the 1980s in particular exhibits refreshing story lines and deeper character development along with creative approaches to delineating women, sexuality, and the family. These changes are so striking that they have ushered in what Kim calls a Golden Age of North Korean fiction.