In the Southern Half of Our Republic: Cross-Border Writing and Performance in 1960s North Korea

Abstract

AbstractThis article offers a revisionist perspective on the relationship between 1960s North and South Korean literature by showing how writers in the North engaged with and creatively rewrote works from the South. Contextualizing such practices within a longer history of cross-border reading in the North, the article highlights how North Korean poetry and drama from the immediate aftermath of South Korea's April Revolution of 1960 took up South Korean literature's image of the volcano and reimagined it as a symbol of North-South dialogue. The article then turns to Kim Myŏngsu's Mother of the South (1965), showing how the play rewrites the South Korean novelist An Tongnim's short story “Hope” (1963) in such a way as to engineer a convergence with a line of literary representations then being produced in the North about its own colonial-era “revolutionary heritage.” Finally, the article suggests that this convergence ended up reshaping such visions of North Korea's own revolutionary past and the figure of the militant mother that emerged within them.