North Korea's Militant Nationalism and People's Everyday Lives: Past and Present

Abstract

AbstractNorth Korea's anti‐American state power has operated in individuals' everyday practices by focusing on its post‐war militant nationalism. Existing studies have neglected an aspect of North Korea's nationalist power that has been neither necessarily top‐down nor violent, but rather productive and diffusive in people's everyday lives. While the regime's anti‐American mobilization has come from above, people's politics of hatred, patriotism, and emotion have been reproduced from below. Along this line, I examine the historical and social changes in North Korea's militant nationalism and people's ways of life through a comparison between two periods: from the 1950s through the 1980s and from the 1990s through the present. I focus on how the state's anti‐American power was legitimated by people's solid micro‐fascism from the 1950s through the 1980s, and how it has been contested and recreated through both change and persistence in people's micro‐fascism from the 1990s through the present.