Abstract
As Charles Armstrong notes in beginning his review essay that follows, deliberately or not North Korea has been in the headlines. Over the past two decades, and notwithstanding the publication timelines that affect our business, it has rarely been a risk for an academic author to start any piece by stating just that. While the articles that comprise this Journal of Asian Studies “mini-forum” on North Korea had already been commissioned, it will surprise no reader to learn that their framing and urgency shifted in response to recent events. As this issue goes to press, such events have included the November 2010 artillery skirmish centered on Yŏnp'yŏng Island, the choreographed revelation in the same month of Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) uranium enrichment facilities to visiting nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, and the March 2010 sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan. All of these incidents—in combination with actions and inactions by South Korea, the United States, and other regional powers—arguably moved the peninsula closer to “the brink” at the end of 2010 than it had been for some time.
As Charles Armstrong notes in beginning his review essay that follows, deliberately or not North Korea has been in the headlines. Over the past two decades, and notwithstanding the publication timelines that affect our business, it has rarely been a risk for an academic author to start any piece by stating just that. While the articles that comprise this Journal of Asian Studies “mini-forum” on North Korea had already been commissioned, it will surprise no reader to learn that their framing and urgency shifted in response to recent events. As this issue goes to press, such events have included the November 2010 artillery skirmish centered on Yŏnp'yŏng Island, the choreographed revelation in the same month of Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) uranium enrichment facilities to visiting nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, and the March 2010 sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan. All of these incidents—in combination with actions and inactions by South Korea, the United States, and other regional powers—arguably moved the peninsula closer to “the brink” at the end of 2010 than it had been for some time.
Against this backdrop, Armstrong's review essay, like his own historical writing on the formation of the DPRK state (see Armstrong 2003) and like some of the recent books he considers, emphasizes the necessity of a deeper understanding of North Korea's past and present that goes beyond the familiar tropes of punditry. The increasing pace of publication of serious scholarly examinations of the country—some new ones have appeared even as this forum was being finalized (Haggard and Noland 2011; McEachern 2010)—merits an overview and a sorting, and this is what Armstrong's review provides. Of particular note is a growing literature on contemporary life. It may be newly possible to teach a course on North Korean culture and society, one that at the very least would complicate common notions of the ideological constitution of the state, its authority, and its legitimacy. Nan Kim, by training an anthropologist, here more directly addresses the historical situation of the Yŏnp'yŏng incident in relation to a genealogy of dispute over the Koreas’ West Sea borders. For her, in this and other writing, the Northern Limit Line is an instantiation of a larger class of efficacious ambiguities that define Korean division—the borders that are not borders and the non-borders that can be deadly, as suggested by Valérie Gelézeau (2010). It furthermore opens onto a broader consideration of the unresolved character and uneven end of the Cold War in Northeast Asia and beyond (see also, recently, Kwon 2010).
Certainly at the time of the 2010 crises some scholarly experts on North Korea, and others locally interpellated as such, sought to respond directly to heated and blinkered media interpretations of the events. Yet the publication of this mini-forum might also be an occasion to renew explicitly an older discussion in Korean studies around the tactics and values of academic perspectives in relation to the formal and time demands of media (cf. Cumings 1992). After all, however nimbly JAS has acted to place North Korea on the front burner, by the time you are reading this it is at least six months later. Towards this end, the “cross-training” evident in these articles, in which Armstrong the historian explores the possibility of an anthropology of North Korea while Kim the anthropologist takes us back to early Cold War history circa 1953 and sideways into domains often marked off by political science, is itself suggestive.
Perhaps a collective mapping project is in order. It might be based in the understanding, hardly novel or unique but worth repeating, that almost any of the “issues” relating to North Korea articulate disparate contexts, political spaces, and temporalities. Beyond scholarship's role in providing an antidote to shallow exoticism, obsession with the bizarre, or “crazy talk” (as in “Kim-Jong-Il-must-be”), a self-conscious charting of these articulations with the goal of making them more broadly visible could be helpful. It is quite apparent, for example, that the way 2010 unfolded was affected at moments by the domestic politics of a South Korean Lee Myung Bak administration that felt increasingly boxed in by its own prior claim to represent a plausible harder-line alternative to earlier forms of Nordpolitik, rather as the early Bush administration's program of being “not Clinton” sometimes seemed to run on its own logic. However absolutist Kim Jong Il's government may be, notably in its own self-depiction, the expanding vision of North Korean culture and society reciprocally opens the question of whether and how North Korean policy responds to a domestic public. The Korean War is unresolved, but other unresolved histories also pass through the Koreas: that the Yŏngbyŏn gas-graphite (Magnox) reactor was modeled on a dual-purpose British design declassified and released during the Atoms for Peace period brings one very quickly to the original sins of the nuclear era, and their continued haunting of proliferation and non-proliferation history. The issue (noted by Nan Kim) of the legal category of “acquiescence,” embodying a trap through which North Korean inaction could be taken to construe constructive recognition of the maritime border claimed by South Korea, suggests that following some historical research (Dudden 2004) a close examination of the categories and acting forms of international law itself could be warranted. These, of course, are only some connections worth making; our hope for the mini-forum is that it might help pave the way to others.
