Hybrid in Form, Socialist in Content: The Formal Politics of Chŏlga in the North Korean Revolutionary Opera Sea of Blood

Kim Jong Il considered the 1971 premiere of the opera Sea of Blood a watershed moment in opera history. He lauded its innovative use of chŏlga (‘stanzaic song’) rather than aria and recitative. By Western analytical standards, however, chŏlga is simple and predictable, so scholars have thus far glossed over its conventions and their signification. This article instead argues that chŏlga conventions exhibit cultural hybridity and that Kim leveraged such hybridity to advocate a modern, popular, and national sound for North Korea. I begin by outlining hybrid characteristics of colonial-era popular music that chŏlga inherited. I then explore Kim's engagement with such trends in his speeches on chŏlga and demonstrate that cultural hybridity was central to his understanding of sonic modernity. Finally, I analyse a scene from Sea of Blood that pits chŏlga against other music genres, leading to a symbolic victory for the form and for the Korean nation.

The “Protect Dokdo” Movement in South Korea

Having its roots in the democratization movement, the “Protect Dokdo” movement in South Korea was shaped by the post-1987 socio-political and economic developments which that culminated in the 1997 financial crisis. The “Protect Dokdo” movement was a response to this critical juncture, a discursive attempt to re-create Korean national subjectivity by replicating but also modifying the national identity construct of the democratization movement. The eEmbracement of the Dokdo cause by the central government from 2005 onwards, impacted influenced both the movement’s structure and its narrative. From the symbol of the Korean nation juxtaposed with the perceived symbiosis of the domestic ruling elites and Japan, “Dokdo” transformed into a symbol of the Korean “‘self’” juxtaposed solely with the Japanese “other.”

5. Competing states, diverging societies

By 1953 almost all Koreans had accepted that they belonged to a single nation united by blood, culture, history, and destiny. However, the end of the Korean War left them divided into two states. ‘Competing states, diverging societies’ explains that each state shared the same goal of creating a prosperous, modern, unified Korean nation-state that would be politically autonomous and internationally respected. The leadership of each saw the division as temporary and themselves and the state they governed as the true representative of the aspirations of the Korean people, and the legitimate successor to the pre-colonial state. While sharing many of the same goals they followed very different paths to reach them and became ever more divergent societies.

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Was Halted on the Korean Peninsula

The purpose of the article is to reveal the most effective ways that helped the people of the Korean Peninsula quickly halter COVID-19 in the early 2020. To put it simply, to the author’s mind, the Koreans were saved from this terrible pandemic not only by the efficient state measures but also by long and deeply rooted Confucian self-consciousness. This philosophical and ethical teaching is accumulated verified experience of survival of a fairly small Korean nation surrounded by powerful and not always peaceful neighbors rather than pressure from above. Koreans are accustomed to think that they are able to survive only on the basis of conscious collectivist interaction, and they often have to sacrifice personal benefit to advance the common good.

Representing Radical Difference

This article considers the politics of representing “Korea” in Japanese-language texts, focusing specifically on the work of “Zainichi” writer Kim Sŏkpŏm (1925–). The author begins by identifying parallels between what Kim calls “the spellbinding of language” (kotoba no jubaku) and the unresolved debate over Frederic Jameson’s statement that “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . national allegories.” Kim’s “spellbinding” refers to the dual impossibilities faced by postcolonial Korean writers in Japan, who can neither maintain a distance from the Japanese language nor take full and unquestioned ownership of it. This double bind is echoed by the discourse on national allegory, with its simultaneous impulses to avoid reifying the categories of first world and third world as incommensurably “different,” while also combatting a Eurocentric universalism that fails to acknowledge productive, nonessentialist difference. The author examines Kim Sŏkpŏm’s specific solutions to this critical impasse in his works of fiction, particularly Karasu no shi (The Death of a Crow, 1957) and Mandogi yūrei kitan (The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, 1970), demonstrating that Kim is able to destabilize the Japanese language of his novels by creating a tension between the main text and the fragments of Korean language embedded within. In this way, Kim carves out a space for the performance of a Korean identity that is ultimately only imaginary, and it is through this process that a potentially empowering identification with an explicitly imagined Korean “nation” can be forged.