Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War

by Christine Kim

Overview

In Brutal Fantasies, Christine Kim examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. Drawing on films, fiction, and defectors’ life writings from the last two decades, Kim analyzes how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. She recasts these stories through Asian American and global Asian frameworks that move beyond common Cold War binaries to critique how US imperialism persists in global understandings of North Korea. Kim shows how human rights discourses simultaneously instrumentalize and dehumanize North Korea while demonstrating that North Korea is a site of contradiction that complicates Western interpretive constraints. She also explores the Korean diaspora’s complex relationship with North Korea and highlights the vulnerability and marginalization of diasporic subjects. In so doing, Kim pulls back the veil on prevailing cultural myths enshrouding North Korea, offering alternative ways of understanding its role in global and regional imaginaries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478032397
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/05/2025
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Christine Kim is Professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia and author of The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America.

Table of Contents

Preface  vii
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction. Cultural Fantasies of the Inhuman  1
1. Dystopic Speculation: Stylizing Transpacific Villains  25
2. The Inhuman Figure of Human Rights: Life Writing, Testimonies, and Escape from Camp 14 51
3. Imperial Diaspora: South Korean Diasporic Exceptionalism, North Korean Terror, and How I Became a North Korean  81
Epilogue. Situating North Korea Within Socialist Lifeworlds  109
Notes  119
Bibliography  141
Index  153

Editorial Reviews

Through an analysis of Western fantasies and representations of North Korea as illiberal, brutal, and inhuman, Christine Kim importantly argues that the Cold War persists through the connected domains of knowledge production, global imaginaries, conceptions of the human, diasporic relations, and racial affects. Complicating and going beyond traditional area studies frameworks, Brutal Fantasies challenges us to think in more layered ways about diaspora by interrogating our presuppositions about the central or privileged diasporic subjects.”—Jodi Kim, author of, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries

“Christine Kim’s daring and inventive framework moves beyond problematic tendencies of binarism, polarization, and abandonment, rendering North Korea as both strangely familiar and intimately strange. Written with sophistication and clarity, Brutal Fantasies provides top-notch scholarship that re-presents its subjects—and importantly, the whole question about the complexity of diasporic Korean subjectivity—to readers in a considerably new light.”—John Nguyet Erni, author of, Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights

From the Publisher

Christine Kim’s daring and inventive framework moves beyond problematic tendencies of binarism, polarization, and abandonment, rendering North Korea as both strangely familiar and intimately strange. Written with sophistication and clarity, Brutal Fantasies provides top-notch scholarship that re-presents its subjects—and importantly, the whole question about the complexity of diasporic Korean subjectivity—to readers in a considerably new light.

Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights - John Nguyet Erni

Through an analysis of Western fantasies and representations of North Korea as illiberal, brutal, and inhuman, Christine Kim importantly argues that the Cold War persists through the connected domains of knowledge production, global imaginaries, conceptions of the human, diasporic relations, and racial affects. Complicating and going beyond traditional area studies frameworks, Brutal Fantasies challenges us to think in more layered ways about diaspora by interrogating our presuppositions about the central or privileged diasporic subjects.

Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries - Jodi Kim