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Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance) Hardcover – March 11, 2010

by Suk-Young Kim (Author)

1 customer review

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"North Korea is not just a security or human rights problem (although it is those things) but a real society. This book gets us closer to understanding North Korea beyond the usual headlines, and does so in a richly detailed, well-researched, and theoretically contextualized way."
---Charles K. Armstrong, Director, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University

"One of this book's strengths is how it deals at the same time with historical, geographical, political, artistic, and cultural materials. Film and theatre are not the only arts Kim studies---she also offers an excellent analysis of paintings, fashion, and what she calls 'everyday performance.' Her analysis is brilliant, her insights amazing, and her discoveries and conclusions always illuminating."
---Patrice Pavis, University of Kent, Canterbury

No nation stages massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea. Even amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, the financially troubled country continues to invest massive amounts of resources to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can involve hundreds of thousands of performers. Author Suk-Young Kim explores how sixty years of state-sponsored propaganda performances---including public spectacles, theater, film, and other visual media such as posters---shape everyday practice such as education, the mobilization of labor, the gendering of social interactions, the organization of national space, tourism, and transnational human rights. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, Illusive Utopia shows how the country's visual culture and performing arts set the course for the illusionary formation of a distinctive national identity and state legitimacy, illuminating deep-rooted cultural explanations as to why socialism has survived in North Korea despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China's continuing march toward economic prosperity. With over fifty striking color illustrations, Illusive Utopia captures the spectacular illusion within a country where the arts are not only a means of entertainment but also a forceful institution used to regulate, educate, and mobilize the population.

Suk-Young Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor with Kim Yong of Long Road Home: A Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor.

Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"North Korean film and drama are underrepresented in scholarship, and this fact alone makes Kim's book a valuable contribution to the literature. However, Kim also offers an outstanding analysis of how utopian imagination supplants reality, how identity-making state rituals construct an imagined history, and why North Korea 'is so obsessed with theatrical presentation of this idealized self-assessment while its political, economic and sociocultural reality presents a stark contrast.'"
—K.J. Wetmore Jr., CHOICE

(K.J. Wetmore Jr., Loyola Marymount University CHOICE 2010-09-01)

"Kim's nuanced and always interesting analysis of North Korean films and theater offers a remarkable window onto a society that has largely resisted the prying eyes of outsiders. She notes in the appendix that 'the real challenge in researching North Korea emerges not from the dearth of available materials, but from the overabundance of primary sources begging for researcher's attention.'... Illusive Utopia is a tremendous accomplishment."
—John Feffer

(John Feffer Korean Quarterly 2010-12-21)

"Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea is a brilliant example of tenacious academic pursuit."
—Mikyoung Kim, Hiroshima Peace Institute/Hiroshima City University, Journal of Asian Studies

(Mikyoung Kim Journal of Asian Studies)

James B. Palais Book Prize

(Association for Asian Studies James B. Palais Book Prize)

"Illusive Utopia is ceratinly a well-researched, well-written book, but its main use will be as a reference work, a bibliographical launching pad for studesnts who want to delve more deeply into one of its many subjects of discussion."
—B.R. Myers, TDR: The Drama Review

(B.R. Myers The Drama Review)

"...this book is full of valuable insights into North Korean culture and is an indispensable addition to the growing literature in English about this bizarre and impenetrable country."
—Michael Rank, Asia Times

(Michael Rank Asia Times 2010-07-14)

About the Author

Suk-Young Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the coauthor (with Kim Yong) of Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor.

Product details

Series: Theater: Theory/Text/Performance
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: University of Michigan Press (March 11, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0472117084
ISBN-13: 978-0472117086
Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 1 customer review
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,703,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #337 in Books > History > Asia > Korea > North
- #2007 in Books > Arts & Photography > Performing Arts > Theater > History & Criticism
- #4235 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Communism & Socialism

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ByKaren Pearlmanon June 10, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

insightful and lucid

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