Art… Resources on North Korean Music Diplomacy 21 Jan 201821 Jan 2018 One strand of my ongoing academic work as a historian of Northeast Asia concerns music and cultural diplomacy in and by North Korea. My published online work on this…
Art… The Moranbong Band and Regime Consolidation in the DPRK 9 Dec 20159 Dec 2015 Today, media in Beijing announced that the Moranbong Band, the all-female ensemble associated closely with Kim Jong-un, will be travelling to China for five days of performances. An academic paper…
Music… On the disbandment of the DPRK’s Unhasu Orchestra and the reported death of several of its members 6 Jun 2015 With respect to the matter of the Unhasu Orchestra “executions” which has been bubbling about since late August 2013, augmented by JoongAng Ilbo reports of “stadium executions” in Wonsan in…
Music… Notes on Kim Ki-nam, and on North Korean Cultural Production 18 Apr 201518 Apr 2015 The Chosun Ilbo carries the news that Kim Ki-nam, head of North Korea's Ministry of Propaganda and one of the few remaining members of the famous funeral cortege of December 2011, has finally…
Art… Researching the Moranbong Band: An Abstract 30 May 2014 Even before Kim Jong-il's tremulously-announced death in Dec. 2011, the North Korean musical-cultural apparatus-elite-complex was in valedictory mode, producing huge orchestral canatas that expressed a perfect --and complete-- vision of…
Music… String Crossings: Tracking the Evolution of North Korea’s Moranbong Band 25 Apr 201425 Apr 2014 One of the advantages of staying at the top North Korean hotel in Shenyang, the Chilbosan, is that the nightly broadcasts from Pyongyang are available in real time. Earlier this…
Art… Blockages and Breakthroughts: Cultural Diplomacy and North Korea 23 Feb 2012 [A cross-post of an essay which I posted on SinoNK.com. -- AC] Yesterday, Corée_Actualités launched a short missive which functioned as a kind of bouleversement of the normal: a 90-member delegation of the DPRK's…
Art… Shanghai Impressions, or, What Cellistic Ennui Tells Us about Cultural Dynamics in the Sino-North Korean Relationship 20 Dec 2011 A few days in Shanghai rarely fails to reorient one immediately from wherever illusory place one has been prior. In Shanghai, China’s upward thrust is paired with its revolutionary guts,…
Cultural Politics… Notions of Incompleteness and Hope: Fragments for Future Appropriation 1 Dec 2011 In his compact yet epic collection of short stories entitled Men Without Women, American writer Ernest Hemingway describes an Italian major who, bereft of a limb and then his wife,…
American Foreign Policy… “US-China Musical Diplomacy” at the US Consulate in Chengdu 28 Jul 2011 25 July 2011 Dr. Adam Cathcart Sino-U.S Relations Lecture at the Chengdu U.S Consulate [Transcription by Mycal Ford, Pacific Lutheran University] Part I: Conflict and Culture: It is often thought…
Adam Cathcart 