Cultural Politics… Notes on North Korean Musical Exchanges and Internal Narratives 30 Mar 20186 Apr 2018 A lot of people seem to be interested in North Korean cultural diplomacy these days, so the (often peer-reviewed/probably badly flawed/usually enormously fun) work which I have been doing on…
Art… Notes on the Music Scene in Pyongyang 26 Mar 2016 I was in North Korea for several days in the middle of March 2016. While my main purpose was to visit the Sinchon Massacre Museum for a Korean War research…
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…
Borderlands… Comment on Haggard: The North Korean Restaurant Franchise 24 Jun 2014 Stephan Haggard is an endless source of extreme quantities of highly enriched North Korea information. His 'blog' posts (which are usually more like mini-journal articles, trenchantly done but lighter and…
Uncategorized Microreads, Macrothemes, Memes 27 Oct 20117 Nov 2011 This past week conspired to make microblogging the internet attack of choice, and this week seems contrived to have the same effect. If you want to keep up with my…
Cultural Politics… North Korean Metaphor War: Whether Adrift or Storming Forward in the Post-Cold War Epoch, the DPRK Remains Not So Much an Enigma as a Deep Cultural Bunker Into Which One, Generally Speaking, Can Only Enter By Pounding on a Piano 12 Sep 20117 Jan 2013 If I had a nickel for everytime I read the words "according to Kim Jong Il's former Japanese chef" I could buy enough rice to feed entire boatloads of squid…
American Foreign Policy… Hiatus//Documentary Smorgasbord//Steven Chu for President in 2016 20 Jul 201020 Jul 2010 I'm on the two-day cusp of departing from Taipei for the beautiful work that awaits in Seattle, and am thus taking my annual last-week-of-July blogging vacation. I would, in the…
Music… North Korean Successor Buzz Suddenly Silent: Correcting and Explaining the Daily NK’s Report 9 Sep 200915 Sep 2009 The Daily NK reports on the somewhat mystifying drop-off in North Korean discussion about the ostensible successor, Kim Jong Un. (Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.) In general,…
Adam Cathcart 