Understanding the dynamics of state power in North Korea: militant nationalism and people's everyday lives.

Abstract

In this dissertation I explore how North Korea's anti-American state power has operated in individuals' everyday practices by focusing on its militant nationalism. The Western image of "Stalinist" North Korea has been of an autocratic, all-powerful totalitarian state inexorably imposing its harsh will upon its subjects. However, existing studies have neglected an aspect of North Korea's nationalist power that has been neither necessarily top-down nor violent, but rather productive and diffusive in people's everyday lives. While the regime's anti-American mobilization has come from above, people's politics of hatred, patriotism, and emotion have been reproduced from below. Along this line, I examine how the state's militant nationalism was legitimated by people's solid micro-fascism from the 1950s through the 1980s, and how it has been contested and recreated through both change and persistence in people's micro-fascism from the 1990s through the present.