The Intellectual and His People: Mass Culture and Class Identities in Post-liberation North Korea

• In Event: Colonial legacies and Cold War Trajectories: Contact Zones and Boundaries in Japanese and Korean Literature

Abstract

This paper looks at the way mass culture in North Korea helped redefine class identities after 1945 and explores the construction of the category of “the people” by the country’s cultural elite.
Upon liberation, the collective identities and political role of the different elements of North Korean society still had to be constructed in order to topple the old colonial order and provide the basis for the development of a new socialist system. Launched in 1946, the movement for the popularization of culture (munhwa taejunghwa undong) established a nationwide cultural infrastructure and a large decentralized network of amateur artistic circles in farms and factories which allowed official writers to disseminate representations and narratives that contributed to the formation of prototypical class identities. By looking at these representations in literature, magazines and visual media, this paper examines how intellectuals depicted the bodies, parlance and psychology of the different classes of North Korean society. It then links these representations with the country’s post-liberation social and economic policies.
The popularization movement also fostered the production of literature and arts by workers, peasants and students engaged in amateur circles. By analyzing the content of these works and their status within the cultural field, this paper shows how the construction of a category of “popular arts” served to reinforce the symbolic gap between intellectuals and “the people”. It concludes by tracing the origins of the post-liberation discourse on class and the “popular” to the ideology of Korean and Japanese proletarian intellectuals during the colonial era.

Author

• Benoit Berthelier, Yonsei University