Brutal Fantasies

Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War

Christine Kim

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781478032397, 9781478029021
• eBook ISBN: 9781478061229
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Social Sciences

In Brutal Fantasies, Christine Kim examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. Drawing on films, fiction, and defectors' life writings from the last two decades, Kim analyzes how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. She recasts these stories through Asian American and global Asian frameworks that move beyond common Cold War binaries to critique how US imperialism persists in global understandings of North Korea. Kim shows how human rights discourses simultaneously instrumentalize and dehumanize North Korea while demonstrating that North Korea is a site of contradiction that complicates Western interpretive constraints. She also explores the Korean diaspora's complex relationship with North Korea and highlights the vulnerability and marginalization of diasporic subjects. In so doing, Kim pulls back the veil on prevailing cultural myths enshrouding North Korea, offering alternative ways of understanding its role in global and regional imaginaries.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cultural Fantasies of the Inhuman
• 1. Dystopic Speculation: Stylizing Transpacific Villains
• 2. The Inhuman Figure of Human: Rights Life Writing, Testimonies, and Escape from Camp
• 3. Imperial Diasporas: South Korean Diasporic Exceptionalism, North Korean Terror, and How I Became a North Korean
• Epilogue: Situating North Korea Within Socialist Lifeworlds
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index