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CHAIRPERSON

Prof Ted Hopf, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Despite western and postcolonial scholarship’s neglect of North Korea’s role and place in anti-imperialism and the Non-aligned Movement, a more complicated picture of postcolonial international relations emerges when we follow North Korea’s politics and diplomacy. In this paper, I argue North Korea is a limit case of anti-imperial, anti-colonial optimism in ‘darker nations’, and use the case as an entryway to develop concepts and methods attentive to the full complexity of the politics of liberation that move beyond, to borrow LHM Ling’s term, HEW = Hypermasculine Eurocentric Whiteness.

The specific empirical sites of my thinking are North Korea’s cultural construction projects in the 2000s that includes statues, museums and public buildings in southern Africa and Southeast Asia, in particular the sites where I conducted preliminary fieldwork since 2018: Namibia, Angola, Senegal, Cambodia and Malaysia, which have specific bilateral as well as regional and/or global historical and contemporary political linkages with North Korea. These contemporary Asia-Africa cooperative projects serve as rich sites to explore postcolonial statecraft, and re-articulation and co-optation of the Third World as an international political bloc, anti-imperialism and people politics in the age of globalization. Against popular explanations that posit these cultural projects as economic ventures between foreign currency poor states, I argue that the fact that these cash poor governments invest in cultural, superficial dimensions of statecraft points to how aesthetics and the appearances of things mediate power and politics, and become a medium that forges relations between postcolonial states and establishes international order. Using feminist and postcolonial methodologies at their limits, I further critcally develop this notion of aesthetics and appearances to begin mapping out the multiple subterranean non-western forms of politics, diplomacy and worlds that have always existed. Given its emphasis on cultural sites and visual artefact of monuments and museums, the paper presents theoretical tools and methods attentive to visual-textual processes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Shine Choi is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. She is also Associate Editor for International Feminist Journal of Politics and co-editor of the book series, Creative Interventions in Global Politics with Rowman and Littlefield. In 2018-2019, she has been conducting her research on North Korean cultural diplomacy supported by Social Science Research Council Inter-Asia fellowship programme (USA). Her research has focused on how an illiberal state like North Korea creates the international as a space of politics. Other areas of research interests include IR theory; intercultural relations; visuality and aesthetics; postcolonial feminist theory; and critical/creative methods. Recent publications include Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives (Routledge, 2015), ‘Art of Losing (in) the International’ (Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2017), and Critical Methods in Studying World Politics: Creativity and Transformation co-edited with Anna Selmeczi and Erzsebet Strausz (Routledge, forthcoming 2019).

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