Abstract: Abstract Kim Il Sung's death in 1994 was a critical event in modern North Korea. This article examines how the North Korean state has struggled to reinvent itself since the death event; in particular, how it has faced the challenging task of turning the country's founding hero and supreme leader into a physically absent yet spiritually omnipresent ancestral figure. The article focuses on the norms of commemoration and ideas of kinship that have emerged in the process of national bereavement, partly in relation to the existing characterization of the North Korean polity as a family or neo-Confucian state. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research for this article was supported by a generous research fellowship grant from the Korea Foundation. An earlier version of the article was presented at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge University, in March 2009, and at the School of International Cultural Studies, Hanyang University, South Korea, in April 2009. I thank Barak Kushner, Mark Morris, and Michael Shin for their enthusiastic support and thoughtful comments. Special thanks to Professor Chung Byung-ho and the postgraduate students of Hanyang University,whomI met in Professor Chung's North Korean culture seminar. The revision benefited enormously from the detailed, engaging comments from anonymous reviewers.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-02-27
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 10
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