Public Lecture: Prof. C. Harrison Kim, Univ. of Missouri

February 22, 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Sakamaki A-201

In the early 1960s, the synthetic fiber vinalon became North Korea's national fiber, a product that symbolized the independence and ingenuity of its state socialism, from the raw materials needed to make it (coal and limestone) to the person who invented it (the Japanese colonial-era chemist Ri S脜颅nggi). The Vinalon Factory near Hamh脜颅ng City芒鈧漚 factory originally built by a Japanese chemical company and a city rebuilt by East Germany芒鈧漚lso became a national emblem. Vinalon City was a transnational object par excellence, but it was immutably localized as everyday narrative for the ordinary North Korean people, replete with its labor heroes who achieved superhuman levels of productivity. The everyday dimension is precisely where the ideological workings of state power are hidden. The history of vinalon reveals a characteristic of ideology of work芒鈧漷he subsumption of life by labor芒鈧漚 characteristic that is certainly not limited to North Korea.

C. Harrison Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Missouri. His research interests include everyday life, industrial work, socialism, and the modern city in the context of Korea and, in particular, North Korea. Harrison芒鈧劉s book, Furnace is Breathing: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, forthcoming from Columbia University Press, is about industrial work as a defining ideological activity in North Korea芒鈧劉s socialism after the Korean War and about the workers who lived during the demanding times of postwar reconstruction.


Event Sponsor
Dept. of History, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Prof. Shana Brown, 956-7151

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