The Art of Monument Politics: The North Korean State, Juche and International Politics

This article examines North Korea's political monuments as sites of domestic and international politics. It uses feminist and postcolonial concepts and critical methods to attend to what most prevailing approaches to Korean studies neglect: the problem of international hierarchy and how the patriarchal North Korean state negotiates the hierarchical, gendered and racialised structures of international politics. In doing so the article focusses on two structures built in the 1970s: the Mansu Grand Monument, which was built to commemorate the head of state, Kim Il Sung, and The Non-alignment Movement is a Mighty Anti-imperialist Revolutionary Force of Our Times, a book published to mark North Korea's entry into the Non-Aligned Movement. Historical studies commonly present the 1970s as a period when juche as North Korea's principle of self-reliance and its role in Third World inter-state politics solidified. Reading the two cultural artefacts together as interlinked monuments, I make two main arguments that critically expand this historical view: rather than simply a fixed political principle, juche is a visual-textual process; and these monuments are artefacts that not only legitimise domestic "authoritarian" rule - as is widely acknowledged - but also help us (to) better understand the North Korean state's relationship to the international.