Ready-Made Architecture and Urban Memory in Postwar North Korea

Cheehyung Harrison Kim (Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, USA)

About the lecture series:

Every semester, we have been organizing special lectures to feature the diverse research achievements of North Korean scholars.

Lecture abstract:

The rebuilding of North Korea after the Korean War—centered on state authority and productive work culture—was distinctly represented by architecture of the quotidian kind. Architecture was divided into two interconnected types: monumental structures symbolizing the utopian vision of the state and vernacular structures instrumental to the regime of production in which the apartment was an exemplary form. North Korea’s architecture also exhibits the process of memory politics, in which the transnational history of urbanization was forgotten and rewritten under the nationalistic framework.

About the lecturer

Cheehyung Harrison Kim is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His focus of research and teaching is on socialism, labor, industrialism, everyday life, and urbanism in the context of North Korea. He is the author of Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953-1961, published by Columbia University Press. He is also the editor of the journal Korean Studies.

Online event!

Please register in advance: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/weblink/register/r34ab0d96bbb8f79da297a2bfb8093ff5