Juche and Culture: What’s New?

Abstract

Throughout history many regimes have attempted to control culture, recognising that the creative powers of artists can threaten or strengthen state authority. Control is typically considered most useful in the production of art for the popular, mass market, although high exemplary specialised forms are also subject to manipulation. Until the demise of the USSR, socialist realism called on artists to promote revolution. In the PRC, Mao Zedong saw art as a weapon for the people. Elsewhere in the world, ‘traditional’ art genres are continually reinvented to recuperate, create or enhance national unity: the imagined community.¹ Where culture becomes subjected to the concerns of political manipulation nothing need be what it is claimed to be. Policy makers are rarely artists and, as scholars and activists seek to uncover the minutiae of manipulation, folklore may cross into the domain of ‘fakelore’.²