Abstract
There are reported to be twenty different kinds of Kim Il Sung badge but no-one in the west has yet been able to decipher the hidden code. The landscape of north Korea may seem similarly impenetrable in its coded symbolism. Nonetheless, it is hoped that an attempted reading can yield insights which will help reduce the aura of exotic otherness that for decades has surrounded the régime and its approach to the material world.
It is the duty of communists to master and remake nature. Kim Il Sung, 1981.2
I wish to thank Janet Townsend, Mike Crang, Diana Pritchard and members of the Anglo-Indian Seminar in Mussoorie for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The responsibility for the views expressed remains mine.
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Notes
Quoted in Korea Today 7 (1981), p. 43.
P. J. Atkins, ‘The Dialectics of Environment and Culture: Kimilsungism and the North Korean Landscape’, in A. Mukherjee and V. K. Agnihotri (eds), Environment and Development: Views from the East and the West (New Delhi: Concept, 1993), pp. 309–32.
J. S. Duncan, and N. G. Duncan, ‘Ideology and Bliss: Roland Barthes and the Secret Histories of Landscape’, in T. J. Barnes and J. S. Duncan (eds), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 18–37.
D. E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
J. S. Duncan, The City as Text: the Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 17.
P. F. Lewis, ‘Axioms for reading the Landscape: some Guides to the American Scene’, in Meinig, D.W. (ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (New Haven: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 11–32.
Lewis (1979), op. cit.
Kim Il Sung, ‘On the Ten Major Tasks of Pyongyang City’, speech delivered at a plenary meeting of Pyongyang City Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, 26 June in Works, vol. 19 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1984), p. 295.
See Chapter 1 in D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Kim Il Sung, ‘Pyongyang City must be an Example for the Whole Country in all Spheres of Politics, the Economy and Culture’, 1974, in Works, vol. 29 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1987), p. 172.
C. Macdonald, ‘So Terrible a Liberation — the UN Occupation of North Korea’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars vol. 23, no. 2 (1991), pp. 3–19.
A. Foster-Carter, Korea’s Coming Reunification: another East Asian Superpower? (London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 1992), p. 9.
Destruction was therefore far worse than that wrought in Beijing by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. M. S. Samuels and C. M. Samuels, ‘Beijing and the power of place in modern China’, in J. A. Agnew and J. S. Duncan (eds), The Power of Place: Bringing together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 202–27.
Anon., Do you know about Korea? 100 Questions and Answers (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1989), p. 140.
Kim Il Sung, ‘On Mapping Out the Master Plan for the Postwar Reconstruction of Pyongyang’: talk with city planners, 21 January 1951, in Works, vol. 6 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1981), pp. 234.
Anon., Glorious Forty Years of Creation, vol. II: July 1953-October 1966 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1989) p. 16; A. Schinz and E. Dene, ‘Pyongyang — Ancient and Modern — the Capital of North Korea’, Geojournal 22 (1990), pp. 121–36.
In this regard Pyongyang is similar to cities such as Bucharest. G. Church, ‘Bucharest: Revolution in the Townscape Art’, in R. A. French, and F. E. I. Hamilton (eds), The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy (Chichester: Wiley, 1979), pp. 493–506.
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 27. For a critique of Foucault’s theory of power see J. G. Merquior, Foucault 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1991), ch. 8.
Ibid., p. 143.
H. Lefèbvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 142–3.
A. Gutnov, A. Baburov, G. Djumenton, S. Kharitinova, I. Lezava and A. Sadovskij, The Ideal Communist City (New York: Braziller, 1971).
B. C. Koh, ‘North Korea in 1988: the Fortieth Anniversary’, Asian Survey 29 (1989), pp. 39–45.
Korea Today 7 (1991), pp. 28–9.
BBC Monitoring, Summary of World Broadcasts, Part 3 Far East, Weekly Economic Report, Third Series FE/WO 219, A/6 (1992); BBC Monitoring, Summary of World Broadcasts, Part 3 Far East, Daily Report, Third Series, FE/1506, B/8 (1992).
Anon., Pyongyang Metro (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1980); Anon., Pyongyang Metro (Pyongyang: Korea Pictorial, 1988).
D. E. Cosgrove and P. Jackson, ‘New Directions in Cultural Geography’, Area 19 (1987), pp. 95–101; S. Daniels, ‘Marxism, Culture and the Duplicity of Landscape’, in R. Peet and N. Thrift (eds), New Models in Geography: the Political Economy Perspective (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 196–220.
J. S. Duncan and N. G. Duncan ‘(Re)reading the Landscape’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 6 (1988), pp. 117–26.
R. D. Sack, Conceptions of Space in Social Thought: a Geographic Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1980).
D. E. Cosgrove, ‘Power and Place in the Venetian Territories’, in J. A. Agnew and J. S. Duncan (eds), The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 104.
M. S. Samuels, ‘The Biography of Landscape: Cause and Culpability’, D. W. Meinig (ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (New Haven: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 51–88.
Duncan (1990), op. cit.
R. Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).
Lefèbvre (1991) op. cit., p. 143.
S. Y. Choe, ‘The Tower of the Juche Idea — a Great Monument’, Korea Today 11 (1982), pp. 30–2.
Anon., ‘Arch of Triumph’, Korea Today 6 (1990), p. 43.
Kim Il Sung, ‘On Properly Preserving Historical Remains and Relics’, talk with the teachers and students of Kim Il Sung University, 30 April 1958, in Works, vol. 12 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1983), pp. 196–7.
R. Hewison, The Heritage Industry (London: Methuen, 1987).
J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990).
Foucault, quoted in Duncan (1990) op. cit., p. 22.
Anon., ‘Mangyongdae — Holy Place of Revolution’, Korea Today 12 (1981), pp. 53–4.
A. White, Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). I am grateful to Mike Crang for this reference.
Anon., The Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery (Pyongyang: Korea Pictorial, 1989)
J. M. Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscape: the American Experience and Beyond (New York: Praeger, 1988).
On sacred space see also Y. F. Tuan, ‘Sacred Space: Explorations of an Idea’, in K. Butzer (ed.), Dimensions of human geography, Geography Department, University of Chicago, Research Paper 186 (1978), pp. 84–99.
Mayo (1988) op. cit., p. 249.
D. Ley and H. Olds, ‘Landscape as Spectacle: the World’s Fairs and the Culture of Heroic Consumption’, Society and Space 6 (1988), pp. 191–212. Apologies to F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
Cosgrove (1989) op. cit., p. 104.
D. E. Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth Century Italy (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992).
A. Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 77; P. J. Atkins, ‘The Great and the Dear: North Korea towards the Millennium’, IBG Conference, Royal Holloway, University of London (1993).
P. J. Atkins, ‘Development North Korean Style’, Geography Review vol. 6, no. 3 (1993), pp. 39–41. For a fuller account of rural landscape modification see Atkins (1993) op. cit.
Y. G. Son, ‘Along the New Waterway of the West Coast Granary’, Korea Today 9 (1990), pp. 23–4; Korea Today 10 (1990), p. 30.
BBC Monitoring, Summary of World Broadcasts, Part 3 Far East, Weekly Economic Report, Third Series, FE/WO230, A/8 (1992).
Kim Il Sung, ‘On Accelerating the Reclamation of Tideland and Increasing the Fertility of Fields’, speech delivered at an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, 2 April 1983, in Works, vol. 37 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1991), pp. 368–95.
Kim Il Sung, ‘On some Measures for the Reclamation of Tideland in a Well Defined Framework’, in Works, vol. 23 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1985), pp. 60–6.
Kim Il Sung, ‘Let the Entire Party, the Whole Country and all the People carry out the Great Project for the Transformation of Nature to Reclaim Tidal Flats and other New Land’, speech delivered at the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the Sixth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, 5 October 1981, in Works, vol. 36 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1990), pp. 233–52; J. R. Cho, ‘Great Plan for Tideland Reclamation’, Korea Today 10 (1984), pp. 58–9.
Kim Il Sung, On certain tasks involved in improving the management of agriculture and increased agricultural production, 1983, in ibid., Works, vol. 37, p. 324.
Kim Il Sung, ‘On accelerating the reclamation of tideland and increasing the fertility of fields’, speech delivered at an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, 2 April 1983, in ibid., Works, vol. 37, p. 380.
Kim Il Sung, ‘On the wide-scale reclamation of tidal flats and their cultiva-tion’, speech at a consultative meeting of agricultural officials 3 April 1978, in Works, vol. 33 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1988), pp. 151–2.
D. Gregory, Ideology, Science and Human Geography (London: Hutchinson, 1978), pp. 59–63 and 144–6; R. J. Johnston, D. Gregory and D. M. Smith (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 244–6.
R. J. Johnston, Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945 4th edn (London: Arnold, 1991), pp. 32–3. For Barnes and Duncan ‘text is an appropriate trope to use in analysing landscapes because it conveys the inherent instability of meaning, fragmentation or absence of integrity, lack of authorial control, polyvocality and irresolvable social contradictions that often characterise them’. T. J. Barnes and J. S. Duncan (eds), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 7.
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Atkins, P. (1996). A Seance with the Living: the Intelligibility of the North Korean Landscape. In: Smith, H., Rhodes, C., Pritchard, D., Magill, K. (eds) North Korea in the New World Order. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24981-7_11
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