Christine Kim
Durham: Duke University Press
2025
In Brutal Fantasies, Christine Kim examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. Drawing on films, fiction, and defectors’ life writings from the last two decades, Kim analyzes how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. She recasts these stories through Asian American and global Asian frameworks that move beyond common Cold War binaries to critique how US imperialism persists in global understandings of North Korea. Kim shows how human rights discourses simultaneously instrumentalize and dehumanize North Korea while demonstrating that North Korea is a site of contradiction that complicates Western interpretive constraints. She also explores the Korean diaspora’s complex relationship with North Korea and highlights the vulnerability and marginalization of diasporic subjects. In so doing, Kim pulls back the veil on prevailing cultural myths enshrouding North Korea, offering alternative ways of understanding its role in global and regional imaginaries.
About the Author
Christine Kim
Christine Kim is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and a faculty affiliate of UBC’s Asian Canadian Studies and Asian Migration program (ACAM). She was the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Literature (2020-25). Before joining UBC in 2020, she taught at Simon Fraser University where she was a founding co-director of Simon Fraser University’s Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Her research and teaching interests lie in Asian diaspora, the Cold War, imperialism, and race.