Kim Jong Il Presents Juche, the Opera: North Korean Revolutionary Opera as Assemblage.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

American media often presents North Korea as a country that is both hostile and nonsensical in equal measure. Scholars question this narrative, however, and have begun reassessing how it impacts our understanding of North Korean history. Many thus hotly debate the definition and origin of the country’s guiding ideology known as juche, often rendered in English as “self-reliance.” This dissertation extends such critique into the field of North Korean cultural studies in order to investigate juche as it applies to cultural production. It focuses in particular on revolutionary opera, a genre established upon the premiere of Sea of Blood in 1971. Earlier scholars have established the historiography of this genre, but I discover in their analyses many latent assumptions based in Western understandings of opera and its functions. I instead seek to understand revolutionary opera on North Korean terms as what I call a “juche art work.” Drawing on assemblage theory, I consider the juche art work a property that emerges from the interactions among people, objects, and cultural values collected within the bounds of North Korean society and its connected communities. This dissertation uses archival research including North Korean music, discourse, and popular media from throughout the twentieth century to examine the musical, social, and political values encoded in revolutionary opera. I probe musical and dramatic techniques found in revolutionary opera designed to inculcate such values in audiences both domestically and abroad. I investigate the connections between the opera and film versions of Sea of Blood and argue that they are in fact two faces of the same work. I then expose the political salience of the musical form cholga, the main form found in revolutionary opera songs. I further illustrate the importance of affect in cinematic and operatic theme songs as dramatic devices. Finally, I study how the juche art work enabled creative workers to rehabilitate precolonial culture on the operatic stage in the late 1980s. This dissertation thus complicates through assemblage theory many persistent assumptions about North Korea, and this more nuanced picture will better enable the reader to understand juche culture in the mid-to-late twentieth century.