[KS] A Center for Korean Research/Columbia University Press Book Publication Announcement

[jk2857 at columbia.edu]

Dear KS moderator,

 

Sorry to write again, but could you please send out the announcement below, a slightly revised version. Thank you,

 

Jooyeon

 

 

Dear Colleagues,

 

CKR is pleased to announce the publication of Cheehyung Harrison Kim’a book Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953-1961 published by Columbia University Press. This is the second book in the Center for Korean Research book series. For more information on the series, please visit: http://ckr.weai.columbia.edu/ckr-cup-book-series/

 

Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961
Cheehyung Harrison Kim
Columbia University Press
Date of Publication: November 2018

 

In search of national unity and state control in the decade following the Korean War, North Korea turned to labor. Mandating rapid industrial growth, the government stressed order and consistency in everyday life at both work and home. In Heroes and Toilers, Cheehyung Harrison Kim offers an unprecedented account of life and labor in postwar North Korea that brings together the roles of governance and resistance.

Kim traces the state’s pursuit of progress through industrialism and examines how ordinary people challenged it every step of the way. Even more than coercion or violence, he argues, work was crucial to state control. Industrial labor was both mode of production and mode of governance, characterized by repetitive work, mass mobilization, labor heroes, and the insistence on convergence between living and working. At the same time, workers challenged and reconfigured state power to accommodate their circumstances—coming late to work, switching jobs, fighting with bosses, and profiting from the black market, as well as following approved paths to secure their livelihood, resolve conflict, and find happiness. Heroes and Toilers is a groundbreaking analysis of postwar North Korea that avoids the pitfalls of exoticism and exceptionalism to offer a new answer to the fundamental question of North Korea’s historical development.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cheehyung Harrison Kim is assistant professor of history at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

 

The CKR/CUP Book Series is supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2016-OLU-2250006).

 

Best,

Jooyeon Kim 
Assistant Director

 <http://ckr.weai.columbia.edu/> The Center for Korean Research

 <http://weai.columbia.edu/> Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Columbia University

420 West 118th Street, Office 907
New York, New York 10027

 <https://www.facebook.com/CenterForKoreanResearch/> facebook

 

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