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Shanghai Impressions, or, What Cellistic Ennui Tells Us about Cultural...
A few days in Shanghai rarely fails to reorient one immediately from wherever illusory place one has been prior. In Shanghai, China’s upward thrust is paired with its revolutionary guts, its past...
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Cultural Power Battle Threads
From the May Fourth Generation to Today – The Telegraph reports in alarmist fashion about Hu Jintao warning, as the newspaper headline puts it, of “cultural warfare from the West” – A closer...
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transmediale buzz
The Berlin transmediale is, to my knowledge, one of the very best annual conferences (a “convergence” is more the appropriate word) which exist on Planet Earth. I was very fortunate to have been able...
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Blockages and Breakthroughts: Cultural Diplomacy and North Korea
[A cross-post of an essay which I posted on SinoNK.com. — AC] Yesterday, Corée_Actualités launched a short missive which functioned as a kind of bouleversement of the normal: a 90-member delegation of...
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Rectified Criminal or Courageous Speech? Ai Weiwei in China and Germany
About two weeks after the disappearance of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the Huanqiu Shibao released a series of photographs of past criminals who had, through arduous years of “thought reform,” found a...
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On Deadlines, and Morning: Edward Said
via Asuka Sumi, Baroque Violin “In early adolescence I was completely in the grip, at once ambiguously pleasant and unpleasant, of time passing as a series of deadlines – an experience that has...
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Enemies and Allies in North Korean Art and Archives, 1948-1952
This is the introduction to a paper which I prepared for an Association of Asian Studies panel on captured wartime documents in Korea, Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, 29...
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Researching the Moranbong Band: An Abstract
Even before Kim Jong-il’s tremulously-announced death in Dec. 2011, the North Korean musical-cultural apparatus-elite-complex was in valedictory mode, producing huge orchestral canatas that expressed a...
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Songs, Film, and Ideological Shifts in the DPRK
Unlike songs which can put forth a new policy line in the space of a day or two, films take longer to congeal and embody ideological shifts. Chinese media covered this film “Rice Plant Flower” 《稻花》with...
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Opera North and ‘The Flying Dutchman’: A Review
While having ostensibly little to do with the East Asian themes that normally permeate this website, the following post is connected to my interest in German classical music and specifically opera....
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The Moranbong Band and Regime Consolidation in the DPRK
Today, media in Beijing announced that the Moranbong Band, the all-female ensemble associated closely with Kim Jong-un, will be travelling to China for five days of performances. An academic paper I...
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Notes on the Music Scene in Pyongyang
I was in North Korea for several days in the middle of March 2016. While my main purpose was to visit the Sinchon Massacre Museum for a Korean War research project in which I am engaged, I was also...
View ArticleResources on North Korean Music Diplomacy
One strand of my ongoing academic work as a historian of Northeast Asia concerns music and cultural diplomacy in and by North Korea. My published online work on this topic generally does a few...
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Cruel Resurrection: Chinese Comics and the Korean War
I wrote this article in the early 2000s under the direction of the ageless Chinese art historian Shen Kuiyi, with whom I did a “cognate field” during my doctoral studies at Ohio University, and with...
View ArticleWalls as Multivalent Icons in Early People’s Republican Cartoons, 1946-1951
The rise and ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese civil war, and Mao’s galvanizing intervention into the Korean War, was accompanied and supported by a wave of cultural...
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