The New C(old) War: Shaping North Korea in American Political and Cultural Discourse

This project adopts an interdisciplinary lens grounded in the transnational analytics of Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian Studies to better understand the formation of North Korea as a political and cultural construct within a U.S.-based context. This project analyzes a collection of texts such as: congressional hearings, documentaries, archival materials, non-fiction material, and comedy to draw out the larger common sense portrays North Korea as an unstable, rogue nation. I argue that this common sense establishes North Korea as being “interiorly different” which adds ideological difference as another measure of racial difference. The goal of this dissertation is to outline the ways in which the interiorized difference of North Korea has been used fulfill the imperatives of different political projects such as: American militarism, global humanitarianism, and the American Left. As such, this project explicates how North Korea has become a malleable construction that has been shaped in different ways within American political and cultural discourse