Speaker: Christine Kim, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia
Moderator: Qingyang Freya Zhou, Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, October 30, 2026
Time: 10am Hong Kong time
Venue: on Zoom
Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109825
All are welcome. Registration required.
Brutal Fantasies argues that cultural representations of North Korea coalesce around Western fantasies of the inhuman. Such fantasies implicitly need to define the appropriate purveyors of freedom and violence for the rest of the world, thereby generating a sense of global intimacy for those seeking to qualify the human through liberal understandings of agency. North Korea, as a figure of what this book calls the “minor inhuman,” marks the limits of the human as imagined in a postwar world and also functions as techne, as it is often reduced to its function or instrumentalized purpose, in dominant and diasporic narratives. This book draws attention to how depictions of North Korea showcase the structures of racial feeling that normalize the logics of the global order as well as its methods. Brutal Fantasies analyzes North Korean defectors’ life writings, human rights testimonies, films, and diasporic and non-diasporic fiction produced in the last twenty years to critique how the long Cold War is catalogued through uneven speculations about brutality’s geopolitics. It also resists methodological tendencies to simplify North Korea through Cold War binaries by directing attention instead towards North Korea as a site of contradiction that complicates the interpretative constraints of the West. Foregrounding key affective turns in North Korean representation (such as disbelief, fear, and sadness), this book’s chapters collectively disrupt fantasies of the North Korean inhuman by providing alternate ways of situating North Korea within global and regional imaginaries.
Christine Kim is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia and a faculty affiliate of UBC’s Asian Canadian and Asian Migration program. Before joining UBC, she was faculty at Simon Fraser University where she was a founding co-director of the Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Her research and teaching interests lie in Asian diaspora, the Cold War, imperialism, and race. She is the author of Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War (Duke UP, 2025), The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012).
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