Suzy Kim's Everyday Life In The North Korean Revolution

The Chapter 6 of Suzy Kim’s Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution focuses on the transformation of women’s political, economic and social roles in the post-liberation North Korea under socialist revolution. Meanwhile, the Chapter 7 of Kim’s book collects conflicting personal narratives of men and women who lived the post-liberation period, challenging the standardized historical narratives of the post-liberation Korea created by the regimes in Pyongyang and Seoul. Here, I would like to focus on my reflection on this chapter.

The official narratives of “liberated space” selected and propagated by the dominant forces of the North and the South are dogmatic and incapable of reflecting multifaceted implications of liberation to diverse segments of the two Koreas. In the case of South Korea, the dominant depiction of liberation as “collective effervescence” effectively erases contradictory reactions from pro-Japanese collaborators from the collective memory of liberation. On the contrary, in the case of North Korea, the removal of any historical depiction of the era that deviates from the regime’s official narratives equally hinders the later generations from having a more accurate, multifaceted view of history. …show more content…
In history textbooks I read, there was only one narrative of the early days of post-liberation Korean society – the narrative filled with joy and hope with the ubiquitous picture of liberated Koreans inserted. Also, there was no mention of complex reactions Koreans in different social status exhibited. This lack of complexity in the textbook’s narrative on the post-liberation period is analogous to the lack of personal memoirs on the era other than those glorifying Kim Il Sung’s political roles and consistent with the Juche