Society & Culture
- Frontline: Secret State of North Korea"How ordinary citizens are resisting one of the world's most oppressive regimes." Originally shown in 2014.
- Secret Nation by Posing as a tourist, broadcast journalist [Channel One anchor] Janet Choi risked arrest to get an inside look at one of the planet's most secretive--and brutally totalitarian--countries while under surveillance by a police 'tour guide.' Archival footage, an interview with a defector... This undercover report documents the stark poverty and extreme repression in North Korea that exist alongside spectacular cultural events and age-old customs unfettered by political ideology.Call Number: Videodisc 1924 (KOR) (In Uris Library Dean Room)Publication Date: 2003 (Princeton, NJ : Films for the Humanities & Sciences)
- North Korea: Rich Kids of the People's Republic Savour Life in ‘Pyonghattan’Anna Fifield of UK's The Independent describes life for the "one-percenters" in Pyongyang. (May 16, 2016. )
- Encyclopedia of KimilsungiaEntries cover the history of a type of orchid named after Kim Il-Sung, the botanical and cultivation details, annual festivals, works of art and literature, exhibition festivals of the flower, and other types of plants given as gifts to Kim Il Sung. many color photos.
- KimjongiliaHistory of the type of begonia named for Kim Jong Il. Botanical & propagation properties. Many color photos.
South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea by Call Number: DS923.23 .S67 2019 Kroch Asia LibraryPublication Date: 2019 (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge)"This book explores the influence of South Korean popular culture in North Korea and social, cultural and political change at this historical moment. Despite tight controls set by the regime...information technology and digital youth make North Korea's isolation more difficult in the light of new images, concepts and lifestyles from South Korean popular culture."
North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society by
.... Media flows covertly into the [North Korea], and fault lines are appearing in the government's sealed informational borders. Drawing on deeply personal interviews with North Korean defectors from all walks of life, ranging from propaganda artists to diplomats, Jieun Baek tells the story of North Korea's information underground--the network of citizens who take extraordinary risks by circulating illicit content such as foreign films, television shows, soap operas, books, and encyclopedias. ...the materials these citizens disseminate are affecting the social and political consciousness of a people, as well as their everyday lives.
Call Number: P94.65.K6 B34 2016Publication Date: 2016 (New Haven ; London : Yale University Press)
Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom by
This unique book, now fully updated, provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of life in North Korea today. Drawing on decades of experience, noted experts Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh explore a world few outsiders can imagine. In vivid detail, the authors describe how the secretive and authoritarian government of Kim Jong-un shapes every aspect of its citizens' lives, how the command socialist economy has utterly failed, and how ordinary individuals struggle to survive through small-scale capitalism. Weighing the very limited individual rights allowed, the authors illustrate how the political class system and the legal system serve solely as tools of the regime. The key to understanding how the North Korean people live, the authors argue, is to realize that their only allowed role is to support Kim Jong-un, whose grandfather founded the country in the late 1940s. Still a cypher, Kim Jong-un, as did his father before him, controls his people by keeping them isolated and banning most foreigners. North Koreans remain hungry and oppressed, yet the outside world is slowly filtering in, and the book concludes by urging the United States to flood North Korea with information so that its people can make decisions based on truth rather than their dictator's ubiquitous propaganda."
Call Number: DS 932.7 H37 2015 (2nd ed.)Publication Date: 2015 (Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield)
- Marked for Life: Songbun, North Korea's Social Classification System Marked for Life: Songbun, North Korea's Social Classification System"Songbun subdivides the population of the country into 51 categories or ranks of trustworthiness and loyalty to the Kim family and North Korean state. These many categories are grouped into three broad castes: the core, wavering, and hostile classes."
Sports
북한 의 체육 과 여가 / Pukhan ŭi ch'eyuk kwa yŏga The Physical Activity and Leisure Life in North Korea by Call Number: GV 663 K7 N38 2016Publication Date: 2016 (Sŏul : Sŏul Taehakkyo Ch'ulp'an Munhwawŏn)(In Korean) Covers physical education and training, sports & the state, government policy on leisure activities.
- Mass Gymnastics Exercise Videoscroll down for c.6 minute video, with music, of 15 exercises for various parts of the body. It shows the basics of exercises for mass rhythmic gymnastics, which is just one type of exercise video available in North Korea today.
- Mass Dancing Instructional Video20 minute demonstration video of couples doing a mass dance to a popular song, Such dances are done at huge gatherings for celebrations and holiday festivals.
(Society & Culture, con.t.) --- DVD's
North Korea: A Day in the Life by
The cover of "North Korea: A Day in the Life" shows the Juche Tower and iconic images which appear on many propaganda posters-- a soldier, construction worker, intellectual, and farmer. Dutch director Pieter Fleury, with approval of the DPRK’s Ministry of Culture, documented the everyday life of a family as they go to school, English classes and work. He observed that the citizens “put their best foot forward,” but the film reveals the unrelenting, “ritualized” propaganda of the government.
The Pyongyang Film Festival gave this film the Special Documentary Award.
Call Number: Videodisc 3372 (KOR) (DVD located in Uris Library Dean Room)Publication Date: 2005 (Chicago, IL: Facets Video [Distributed by] Total Film Home Entertainment
North Korea Society and Culture: Complete Report by
"Our all-inclusive culture report for North Korea... includes gift-giving, greetings & courtesies, holidays & festivals, lifecycle, religion, sports, stereotypes, superstitions & folklore, time and punctuality, and women in business and culture.
Call Number: e-book: click on titlePublication Date: 2010 [Petaluma, Calif.: World Trade Press)
The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters by
"B.R. Myers, a North Korea analyst and a contributing editor of The Atlantic, presents the first full-length study of the North Korean worldview. Drawing on extensive research into the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, romance novels and other artifacts of the personality cult, Myers analyzes each of the country’s official myths in turn—from the notion of Koreans’ unique moral purity, to the myth of an America quaking in terror of “the Iron General.” In a concise but groundbreaking historical section, Myers also traces the origins of this official culture back to the Japanese fascist thought in which North Korea’s first ideologues were schooled.
What emerges is a regime completely unlike the West’s perception of it. This is neither a bastion of Stalinism nor a Confucian patriarchy, but a paranoid nationalist, “military-first” state on the far right of the ideological spectrum."
Call Number: HN 730.6 Z9 M66 2010Publication Date: 2010 (Brooklen, NY: Melville House)
Nothing to Envy by Call Number: HN 730.6 A8 D46 2010Publication Date: 2010 (New York : Spiegel & Grau)"A National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle finalist, Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years--a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Demick takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors...
Kimjongilia: the Flower of Kim Jong Il by
Kimjongilia refers to the hybrid red begonia created in celebration of Kim Jong Il’s 46th birthday. Kim Il-Sung also has a flower named after him, a hybrid deep pink orchid, “Kimilsungia.” Both are on display at the Kimilsungia-Kimjongilia Exhibition Hall in Pyongyang, This film looks at the “mass illusion” necessary to maintaining a totalitarian state and the cult of the leaders. Descriptions of human rights abuses from concentration camp and famine survivors are interspersed with archival propaganda films and scenes of everyday life.
Call Number: Videodisc 7653 (KOR) (DVD located in Uris Library Dean Room)Publication Date: 2010 (New York, NY: Lober Films: Distributed by Lorber HT Digital)
