The early Cold War attempt to create a new North Korean cultural field cannot be understood without taking into account a global circulation of ideas, as well as the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910-1945), U.S. and Soviet military occupation (1945-1948), and the Korean War (1950-53). “Affective Socialism” locates the formation of North Korean literature and art within transnational networks of texts and images, paying particular attention to ways in which portrayals of armed struggle inform the emergence in North Korea of a powerful and lasting familial bond between the people and the state in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Theodore Hughes is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University. He is the author of "Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier" (Columbia University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Association for Asian Studies James B. Palais Book Prize. He is the co-editor of "Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film, and Art" (special issue of the Journal of Korean Studies, 2015); the co-editor of "Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire" (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), a finalist for the Daesan Literary Prize for Translation; and the translator of "Panmunjom and Other Stories by Lee Ho-Chul" (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2005).

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