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Redressing international problems: North Korean nuclear politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2020

Shine Choi Open the ORCID record for Shine Choi [Opens in a new window]
Shine Choi*
Affiliation:
Massey University, Aotearoa, New Zealand
*
*Corresponding author. Email: s.choi1@massey.ac.nz
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Abstract

Marysia Zalewski's Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse on feminism and global politics directly addresses matters of style, that is, questions of language and representation that foreground the invisible yet so palpable aspect of how meanings circulate. This article puts Zalewski's work in conversation with Trinh Minh-ha's D-Passage: The Digital Way and Lynda Barry's What It Is that similarly push the limits of how we craft feminist arguments. These feminists show how styles of writing and thinking, and how ideas gain shape to circulate matter in academic sites of knowledge as much as in art and culture. Building on these works, I put forward the thesis: to theorise is to feel out boundaries and question the questions we encounter that perennially relegate women as taint and malaise. I further explore this thesis by highlighting the visual dimensions of writing and thinking, in particular, what drawing, and drawing lines that shape ideas do. I focus on caricatures from the currently evolving North Korean nuclear crisis to loosen up the ways we go about thinking about war and politics wherein thinking is recognised not so much as a craft to be perfected but a democratic form of being in the world.

Keywords

Marysia ZalewskiFeminist TheorisingInternational Relations TheoryVisualityMethodologyDrawing
Type
Forum Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 337 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2020

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References

1 Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague as delivered, Hradcany Square, Prague, Czech Republic, 5 April 2009, The White House, available at: {https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered} accessed 1 March 2019.

2 Zalewski, Marysia, Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See the sighs, ibid., pp. 107, 126.

4 Ibid., p. 113.

5 Ibid., p. 12.

6 Ibid.

7 For more the parenthetical point, see Elisabeth Prügl's article in this forum on Marysia Zalewski.

8 Zalewski, Feminist International Relations, p. 9.

9 Ibid., p. 19.

10 Ibid., p. 16.

11 Ibid., p. 21.

12 Trinh, cited in ibid., p. 41.

13 Ibid., pp. 117–26.

14 Ibid., p. 4.

15 Ibid., p. 6.

16 Ibid., p. 6, emphasis in original.

17 Minh-ha, Trinh T., D-Passage: The Digital Way (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Trinh, D-Passage, p. 68.

19 Moniza Alvi, cited in Zalewski, Feminist International Relations, p. 16.

20 Minh-ha, Trinh T., Lovecidal: Walking With The Disappeared (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 1Google Scholar.

21 Zalewski, Feminist International Relations, p. 18.

22 Ibid., p. 15.

23 Ibid., p. 84.

24 Ibid., p. 69.

25 Ibid., p. 83.

26 Ibid., p. 68.

27 Ibid., p. 42.

28 Ibid., p. 111.

29 Ibid., p. 116.

30 Ibid., p. 53.

31 Trinh here is re-citing Audre Lorde's famous words. See Trinh, D-Passage, p. 138. Also see Choi, Shine, Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 181–3, 202Google Scholar.

32 Zalewski, Feminist International Relations, p. 110.

33 Trinh, D-Passage, p. 134, emphasis in original.

34 Ling, L. H. M., ‘Don't flatter yourself: World politics as we know it is changing and so must disciplinary IR’, in Dyvik, Synne L., Selby, Jan, and Wilkinson, Rorden (eds), What Is the Point of IR? (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 135–46Google Scholar.

35 The image, drawn by Anita Kunz, can be found here: {http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-anita-kunz-2016-01-18}.

36 Cumings, Bruce, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2010), p. 95Google Scholar; Cumings, Bruce, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 127Google Scholar. As many have stressed, this figuration is riddled with bigotry that has long cast North and South Koreans alike as ‘locusts’, ‘hauling asses’, ‘primitives’, ‘barbarians’, ‘thieves’, ‘Nazis’, and ‘gooks’ (Cumings, The Korean War, pp. 14–16, 80). See also Cumings, Parallax Visions, pp. 180–91; Barkawi, Tarak, ‘Orientalism, “small wars”, and big consequences in Korea and Iraq’, Arena 29/30 (2008), pp. 59–80Google Scholar; Kim, Suzy, ‘(Dis)orienting North Korea’, Critical Asian Studies, 42:3 (2010), pp. 481–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dower, John W., War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (London: Faber, 1986)Google Scholar.

37 Little is known about this image, which circulated on Facebook mainly between 2017 and 2018.

38 Saara Särmä, ‘Junk Feminism and Nuclear Wannabes: Collaging Parodies of Iran and North Korea’ (PhD dissertation, University of Tampere, Finland, 2014).

39 Useful preliminary texts for such exploration might include critical readings of, Sung, Kim Il, The Non-alignment Movement is a Mighty Anti-imperialist Revolutionary Force of Our Times (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1976)Google Scholar; Gills, Barry, Korea versus Korea: A Case of Contested Legitimacy (New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; Armstrong, Charles, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Choi, Lyong and Jeong, Il-yong, ‘North Korea and Zimbabwe, 1978–1982: From the strategic alliance to the symbolic comradeship between Kim Il Sung and Robert Mugabe’, Cold War History, 17:4 (2017), pp. 329–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On postcolonial nuclear politics, see Biswas, Shampa, Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Edkins, Jenny, ‘Novel writing in international relations: Opening for a creative practice’, Security Dialogue, 44 (2013), p. 284CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Trinh, D-Passage, p. 74.

42 Ibid., p. 76.

43 Ibid., p. 80.

44 Aristide, cited in in ibid., p. 123.

45 Barry, Lynda, What It Is (Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 88Google Scholar, underline in original.

46 Ibid., p. 122.

47 Ibid., p. 107, original handwriting translated in typeset.

48 Ibid., p. 103.

49 Barry, Lynda, Syllabus: Notes From An Accidental Professor (Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly, 2014)Google Scholar.

50 Zalewski explores this idea further in this work, Marysia Zalewski, Trying Not to Write an Academic Book (While at the Same Time Trying to Write One) in Critical Methods in Studying World Politics: Creativity and Transformation (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming).

51 Chow, Rey, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 59Google Scholar.

52 Trinh also discusses representation and exteriority. Trinh, D-Passage, pp. 72–8, 194–5.

53 Barry, What It Is, p. 49.