Brutal Fantasies

“Through an analysis of Western fantasies and representations of North Korea as illiberal, brutal, and inhuman, Christine Kim importantly argues that the Cold War persists through the connected domains of knowledge production, global imaginaries, conceptions of the human, diasporic relations, and racial affects. Complicating and going beyond traditional area studies frameworks, Brutal Fantasies challenges us to think in more layered ways about diaspora by interrogating our presuppositions about the central or privileged diasporic subjects.” - Jodi Kim, author of Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries

“Christine Kim’s daring and inventive framework moves beyond problematic tendencies of binarism, polarization, and abandonment, rendering North Korea as both strangely familiar and intimately strange. Written with sophistication and clarity, Brutal Fantasies provides top-notch scholarship that re-presents its subjects—and importantly, the whole question about the complexity of diasporic Korean subjectivity—to readers in a considerably new light.” - John Nguyet Erni, author of Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights