Reading Seoul in Pyongyang: Cross-Border Mediascapes in Early Cold War North Korea

Abstract:This article argues that the North Korean mediascape of the 1950s and 1960s must be understood in relationship to its interaction with publications from the South. To do so, it makes three methodological interventions. First, it demonstrates how North Korean writers’ own practices of citation can be used to outline the extensive and expanding body of South Korean texts available in the North during this period. Second, it shows how a focus on such references and their changing character allows us to see a shift in the late 1950s and early 1960s: one that enabled a selection of South Korean texts to be reprinted in the North, producing intersecting reading publics. Finally, it demonstrates how an understanding of this changing relationship to South Korean texts illuminates changing writing practices in the North and the hybrid texts linking North and South Korean authorship that they produced. The article thus contends that the 1950s and 1960s mediascapes of the two Koreas must be seen as imbricated rather than isolated entities.