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“US-China Musical Diplomacy” at the US Consulate in Chengdu
Adam Cathcart and Andreas Boelcke perform Gao Ping's Cello Sonata at US Consulate-General Chengdu, July 2011 25 July 2011 Dr. Adam Cathcart Sino-U.S Relations Lecture at the Chengdu U.S Consulate...
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Notions of Incompleteness and Hope: Fragments for Future Appropriation
In his compact yet epic collection of short stories entitled Men Without Women, American writer Ernest Hemingway describes an Italian major who, bereft of a limb and then his wife, puts his broken...
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Shanghai Impressions, or, What Cellistic Ennui Tells Us about Cultural...
A few days in Shanghai rarely fails to reorient one immediately from wherever illusory place one has been prior. In Shanghai, China’s upward thrust is paired with its revolutionary guts, its past...
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Blockages and Breakthroughts: Cultural Diplomacy and North Korea
[A cross-post of an essay which I posted on SinoNK.com. — AC] Yesterday, Corée_Actualités launched a short missive which functioned as a kind of bouleversement of the normal: a 90-member delegation of...
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String Crossings: Tracking the Evolution of North Korea’s Moranbong Band
One of the advantages of staying at the top North Korean hotel in Shenyang, the Chilbosan, is that the nightly broadcasts from Pyongyang are available in real time. Earlier this month, I made a visit...
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Researching the Moranbong Band: An Abstract
Even before Kim Jong-il’s tremulously-announced death in Dec. 2011, the North Korean musical-cultural apparatus-elite-complex was in valedictory mode, producing huge orchestral canatas that expressed a...
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Notes on Kim Ki-nam, and on North Korean Cultural Production
The Chosun Ilbo carries the news that Kim Ki-nam, head of North Korea’s Ministry of Propaganda and one of the few remaining members of the famous funeral cortege of December 2011, has finally stepped...
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On the disbandment of the DPRK’s Unhasu Orchestra and the reported death of...
With respect to the matter of the Unhasu Orchestra “executions” which has been bubbling about since late August 2013, augmented by JoongAng Ilbo reports of “stadium executions” in Wonsan in November...
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The Moranbong Band and Regime Consolidation in the DPRK
Today, media in Beijing announced that the Moranbong Band, the all-female ensemble associated closely with Kim Jong-un, will be travelling to China for five days of performances. An academic paper I...
View ArticleResources on North Korean Music Diplomacy
One strand of my ongoing academic work as a historian of Northeast Asia concerns music and cultural diplomacy in and by North Korea. My published online work on this topic generally does a few...
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