Meditation is a practice or technique designed for self-regulation of the mind. Despite the massive scale of famine-related deaths and grievous economic hardship in the 1990s, the Kim Jong Il regime managed to guide the people to cope with these tragic environments by transforming labor into meditation. This study also examines the ways in which the state constructs of religious imaginations of immortality and the afterlife in North Korea presented extended working hours overwork industrial accidents and deaths at factories, farms, mines, and construction sites. He sought to suppress negative feelings (e.g., fear of death) and augment positive emotions (e.g., happiness with everyday life) by operating a propaganda apparatus that produced and circulated hagiographic fictions of his father and himself. Thus, I argue that the religious imaginations of immortality in North Korean historical writing helped the son Kim Jong Il control people’s emotions. North Korea’s leader deployed state-constructed historical prose to consecrate his father as a messiah of the Korean race, justify his own oppressive rule as his dead father’s yuhun (will), and encourage the people’s imagination of yŏngsaeng (immortality) as a way to heal their pain and grief suffered as a result of famine. Particularly in the 1990s, Kim Jong Il stressed this political religion by urging the people to read and discuss state-sanctioned history. The North Korean state’s ideological constructions-such as Kimilsungism, Kimjongilism, and the Juche idea of self-reliance-display features commonly associated with religion. Scholars in North Korean studies have ignored the roles played by the North Korean people’s imaginations of immortality, encouraged by historical narratives, and their emotions, caused by religious visions, during the great famine and economic difficulties in the 1990s. Previous studies often described this historical writing-or what my dissertation explores as the fictionalized biography of Kim Il Sung, the father, and Kim Jong Il, the son-as propaganda for the authoritarian regime while underestimating the religious quality of the propaganda (and more specifically its roots in Judeo-Christian biblical narrative). Focusing on North Korean historical narratives-produced and circulated under Kim Jong Il’s supervision-this study sheds light on the relationships among the idea of divine authority, the functions and purposes of historical narrative, and the people’s emotions expressed in North Korea’s historical writing. Abstract This dissertation explores how Kim Jong Il, the supreme leader of North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea DPRK) from 1994 to 2011, established his legitimacy based on constructs of his late father, Kim Il Sung’s, divine authority at the turn of the twentieth century.
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