Seo-Young Chu is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Her lecture “Utopias Misplaced: The Cost of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics to North Korea” was given as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities, a series organized in conjunction with the Yale College seminar “Utopia” taught by John Rogers, Professor of English.
This undergraduate seminar presented perspectives on utopian fictions. The lecture takes up the question of Western culture’s penchant for dystopian narratives and the imaginative sources for many of those narratives. Relating what she calls “dystopian poetics” to Masahiro Mori’s 1970 essay on the “uncanny valley,” a concept Mori uses to describe how we relate to humanoid artifacts on a spectrum of human likeness, Chu positions North Korea’s totalitarian government firmly within the uncanny or “eerie” valley, a position also occupied by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. According to Mori, artifacts that fit into this category are met with revulsion by humans.
Chu is critical of the all too easy and irresponsible appropriation of the dystopia of everyday life in North Korea for entertainment purposes, as in the recent James Bond film Die Another Day. She ends with examples of how the dystopian poetics of North Korea can be “outsourced in an ethical manner.” She argues that David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas and the satirical works of former North Koreans in exile represent ethical and properly critical engagements with dystopian poetics.