Shine Choi
schoi05@qub.ac.uk
Can’t Do Without: Graphic Bodily Translations in Cross-Cultural Dialogues
DAVIES: You know, I can imagine some people listening to the story that might be
thinking, well, this is certainly very unfortunate but an American journalist
captured in North Korea has to know that sooner or later they’re going to get to
come home, that they’re going to be a pawn in some diplomatic game but they’re
not going to get sent to a labor camp....
Ms. LAURA LING: Well, I did try to maintain hope throughout most of that time.
And, as you said, you know, I didn’t know if they would in fact send us to a camp.
But North Korea is also one of the most unpredictable countries in the world with
a history of duplicity and everybody you speak to is very vehement about their,
speaks very vehemently about their anger toward the United States. 1
The predictable ways North Korea is considered a basket case in international politics as
exemplified in the above interview exchange around a journalist’s capture in North Korea highlight
the importance of ‘extraordinary’ encounters between ‘ordinary’ people. While how the event is
extraordinary and/or ordinary is debatable, the above dialogue is a predictable exchange between
compatriots that cannot even recognise the most basic element of the event, i.e. irresponsible way
the journalist went about doing her job reporting about the North Korean human rights situation.
This refusal to be responsible has required (re)productions of North Korea as ‘unpredictable’,
‘vehement’, ‘angry’, ‘anti-American’, and extractive at every opportunity. This paper begins from the
premise that ‘North Korea’ in exchanges such as the one above is a product of encounters across
cultures. I would like to juxtapose this statement with what Rey Chow says about predictability and
seeing in her discussion of Area Studies in the United States,
As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of
targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and
omnipresence of the sovereign “self”/ “eye” – the “I” – that is the United
States, the other will have no choice but remain just that – a target whose
existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber.2
Articulated in the context of this paper, we could say that ‘North Korea’ in our dialogue is an object
produced and reduced by our attempts to solve international problems. By focusing on meetings
between ‘North Korea’ and ‘I’, I want to attend to dialogic issues and more specifically to translation
involved in the global (that is to say, intercultural) contacts as a way of writing near ‘the inaccessible
blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text [within the European enclosure]’.3 It is my
argument that dialogic issues are crucial in relations between cultures where the continued life of
the bodies that violently come in contact is possible only by remaining in circulation, i.e. through
1
National Public Radio, ‘Ling Sisters Recount Laura’s Capture in North Korea’ Fresh Air 19 May 2010:
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=126613763 (accessed: 19 July 2010), italics
added.
2
Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 41.
3
Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1988), 294.
1
transmissibility (that is a continual and incomplete process of mediation, circulation and creation).
With the help of Trinh Minh-ha and Rey Chow who study culture in its multifaceted form and
meaning, I unpack this argument in three sections. I begin by delineating how we can understand
international relations as inter-cultural relations, which leads to an elaboration on how dialogues in
intercultural relations inescapably require transactions of translation. Lastly, I illustrate these points
by examining two graphic novels about travel experiences to North Korea.
Dialogic Nature of International/Intercultural Problems
Scholars of International Relations (IR) attuned to postcolonial and feminist theories treat
international politics largely as a problem of difference rooted in intersecting historical processes
that create hierarchies along gender, race and class axes.4 These writers argue that concepts such as
modernisation, development, human rights protection and international security, to name a few,
see ‘sameness’ and ‘integration’ as solutions in the face of difference. These frameworks, especially
when roused within their conventions, account for otherness by insisting that others (the problem
states and agents) conform to some pre-existing standards (in ‘our’ image) rather than creating a
more dialogical space in which learning by and transformation of both (the others and self) can take
place. For Inayatullah and Blaney, this insistence is ‘a commitment to uniformity’ that treats
difference as ‘a fall from God’s grace, a deviation from God’s purpose, and a degeneration of God’s
original perfection’.5 In short, an idealised image of self understood as an unchanging sacred being
that is raised above contestation means difference is effectively denied. These scholars argue that
this denial is especially troubling in the context of international politics since it is this context (i.e. in
an intercultural context) where recognition of plurality, ‘multiple worlds’ or ‘heterology’ is so
urgently and violently needed.6 Put more strongly, reality is constructed through dialogic processes
between two or more but never by one, and thus no matter how much power is exerted to control
and master over another to create a singular reality and view, the singularisation of multiples is
impossible. As Trinh Minh-ha puts it, ‘[O]ne needs to face what is strange in one.’7 By pointing to the
4
See Christine Sylvester, ‘Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the “Third
World”’, Third World Quarterly 20, no.4 (1999): 703-721; Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair eds., Power,
Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (London: Routledge, 2002); Lily
H.M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desires between Asia and the West (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Anne Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of
Force in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Anna Agathangelou and Lily H.M.
Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (London: Routledge, 2009); Albert J. Paolini,
Navigating Modernity: Postcolonialism, Identity and International Relations (London: Lynne Rienner, 1999);
Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London:
Routledge, 2004). The latter two are not explicit about how gender intersects with issues of class and race in
international politics. Agathangelou and Ling add sexuality and nationality to this list, Agathangelou and Ling,
Transforming World Politics, 88.
5
Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference, 49.
6
These terms emphasise the irreducibility of differences. To be more precise, while in the notion of
‘multiple worlds’ Agantangelou and Ling, for instance, explicitly recognise that multiplicity is about ‘multiple
relations, ways of being, and traditions of seeing and doing passed to us across generations’ (i.e. about
relationality), they foreground ‘social ontologies’ in their articulation of these irreducible differences,
Agathangelou and Ling, Transforming World Politics, 1, 5. Also, Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations
and the Problem of Difference, 16-7.
7
Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Digital Film Event (London: Routledge), 199.
2
stranger (the ‘not-one’ but not the ‘two’ either) in one, Trinh accentuates how difference exists
within the same culture as it exists between cultures.
When we attend to international problems as primarily constructions resulting from
intercultural encounters where differences are over-determined by a self-other hierarchy, we see
that quests for knowledge are profoundly dialogic in nature regardless of whether this is
acknowledged or not. This means authoritative judgments –mainstream IR’s diagnostic
pronouncements and their remedies for a social, political or economic problem (involving an
elsewhere) – are knowledge projects that fail to account for how the position from which views are
offered affects how they are received and what is done with them. By pointing to how the character
of an analytical attention changes depending on its position, I am talking about how identity is
inescapable in world(ing)politics. But this attention to identity is not a return to the tired argument
that only insiders should be able to determine the projected course for that community. Rather, it is
a critical way of taking into account how ‘[e]very spectator mediates a text to his or her own
reality.’8 In repeating this banal statement, Trinh recognises the violence in repressing mediation (by
the standardising techniques to create ‘facts’ and ‘literal reality’) or when mediation is liberally at
play by self but is denied its full play for some others.9 In other words, identity specifies what, how,
or why one makes observations and constructs reality. More importantly, translation stresses the
importance of speaking/seeing attuned to and not immobilised by this politics of mediation.10 To
continue working towards change, we need to continue working towards an understanding and
indeed satisfaction (rather than repression or denial) of our need to know. Another way of
interpreting Trinh’s point is to say that knowledge and politics are not in direct logical or
proportional relation (i.e. more knowledge, better for politics) but they are undeniably in need of
and are always in relation to each other. Thus, knowing for political ends is not an easy,
straightforward endeavour of possessing comprehensive overview or even knowing in a more
complicated nuanced way.
Translations in Intercultural Encounters
While the postcolonial-feminist IR scholars mentioned in the beginning do not explicitly
frame the problem of difference in terms of translation, their critique of mainstream theoretical
frameworks serves to highlight the need for cultural translation. Denying difference in issues of
international relations is a way of denying the need for translation between different worlds.
However, by omitting to theorise translative transactions involved in these encounters, these IR
scholars do not explicitly talk about what a dialogic encounter has to negotiate. This means, as
valuable as their attention to plurality and multiplicity in power-laden global politics, these scholars
8
Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (London:
Routledge), 93.
9
Trinh uses an exchange between a woman viewer and a woman filmmaker as an example wherein
the viewer assumes that the Western feminist notion of ‘women’s power’ as universal, unmediated, and thus
self-evident. By criticising the film in question for failing to promote ‘women’s power’, the viewer denies the
other’s creative mediation and plurality of meaning inherent in symbols including the idea-words ‘women’ and
‘power’. Ibid.
10
Trinh elaborates on how this process of mediation is to be negotiated by way of the idea
‘inappropriated/ed other’, see Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Inappropriate/d Artificiality’ with Marina Grzinic in The
Digital Film Event, 125-32.
3
do not elucidate the micropolitics of negotiating ’international’. By framing intercultural encounters
as an issue of translation (rather than denial, exclusion, domination or even assimilation), I am
referring to the necessary and power-laden process of mediation that must accompany meetings
wherein ‘who can speak how’ is inescapably over-determined at present. As Rey Chow points out,
‘inequality inherent to the binary structure of observer/observed that is classical anthropology’s
operating premise and that has become the way we approach the West’s “others”’ means this
asymmetry of privileges is inescapable in the contemporary global context. 11 To mitigate and indeed
transform this inequality, what requires negotiation is mediation itself as a process, which means
negotiating the mediated nature of intervention, mitigation, and transformation. It is for this end
(wherein our complicity with global hierarchy is taken seriously) that Rey Chow argues that
intercultural contacts must be about negotiations with what is presently in front: ‘literal’,
‘superficial’, ‘coeval’. 12 In other words, if what is at stake is bringing something new into the relation
(i.e. change) in a world that is always already steeped in self-other/West-East/seer-seen hierarchies,
seeking out something completely new or returning to a tradition that is supposedly free and
uncontaminated by power simply does not make sense. They do not make sense because concepts
such as authenticity, essence, culture-as-units, and differences-as-absolutes that privilege ‘a radical
break’ or ‘a return to the past’ require searches for something or somebody else in which we place
our hopes. In short, they are ways an imagined other (rather than what is in front and on the
surface) comes to be seen as the key to a better understanding, a truer representation, a more
desirable situation, i.e. a resolution. What Chow is pointing to is that this privileging of ‘depth’,
‘authenticity’ and indeed ‘meaning’ allows perpetual postponement of facing differences, facing the
other that is encountered.13
Translation allows facing what (or who) is in front by enabling the continued circulation of
representations to ensure that bodies in the encounter remain in currency and through this process
allow ‘newness’ to enter the circulation. Put in the language of translation, the ‘original’ is used to
create something that is neither new nor the same as the original, which makes translation a recreation, or creating anew in a different medium and for a different end. 14 This means departing
from the original and through this movement – which, those with experience in translation would
know, requires a constant departure from and return to the ‘original text’ – creating and at the same
time working with an ‘in-betweeness’15 (an inbetween space, an inbetween term16). In other words,
because translating the ‘original’ requires changing ‘the form’ to express ‘the content’, it is a
process that makes the distinction between content and form, original and secondary, ‘over here’
and ‘over there’ impossible. As a result, we have changed the terms of mediation and have in effect
entered a different realm. As Trinh says, ‘Translation leads us…to the fictive nature of language and
11
Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177.
12
Ibid. 184-6, 194.
13
Ibid., 198-201.
14
See for instance, Maria Tymoczko, Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (Manchester: St.
Jerome, 2007); Kathleen Davis, Deconstruction and Translation: Translation Theories Explained (Manchester:
St. Jerome, 2001); Susan Bassnett and Harish Triveli eds., Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice
(London: Routledge, 1999); Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre, Changing the Terms: Translating in the
Postcolonial Era (Ontario: University of Ottawa, 2000).
15
Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red, 112-3.
16
Chow calls this ‘the Third Term’, Chow, Primitive Passions, 192-5.
4
image’.17 In short, a ‘good’ cultural translation is not an instance of the authentic, honest or faithful
transfer of meaning, nor is it an instrument that enables a clear, unmuddled communication. To say
that intercultural encounters require translation is to say they must enable many messy, full-contact,
bodily and superficial intercultural encounters to occur.
If indeed cultural translation is centrally about creating anew, and if indeed the necessary
translation requires privileging the transmission process (the form) rather than what is transmitted
in the acts of translation (the content), then we need to conceptualise how survival of what is
encountered is possible that set off this need for translation in the first place. The feminist attention
to ‘body’ is significant for this reason. Judith Butler conceptualises ‘body’ to gain meaning, identity
and differentiating contours through reiterative, relational, constitutive practices. Butler in effect
points to the gap between the body and the meaning endowed to it and its acts: while the body is
sustained by language, recognition and convention, it is not subsumed and contained by them. In
short, body is ‘outside’ language, but this is not an absolute ‘outside’ and thus ‘can only be thought –
when it can – in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders.’18 What is even more
important in Butler’s conceptualisation of body for the contexts here is how she considers speaking
(and by extension cultural and political acts) as bodily acts. Butler points to a lack of control and
mastery in interaction, and body here becomes ‘a sign of unknowingness’ because the body from
which speech is uttered is never fully and consciously directing its action.19 In short, an act always
says more or says differently than it means to say. Discussing performativity and body in the context
of cultural translation is to attend to how translation as a survival technique is about ensuring the
survival of bodies that come in contact; moreover, it is to recognise that practices of translation are
acts of survival that are bodily activities. In the genre I loosely call graphic novel/travelogue that is
examined in the section that follows, I examine how dialogues (speech) and translations are bodily
acts and how the process through which bodies gain identities is inescapably violent.
Translation, Intercultural Dialogue in Graphic Novel/Travelogue
Graphic novels – and most contemporary cultural productions in the novelistic/storytelling
tradition – dabble with specificity and bodily acts and realities relatively well in the way they create
narratives about ‘big’ ‘serious’ events from specific, located, embodied positions. Here I have in
mind works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Joe Sacco’s Palestine.20 In
Edward Said’s introductory essay to Sacco’s Palestine, Said talks about the ‘havoc’ comics do to ‘the
logic of a+b+c+d’ and ‘what the teacher expected or what a subject like history demanded.’21 Said
thinks the genre has ‘unique capacity for delivering a kind of surreal world as animated and in its
own way as arrestingly violent as a poet’s vision of things’ and stresses how comics’ alternative
terms of representation enable alternative terms of meeting between Palestinians and outside
observers. 22 By creating representations that are unforgettable and arresting, Said argues that we
17
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cinema Interval (London: Routledge, 1999), 61.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 8.
19
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 10.
20
Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon Books,
1986); Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007); Joe Sacco, Palestine
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2003).
21
Edward W. Said, ‘Homage to Joe Sacco,’ in Joe Sacco, Palestine, ii.
22
Ibid., iv.
18
5
allow lives that are often ‘reduced to their nuisance value’ to gain their rightful political lives.23 To
examine how these tricky negotiations with ‘alternative representation’, ‘alternative terms of
intercultural meeting’ and ‘gaining (value/life)’ unfurl in the case of North Korea, I turn to two
graphic novels depicting North Korea from the authors’ personal experiences as observers in North
Korea. Guy Delisle’s graphic travelogue Pyongyang: Journey in North Korea is based on the author’s
two-month stay in Pyongyang while supervising an animation project for a French company in the
studios of North Korea’s SEK (Scientific Educational Korea).24 Oh Young-jin’s Pyongyang Project: Oh
Yong-shik’s Wishy-washy Accounts of North Korea is also based on Oh’s experience as a construction
overseer for the KEDO (the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization) in North Korea for a
year and six months.25 Looking at these two productions together, it is interesting that two radically
different constructions of North Korea and in effect of their encounters with North Korea(ns)
emerge. By examining how these constructions come to form with a special attention to the
mediation and more specifically, the translative transactions in them, I demonstrate how coeval
survival of the bodies through cultural translation is hard but possible, and more importantly, how
change (newness) can be brought to form even in the most banal and predictable (re)productions.
As Guy Delisle himself admits in one of his interviews, Pyongyang is about ‘the regime’.26
Thus the graphic novel spends most of its time directing our attention to the ‘strange’ ways the
North Korean regime infringes on individual freedom and governs by propaganda. I focus on
sequences where Delisle is out and about with his interpreters and guide, the main North Korean
figures in the story, pointing, poking, and questioning his North Korean colleagues about things that
strike him as strange or troubling.27 The first of these back-and-forth exchanges begins with a walk
Delisle takes from his office to his hotel with Mr. Sin, his first interpreter. Delisle notices and asks
about the women painting a circle of rocks arranged under a tree. Mr. Sin describes the women as
volunteers. This puzzles Delisle. As this same answer is repeated for his questions in their other
excursions (women sweeping the highway and a man cutting grass), Delisle starts to ridicule the
answer. The mockery is especially visible on Delisle’s face (chin up, eyes closed) in the last of this
recurring sequence when he rhetorically asks, ‘Uh…A guy trimming grass with a sickle along the
23
Ibid., v.
The title of the Korean edition is Pyongyang: A French Cartoonist’s Crash-bang Journey in North Korea
wherein Delisle is identified as a French writer, which would cause some confusion in readers who are familiar
with Delisle’s French- Canadian background. This short-cut taken in the Korean edition highlights the tricky
territory of translation (and Apter would add, ‘transnation’), Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New
Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) .
25
KEDO is an intergovernmental organisation set up as part of the 1995 Agreed Framework ‘under
which North Korea agreed to freeze and ultimately dismantle its nuclear program’ on the condition that
alternative source of energy would be provided including two Light Water Reactors be built. The operations of
KEDO to meet these energy requirements have ceased since 2006, KEDO: Promoting Peace and Stability in the
Korea Peninsula and Beyond: http://www.kedo.org (accessed 20 September 2010).
26
Guy Delisle, interview with Brian Heater. ‘Interview with Guy Delisle, Part 1’, The Daily Cross Hatch
(12 October 2009): http://thedailycrosshatch.com/2009/10/12/interview-guy-delisle-pt-1/ (accessed: 20
August 2010).
27
These three ‘main’ North Korean figures in the story are Mr. Sin (the interpreter), Mr. Choi (the
guide), and another translator that replaces Mr. Sin (no name). While Mr. Sin plays the most prominent role In
Delisle’s story, the three North Koreans are undifferentiated as individuals in the roles and thus at times
referred to at times as ‘the translators’ in this paper.
6
24
highway – would he be volunteering?’28[See figure 1] This sequence ends with the panel where Mr.
Sin gives Delisle a blank stare in response. The absence of dialogue as the two men sit facing each
other (one blank faced, and the other squirming under the stare) sums up the resulting relationship:
impasse.
At the heart of this recurring exchange is the word ‘volunteer’, which is translated in the
Korean edition as ‘jawonbongsa’.29 While the Korean word ‘jawonbongsa’ is literally closer to the
English word, ‘volunteering’ (‘jawon’ means independent will, ‘bongsa’ means service), other words
can also enter this effort at translation such as ‘community service’ or even ‘community-building’
that alternatively stresses the idea of ‘community’ rather than the independent intention behind the
service. Moreover, the conjunction of ‘community service’ and ‘community-building’ is especially
interesting because they conjure up South Korea’s Saemaul Movement that emphasised building a
strong collective mentality through labouring together and labouring together for national economic
development and progress.30 The conjunction of community service and community building in the
Saemaul Movement accentuates how acting in concert for communal benefit makes community
service simultaneously a team-building/mobilisation exercise. I bring in the example from South
Korea not to defend the mandatory public labour in North Korea or its ‘South Korean equivalent’ but
to illustrate how my awareness of the Saemaul Movement interrupted my own reading of Delisle’s
interpretation of these communal activities. It serves the earlier point I made through Trinh that
injection of one’s own reality in reading/spectatorship is something we all do all the time.
Moreover, even in this rudimentary look at the idea and word, ‘volunteer’, we already see that the
meaning of the idea/word in question has several linguistic variants and subtle but significantly
different meanings depending on what the listener or reader can or is willing to understand. Due to
the limits of space, I do not go into the necessary elaborations but we see that by ridiculing these
activities and the idea of volunteering in North Korea, Delisle is excluding not only the functional
value from what he witnesses (i.e. North Korea) but also mobilisation as a component of
volunteering/community service. My argument is that even if these activities are designed to
mobilise and rally the people behind the government (which is what Delisle’s reading wants to
establish so as to make ‘volunteering’ impossible in North Korea), community/team building
component of these activities need not and do not necessarily lead to the exclusion of functionality
from the meaning of these activities. In sum, Delisle’s scepticism of the interpreter’s explanation
points to how for Delisle the control and propagandistic mechanism of these activities cancels out
28
Guy Delisle, Pyongyang: Journey in North Korea, trans. Helge Dascher (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006),
110.
29
Guy Delisle, Pyongyang: A French Cartoonist’s Crash-bang Journey in North Korea, trans. Oh Seungjae (Paju: Munhaksegye-sa, 2004), 57, 99, 110. There are points of contention, like the idea of children doing
‘work’ for ‘fun’ among others, see for instance, p.155-6, 164.
30
A nationalist campaign, Saemaul Movement began in the 1970s under President Park, Chung-Hee in
South Korea that mobilised the then mostly rural South Korean population to participate in beautification and
public building projects in the village level. These were meant to ‘overcome underdevelopment through
collective striving’, Mike Moore, ‘Mobilization and disillusion in rural Korea: the Saemaul Movement in
retrospect’, Pacific Affairs 57, no. 4 (1984-1985), 577-598 at 580. The movement’s heavy reliance on the idea
of a wise leadership suited Park’s dictatorial rule and it is interesting that movement has been recently
revived. Founding ideas– nationalism, development, community/mentality-building – with a ‘global’ emphasis
remains at the centre of the revival. For an overview of its activities and ideology, see the website 21 st Century
Saemaeul Undong Movement (2007): http://www.isvil.net/english/main.php (accessed: 10 August 2010).
7
whatever practical function they serve in the community; however, the interpreter’s translation,
whichever variant it might be, will never exclude functionality. Thus, what we need to recognise is
that efforts to exclude when the exclusion is never complete are behind incommensurable positions.
At this juncture, I want to turn to examine how the North Korean interpreters approach
Delisle as an outsider and a guest. This is to say that while Delisle goes to Pyongyang to get a firsthand experience and check out North Korea(ns) for himself, he cannot escape the mediated nature
of his experience.31 One significant way Delisle’s experience is mediated is through the translative
role his interpreters and guide take that Delisle actively resists. I first illustrate the translative
transaction the North Korean translators pursue and then go on to demonstrate that by resisting,
Delisle, contrarily to what he assumes, does not escape the mediatory role of the translators. My
argument is that the North Korean’s translations come to influence and indeed mediate what Delisle
sees and his rejection of the translation thus becomes a mediating layer that shapes Delisle’s view
and experience of North Korea.
Literal Translations by North Korean Mediators:
Mr. Sin, Mr. Choi and the other (nameless) interpreter act as knowledgeable mediators
between their guest and North Korea wherein they assume the guest must be told how things are in
North Korea. By this act, they simultaneously assume three things: that an authentic North Korea
pre-exists them, that they themselves are the representatives, and that the guest is ignorant or
possibly full of misconceptions. Thus, an elusive ‘real’ North Korea becomes the ‘original text’ while
their explanations, the ‘translation’ and Delisle’s ‘world’, ‘the receiving culture’. This means not only
do the North Korean translators make some assumptions about North Korea (and that they know
‘it’) but they also assume that the receiver – the guest from ‘the capitalist West’ – knows nothing of
value. Illustrative of this positioning is found in the very beginning when Delisle correctly identifies a
picture of Karl Marx in the city:
MR. CHOI, THE GUIDE: You know Marx? Very good.
GUY DELISLE: A bit…doesn’t everybody?
MR. CHOI: Oh no, not many capitalists do. 32
What also pervades in the above dialogic exchange is the assumption that ‘the capitalists’ are a
homogeneous monolithic group that Mr. Choi, as an experienced representative of the anticapitalists world in general and North Korea in particular, can also authoritatively speak about. The
translators see themselves as authoritative mediators in a dichotomously conceptualised
intercultural meeting between rigidly defined and radically separate North Korea (non-capitalist) and
the guest (the capitalist). In short, the North Korean translators assume the mediatory function that
is needed in the encounter is to correct whatever misconceptions an outsider holds, which they
assume to know all about.
31
In the preface to the Korean edition Delisle writes, ‘I wanted to verify on this trip what I had read
about the country and daydreamt about the numerous questions I might ask the people I meet and how open
and free I could be with them.’ Delisle, Pyongyang: A French Cartoonist’s Crash-bang Journey in North Korea,
preface, my translation.
32
Delisle, Pyongyang: Journey to North Korea, 10.
8
Moreover, the North Korean translators assume that this mediatory practice takes the form
of speaking in the guest’s language. Take the example of volunteerism from our earlier discussion
and let us for a moment assume that the word ‘volunteer’ is Mr. Sin’s and therefore a North Korean
translative transaction. It is a word choice that presumes the best translation is the word that most
directly opposes the outsider’s sceptical perception that the North Koreans lack freedom and that
they are mobilised by propaganda, force and fear. To communicate to the guest the preferred
meaning (which is the meaning that corrects Delisle’s scepticism), the translator has chosen the
word in his guest’s language that most directly opposes the guest’s viewpoint. In short, the North
Korean attempts at translation and mediation take translation as a rational process operating in a
neatly ordered world composed of neatly contained units. Translation here begins from the position
that ‘truth’ if presented properly can dispel foreign scepticism, and thus sets transparent
communication as the goal of translation. Assuming one possesses the truth, which makes relaying
and disseminating this truth an ideal in the practice, transparent communication across cultures
becomes the utmost goal of the dialogic exchanges. My point is that this transparent communication
is thought possible by acquiring fluency in foreign language, which I might add is a strife with no end
in sight.
Literal translation, which is at work here treats mediation as a process that enables this
transparent transfer of meaning. Here the original meaning (understood as a monolithic and
uncontestable ‘truth’ that has undergone no putting together, no mediation) is ‘translated’ in a
secondary language (understood as radically separate but with correspondent form with the
original’s language). But is ‘truth’ when understood as interchangeable with insider’s view that relies
on the idea of authenticity a status that can ever be settled? Is transparent communication about
communicating, i.e. achieving a dialogic understanding or is it about squashing out one’s
communication partner like one would of one’s competitor? In short, is transparent communication
a dialogic exchange or a competition for control over meaning? My point is that communicating
one’s world (which is never a clearly delineated ‘world’ to begin with) requires more than finding the
right comparable idea from the latter’s world that corresponds to the meaning one has in mind.
Moreover, in this simplistic understanding of communication, there is an assumption that
communication across cultures is about converting the nonbelievers (i.e. those who disagree) and
making them into one of ‘us’. This is curious given how this us-them dichotomy is a product of the
literal translation the North Koreans practiced. I return later to elaborate on what kind of
‘communication’ if at all is needed, which I argue is better understood as a process of mediation.
In the Face of Mistranslation:
The above analysis of mistranslative transaction would be incomplete if we did not also look
at Delisle’s interpretive hand in the way we enter into the various moments in the transaction. As
the exchange surrounding volunteerism in North Korea illustrates, the interpreters and guide are
seen as unreliable translators and mediators that highlights their ‘real’ function as minders and
propagandists for the regime, which will become clearer momentarily. [See figure 2] As illustrated in
the image of the interpreters and guide in ‘I heart Kim’ t-shirts (reminiscent of the tourists in ‘I heart
NY’ t-shirts) in figure 2, the main North Korean characters are monolithically equivocated with
9
tourists for their rote and naive herd mentality and blind adoration of icons.33 In short, the North
Korean translators have become objects of our imagination that derogates them. My point is that
being seen as minders and propagandists means they in effect become security agents and onedimensional straw figures that are easily summed up for the sole purpose of derogating them.
Moreover, the oppositional matrix Delisle creates of himself and North Korea(ns) is visually realised
by the ‘chinky eyes’ of the Koreans that distinguish them from the Westerners.34 This physical
abstraction coincides with a binary abstraction of the worldviews the two groups supposedly hold,
and together, they serve as markers for two distinct separate cultural groups along national and
ethnic axes. While exaggeration of physical features and visual abstractions are indispensible
components of comics (that often allow comics to do complex things),35 the abstractions of physical
characteristics that coincide with a reductive cultural sketch flatten the North Koreans as a distinctly
separate species. In other words, specific North Koreans (the interpreters and guide Delisle talks
with) and the general North Korea (the place and nameless groups of people Delisle sees) are
monolithically seen as ‘North Korea’, a construction Delisle has created to signify what is unfree,
untrustworthy, and naive.
Delisle’s production of his ‘North Korean friends’36 as propagandists and minders rather
than as guides is analogous to the North Korean translation of reality that Delisle found unconvincing
and false. In other words, the dichotomous characterisation of himself and the North Koreans is
Delisle’s way of supplanting North Korean translation with his own interpretation, which is
analogous to how North Koreans attempted to erase his scepticism by supplanting Delisle’s
viewpoint with their own. It is important at this point to stress that this substitution in interpretation
is inescapably part of not only interpretation/reading/construction of meaning in general but is
inescapable in constructing meaning/reality in intercultural encounters more specifically. Speaking
of this as ‘inevitability of stereotypes’ which are ‘relations conducted around exteriors’,37 Chow
points out their danger in how they ‘insist on boundaries exactly at those points where in reality
there are none.’38 In other words, caricatures create difference according to superficiality that
33
This is just one way North Koreans are constructed in Delisle’s Pyongyang but the construction by
way of a North Korean:tourist analogy is not unsurprising for a narrative working in the travel genre that
privileges the singular independent traveller by contrasting him (it is usually a ‘he’) to the mass, naive tourist.
This is especially an important analogy because of the way it so poignantly reproduces the mindless adoration
of the leadership in North Korea that has widely circulated in mainstream media and scholarship. For examples
see Philip Gourevitch, Letter from Korea, ‘Alone in the Dark: Kim Jong Il plays a canny game with South Korea
and the U.S.’, New Yorker (September 8, 2003):
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/09/08/030908fa_fact4 (accessed 23 September 2010); Andrew
Scobell, ‘Kim Jong Il and North Korea: The Leader and the System’, Strategic Studies Institute (March 2006):
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?PubID=644 (accessed: 23 September 2010).
34
This becomes even more pronounced in North Korean figures that are viewed from a greater
distance such as the airport security officer, building guards, and traffic warden, see Delisle, Pyongyang: A
Journey in North Korea, 2, 11, 56.
35
For a lengthy but interesting discussion on this premise, see Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics:
The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993); Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (Florida:
Poorhouse Press, 1985).
36
Delisle, Pyongyang: A French Cartoonist’s Crash-bang Journey in North Korea, preface, my translation.
For reference to his friendship with North Koreans, see Delisle, interview by Brian Heater.
37
Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press),
57.
38
Richard Dyer in Ibid., 59, original emphases.
10
emerges in the encounter and the arbitrary understanding of the other that results from it.
However, the problem of creation involved in caricatures and stereotypes is not that these are
superficial and are creations (and are not faithful reproductions). Indeed, translation as a concept is
valued for making this process of surface-level substitution explicit not so as to more correctly sum
up difference (i.e. distinguish a ‘good’ stereotype from a ‘bad’ stereotype) but to enable brushes
against the surface to induce change. What I am pointing out in Delisle is that he appears
unconscious of not only the mediated nature of knowing by travelling to a ‘foreign’ place (North
Korea) but is also completely unconscious of the translative mediation necessary in his dialogic
engagements with ‘the natives’. To be brief, Delisle is unaware of how mediated his construction of
North Korea is by his North Korean translators. Moreover, contrarily to the North Korean mediators
who depend on fluency in foreign language to communicate, Delisle refuses to speak any form of
mediatory language in his attempts to have dialogue with the natives. In effect, Delisle erases the
violence inherent in his substitution/interpretation and adds another layer of violence. In a sense
this layer of violence is even more dangerous than the actual substitutive act because it is made
invisible by Delisle’s ‘unconscious’ monolingual interpretation.
My argument so far has been that the violence in Delisle’s construction of North Korea is a
result of the author’s inadequate intercultural skills. To this I would add that it is also symptomatic of
how in the face of mistranslation, Delisle has turned away from the encounter and focused on selfpreservation by turning the experience into a self-satisfying, therapeutic monologue. In other words,
the probing questions about things and persons in North Korea seem more about surviving the
experience of living under a totalitarian regime with self-respect intact, a project that extends to
being able to and succeeding in packaging his experience as something that he (and his readers) can
laugh about. In a way, both – the mistranslative mode of the North Koreans and Delisle’s response to
it – are symptoms of their unwillingness to be changed by the encounter but at the same time
wanting the other to be unsettled and changed by the contact. In this sense Delisle’s Pyongyang is a
story about how everyone remained untransformed by the experience. I think it is important to see
this unwillingness to be transformed as a product of their fixation on surviving the encounter
wherein survival is conceived as remaining unconvinced and unconverted by the other’s
communicative attempts. In other words, we see in Delisle’s Pyongyang how the need to know and
be known in one’s own and absolute terms has led to not change but only reiterations of
problematic intercultural relations and practices. But the all important question remains, what kind
of dialogic engagements are necessary to shift or break away from the cycle of cynicism, fear and
derogatory manoeuvrings? In short, can we imagine how alternative graphic contacts are possible?
In an attempt to answer this question, I turn to Oh Young-jin’s Pyongyang Project.
Dealing with Incommensurable Realities:
Oh Young-jin’s graphic travelogue deploys an ethnographic method of illustrating and
theming to unveiling the ‘real’ North Korea and North Koreans to the readers.39 Ethnography’s place
39
The exclusion of ‘the regime’ in this ‘real North Korea(ns)’ is evidenced in the preface, Oh Young-jin,
Pyongyang Project: Oh Yong-shik’s Wishy-washy Accounts of North Korea (Paju: Changbi, 2007), 6-7. This is
less ambiguously stated in his earlier publication where Oh wrote, ‘I wanted to draw the people not the
ideology or the regime in my comics,’ Oh Young-jin, Ordinary Citizen Oh’s 548-day Stay in North Korea (Seoul:
Gilchatgi Books, 2004), preface, my translation.
11
in Oh’s stories plays with similar assumptions about translation and mediation that is at play Delisle’s
Pyongyang. I first turn to the problems Oh’s ethnographic approach to translation reproduces before
considering how Oh also opens up alternative ways of encountering North Korea(ns).
Commensurability:
Oh uses ethnographic snapshots of North Korea to interpret and explain (i.e. translate)
North Korea for his readers. These ethnographic snapshots are tactics of translation in the sense that
they are composed to be readable to those unfamiliar with what is taken for granted in the manner
of speaking, acting and living in North Korea. In short, North Korea is interpreted using a cultural
matrix that the ‘ethnographer/translator’ brings to bear. What is problematic here is not that Oh
translates North Korea for his readers and does so in ethnographic snapshots but that he relies on
similar assumptions about translation as the North Korean mediators. Translation is understood as
involving a direct transfer of meaning by approximation between cultural systems. A demonstrative
episode is the episode titled ‘Landscape’, which Oh explains is a euphemism for a husband who is ‘a
mere decorative figure’ in the family.40 [See figure3] This explanation, which is part of a larger list of
common terms used to label the husbands who have lost their economic power (and traditional
status as the heads of the family), is provided as an addendum outside the panels and is not part of
the narrative sequence of episode. In this same addendum, we are also told that this change is a
result of the emergence of black markets and the larger economic changes in North Korea.
Incidentally, the word ‘husband’ is an idea/word that does not share the same word in North and
South Korea, which Oh then explains by giving the South Korean equivalent in parenthesis when the
North Korean word occurs in the dialogue box. These addendums and the detail in which the
explanations are offered illustrate that while the episode is ostentatiously about a chance run-in
between Comrade Cho (Oh’s colleague) and Cho’s old friend that Oh witnesses which quickly
develops into a rivalry match, the episode is centrally about translating everyday life in North Korea
in a dense, multifaceted, comic way.41 I would briefly add here that the emphasis in this episode,
which is representative of the book as a whole, is on explaining North Korea not to single out North
Korea critically (e.g. for gender inequality) but to illustrate situations in North Korea as ones we can
make sense of and indeed are familiar with.42 Thus, unlike Delisle’s Pyongyang where radically
separate deviant other(s) are created in both directions by the host and the guest, Oh’s Pyongyang
Project is fixated on resolving differences and making differences commensurable.
But what do these ‘ethnographic facts’ that help us become more informed about North
Korea and make sense of North Korea as a society (as analogous to ours) achieve politically? My
answer is, not much. Oh’s work assumes that if we know more about them (the ordinary ‘real’ North
Koreans), then the present North Korean situation of international isolation, poverty and political
repression could be solved. But my argument is that assuming that the international (‘inter-Korean’)
40
Oh, Pyongyang Project, 55.
We are able to quickly gather impressions in this episode about male rivalry, economic system,
husband-wife relationship, family hierarchy, to name a few, in North Korea.
42
Other episodes where Oh centrally resorts to the idea of commonality include the phenomenon of
‘wang-tta’ in South Korea, a practice of ostracising and bullying in school that has received much media
attention, which Oh explains is also common in the North in the social phenomenon of ‘morajugi’; and the
episode about children’s day celebration in the North, which Oh uses to convey the idea that all parent-child
relationships are alike everywhere. Ibid., 36-37, 58-59.
41
12
problem can be ‘solved’ narrows not only what kind of inter-cultural understanding is possible but
also what kind of political action is necessary. When understanding is equated with being informed
about North Korea rather than, for instance, as intercultural dialogic process that privileges
relationality, politics is subsumed under problem-solving. We come to value knowledge in the form
of information (what do they normally do, why do they generally do them, what could these usually
mean). My argument is that we need to shift away from this fixation on solving North Korea as a
problem that is operating in Oh’s ethnographic/translative efforts. In short, direct translative efforts
in Oh do not help us fray the vicious cycle of objectification problem-solving  reification of
global hierarchy. Moreover, the direct translative efforts in Oh illustrate how the desire to know
and ascertain truth is at the centre of Oh’s project that squarely return us to a realm where the need
for clear communication and correspondence across cultures over-determines where we go
narratively and theoretically. We return to the idea of difference as something that either needs to
be narrowed (overcome) or accepted (succumbed to whether this be to accept being constrained by
difference or making use of it). But to understand cultural differences as things (e.g. coherent
systems as a traceable matrix) is as pointed out earlier through Butler, a failure to understand bodies
as performative in its contours and translation as the bodily, performative, citational process. In
sum, transformation (of the structures, of the processes, of cultures) is again postponed and evaded
even when changing the derogatory way North Korea is represented in mainstream dialogues is at
the heart of the translative transaction.43
What makes Oh interesting however is that in some episodes where translation remains an
indirect ‘theme’, Oh illustrates how the necessary translation in intercultural encounters is not
creation ethnographic snapshots of ‘real’ North Korea but negotiating how we come in relation in
these encounters that changes the terms of dialogic exchange.44
Speaking Humour as a Translative Transaction:
In moments when incommensurable realities become apparent and translative transactions
become necessary, self-deprecating humour plays a major role in Oh. Admittedly, comic relief in
representation can just as easily be put to work to reify or restore the stability of the reality one
began with. However, my argument is that Oh shows us how humour can help and be put to use to
induce a more dialogic encounter by functioning to privilege the particular relation that has arisen
and the body that stands before us. One example takes place on a tour of the (previously black)
market that Oh’s North Korean colleague, Comrade Cho, explains is evidence of North Korean
economic vibrancy.45 Having just woken up from his nap in the car ride to the market, Oh takes on
an uncharacteristically sharp line of questioning and asks, ‘Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that
the economic vibrancy in the market is evidence that the government’s distribution system has
collapsed?’46 Seeing Cho’s defensive posture the question has incited, Oh quickly tries to amend the
situation by joking around to distract his colleague and move both of them away from conflict. [See
43
Again Oh explicitly confesses to this aim in the preface. Ibid., 6-7.
At this point, it might be also appropriate to note that in the episodes that I examine below, the
mediatory role is carried out by Oh Yong-Shik, the fictional alter-ego the author Oh Young-jin.
45
Oh, Pyongyang Project, 27-9.
46
Ibid., 28, my translation.
44
13
figure 4] To his colleague’s challenge that Oh back up his scepticism about the market (and in a
sense enter in a duel), Oh breaks out in sweat and jokes,
Whoa, hold on Director Comrade Cho. You are truly a man of humour! How can
you ask a married man to take responsibility? You’re going to get me in
trouble.... Look at the time! High noon and past the time to stuff our sausages.
Ha Ha. And we still have to look around the marketplace so you can tell us all
the juicy important stories I need to know, eh? 47
Not only does Oh humorously respond, he also appeals to Comrade Cho’s sense of humour. As a
result, the host’s mistranslative mode does not become evidence in support of the diagnosis that
North Korean people live in an exceptionally problematic society nor the solution that the problem
requires a heavy dosage of our kind of freedom. In short, Oh does not try to argue his point and
cancel out his colleague’s position.
The humorous side-stepping of confrontation illustrates another important point, which is
that translation is a bodily act. One way into this argument is to point out that Oh’s humour in
Korean as it might also be obvious in English, is a ‘banal’ play of word (take responsibility, of an
illegitimate child?) that even in Korean does not entirely make sense (stuff our sausages, stuff our
bellies with sausages?). They ‘work’ because they are exaggerations and playfulness that rely not on
the textual coherence or quality but on the distraction that the verbal assuage causes that in turn
allows physical and bodily move to an elsewhere. In short, humour functions here as a social
lubricant. Oh uses humour as a ‘social skill’ to cope in the face of incommensurable truths. Indeed
Comrade Cho looks baffled and mumbles to himself that Oh’s rambling does not quite make sense
but in the midst of the confusion and commotion goes along with Oh’s itinerary. Central here is that
Oh has set the itinerary (the terms of their exchange) anew. This means that while in appearance the
roles (Cho as the guide and Oh as the eager ignorant visitor) and what they do (tour the
marketplace) stay the same, the context of how they fulfil their roles has changed. My point is that
this shift has taken place without conflict, without demolishing the other and in fact through
privileging the body that is present. The episode illustrates how transactions of cultural translation –
the ‘communication’ between the bodies in contact that brush against the surfaces that ensures the
survival of both and simultaneously shifts the terms of engagement and thus brings something ‘new’
– are bodily processes that exceeds ‘verbal’/‘knowing’/’communicative’ exchanges.
In a sense, humour is a way of valuing the relationality one has arrived at that requires
humbling oneself for the sake of diffusing possible escalation of conflict by pre-empting it (e.g. by
exaggerating emotion, performing a persona). This is not to say survival dissipates as a concern but
that this need that turns into an issue of self-preservation in Delisle does not lead Oh to similarly
turn his North Korean colleagues into uncomplicated mechanical agents of state security. By valuing
the bodies that he has come in relation to, and the present moments (rather than a later moment
that will amend the situation by, for instance, writing about the encounter humorously to reaffirm
one’s position over the other), Oh does not see conflicting realities as occasions to mobilise truth
claims around himself to assert against, attack, or suppress the views that contradict his own. In
short, it isn’t another opportunity in the long and tenuous road to convert the other. This has
significant implications on how we conceptualise translation as a mediation process necessary in
47
Ibid., 29, my translation.
14
intercultural encounters that has not been explicit thus far: translation does not necessarily entail
changes in ‘form’, i.e. the movement from ‘the original’ to ‘the translation’ does not require
formal/visible changes. Rather, it is a process where there may be no changes in ‘form’ but at the
same time through mediatory movements (not necessarily to and fro but haphazard bodily, verbal,
nonsensical, exaggerated performative movements) introduces a shift. In other words, humour in
mediation process illustrates how the newness that is introduced could be ‘invisible’ because
cultural translation is not about a production of some new thing or body but is about changing the
terms or the context of bodily contacts.
Confrontation:
However, confrontations are not always side-stepped in Oh’s Pyongyang Project but are also
allowed to escalate and become messy. In the episode on the Arirang Games, Oh and Comrade Cho
turn red in anger in an argument over Oh’s refusal to attend the Games, which Oh calls false, dull
and gimmicky. 48 This argument is followed by two parallel illustrations of how his colleague and Oh
deal with the aftermath of their argument. [See figure 5] The left column of panels stays on Cho who
makes a phone call to complain about Oh but ends up hanging up without complaining while the
wider right-hand column follows Oh as the red anger leaves him and colours the sky out in the
street. In the latter column where Oh walks head down past students who appear to be coming from
the Games, the complicated context of their contest of truths is worked out. The juxtaposition of Oh
and the students helps us see that there are human lives and hopes involved that makes Oh’s
position (that the Games are gimmicky and thus unimportant and uninteresting performances) a
difficult ‘truth’ and perhaps even an unproductive framing from which to engage in dialogue. The
juxtaposition also helps us see that there are organic contexts to Cho’s position (which is not to say
Cho is necessarily or straightforwardly ‘right’) that should make us feel the absence of ‘other’ that
makes Oh ‘wrong’. The argument between Oh and Cho in the episode is meant to show the limits
and costs of striving to convert the other.
However, while no easy resolution for the disagreement over the Arirang Games is offered,
the conflict in the episode is resolved in another way that covers over the careful arrangement of
contexts above. The tension resulting the juxtaposition dissipates when another colleague, Comrade
Kim, comes running after Oh and invites Oh out for a consolatory drink. By turning the disagreement
between Cho and Oh into an issue one can do nothing else about but drink to get over, resignation
becomes a comforting outcome. In short, the failure to communicate when we turn to public and
political issues remains untouched in Oh’s narrative. My concern here is, how do we negotiate the
tricky balance of shifting away from conflict that is practically indistinguishable from a kind of
resignation/nihilism? How do we relate dialogically when words, texts, directness do not perform
their vehicular functions? My response has been to attend to the bodily exchanges in intercultural
encounters that sees verbal exchanges as components of a larger circulation, not of essence or more
48
Ibid., 99-101. According to a promotional material from Koryo Tours, a tour agency, Arirang Games
(also commonly referred to in English as Mass Games) ‘can basically be described as a synchronized socialistrealist spectacular, featuring over 100,000 participants in a 90 minute display of gymnastics, dance, acrobatics,
and dramatic performance, accompanied by music and other effects, all wrapped in a highly politicized
package. Literally no other place on Earth has anything comparable and it has to be seen with your own two
eyes to truly appreciate the scale on display,’ Koryo Tours, email (17 May 2010), original emphases.
15
authentic flow of meaning but of surfaces but in a different form. In short, while Oh helps us begin
thinking about what kind of cultural translations are necessary and possible, reading Oh only helps
us see that a lot more mediation, translation, and messy intercultural bodily meetings still need to
occur.
Conclusion
It has been my argument that understanding cultural differences in absolute terms where
two or more pre-existing units come together rather than differences as becoming what they are by
encounters (i.e. bodies perform their defining and differentiating contours in relation to the other)
lead to ineffectual translative transactions in intercultural encounters. In short, when differences
become problems that need to be ‘solved’ (eradicated, supplanted, narrowed, tolerated, explained),
we lose sight of how coeval survival of the bodies in the encounter could occur that at the same time
brings newness into the relation and the circulation of power. While I agree with Edward Said on the
power of comics to add value and Rey Chow on ‘graphicity’49 to change the terms of encounter (as
well as with the other insights on humour and negotiated mediation articulated by Oh and Trinh
among others), I think it is appropriate to end on yet another of Oh’s efforts to resolve/solve as I
have done in the previous page to dwell on how we know better than to do what we do but we
never seem to learn.
49
Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 62.
16
FIGURES:
Figure 1 Voluntary Impasse
Figure 2 I love Kim
Figure 3 'Landscape' translation
17
Figure 4 Marketplace humour
Figure 5 Red sky thinking
18