| Abstract | North Korea's anti-American state power has operated in individuals' everyday practices by focusing on its post-war militant nationalism. Existing studies have neglected an aspect of North Korea's nationalist power that has been neither necessarily top-down nor violent, but rather productive and diffusive in people's everyday lives. While the regime's anti-American mobilization has come from above, people's politics of hatred, patriotism, and emotion have been reproduced from below. Along this line, I examine the historical and social changes in North Korea's militant nationalism and people's ways of life through a comparison between two periods: from the 1950s through the 1980s and from the 1990s through the present. I focus on how the state's anti-American power was legitimated by people's solid micro-fascism from the 1950s through the 1980s, and how it has been contested and recreated through both change and persistence in people's micro-fascism from the 1990s through the present.
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