Changing Frontiers and Invisible Politics in Northeast Asia: A Conversation with Tessa Morris-Suzuki

This is an edited and updated transcript of a November 2016 interview that was part of the Tianxia Podcast Series (http://www.chinoiresie.info/tessa-morris-suzuki-podcast-diamondmountains/). The conversation transcribed here focuses on a discussion of Tessa MorrisSuzuki's To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred-Year Journey through China and Korea ( 2010), a travelogue based on a trip she took in 2009 to Northeast China, North Korea, and South Korea with the purpose of retracing the 1910 journey of the English adventurer and artist Emily Georgiana Kemp. We discuss the book in relation to the momentous transformations that have occurred over the long twentieth century in the areas visited by Kemp, and to the ways in which grassroots movements and new forms of survival politics are remaking Northeast Asia today.