NARRATIVES OF FLIGHT AND IDENTITY: A CULTURAL STUDY OF REFUGEE AND EXILE LITERATURE IN NORTH KOREAN DEFECTOR MEMOIRS

The experiences of displacement, identity issues, and denial of culture are taken in-depth in literature on refugees and exiles. This paper will review three intriguing NK defector memoirs:Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden, The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee, and To Live by Yeonmi Park, as literary works which go beyond the personal memoirs and bring up the issue of state repression, survival, and cultural reintegration. The book examines the mechanics of these narratives as an autobiography and a critique of authoritarian regimes, inherited trauma and the construction of identity in exile via the cultural studies. The experiences Shin Dong-hyuk goes through in a prison camp show the dehumanizing results of institutional violence, whilst the events of Lee and Park go through complex migration, gender violence and self-identification in a foreign land. The memoirs highlight the significance of language, social class (songbun), ideology (Juche), and media control in shaping their previous realities and the challenges they face in transitioning towards capitalist and democratic worlds. With the aid of qualitative textual analysis, this study identifies cultural shock, emotional isolation, and resistance as recurring themes. Although the author acknowledges the constraints of memoir-based writing, such as the potential influence of the commercial publishing industry and the geopolitical context in which such works are produced, the paper contextualizes them within the broader context of refugee and exile narratives. It concludes by reaffirming the pedagogical value of such literature in fostering global solidarity, intercultural awareness, and critical analysis of issues related to displacement, resilience, and human rights in modern literary studies.