Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema

Description

In Tourist Distractions Youngmin Choe uses hallyu (Korean-wave) cinema as a lens to examine the relationships among tourism and travel, economics, politics, and history in contemporary East Asia. Focusing on films born of transnational collaboration and its networks, Choe shows how the integration of the tourist imaginary into hallyu cinema points to the region's evolving transnational politics and the ways Korea negotiates its colonial and Cold War past with East Asia's neoliberal present. Hallyu cinema's popularity has inspired scores of international tourists to visit hallyu movie sets, filming sites, and theme parks. This tourism helps ease regional political differences; reimagine South Korea's relationships with North Korea, China, and Japan; and blur the lines between history, memory, affect, and consumerism. It also provides distractions from state-sponsored narratives and forges new emotional and economic bonds that foster community and cooperation throughout East Asia. By attending to the tourist imaginary at work in hallyu cinema, Choe helps us to better understand the complexities, anxieties, and tensions of East Asia's new affective economy as well as Korea's shifting culture industry, its relation to its past, and its role in a rapidly changing region. Cover ......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction. Distracted Attractions......Page 14 Part I. Intimacy......Page 42 1. Feeling Together: Pornography and Travel in Kazoku Cinema and Asako in Ruby Shoes......Page 44 2. Affective Sites: Hur Jin-ho’s April Snow and One Fine Spring Day......Page 72 Part II. Amity......Page 100 3. Provisional Feelings: The Making of Musa......Page 102 4. Affective Palimpsests: Sudden Showers from Hwang Sun-wŏn’s “Sonagi” to Kwak Jae-yong and Andrew Lau’s Daisy......Page 125 Part III. Remembrance......Page 154 5. Postmemory DMZ: Joint Security Area, Yesterday, and 2009: Lost Memories......Page 156 6. Transient Monuments: Commemorating and Memorializing in Taegukgi Korean War Film Tourism......Page 179 Conclusion. K-hallyu: The Commodity Speaks in KangChul-woo’s Romantic Island, Bae Yong-joon’s A Journey in Search of Korea’s Beauty, So Ji-sub’s Road, and Choi Ji-woo’s if......Page 210 Notes......Page 218 Bibliography......Page 242 B......Page 254 C......Page 255 F......Page 256 H......Page 257 K......Page 258 L......Page 259 N......Page 260 P......Page 261 S......Page 262 T......Page 263 X......Page 264 Z......Page 265