The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global

Description

Since the late 1990s South Korea has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational popular culture - the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history. Why popular (or not)? Why now? What does it mean socially, culturally and politically in a global context? This edited collection considers the Korean Wave in a global digital age and addresses the social, cultural and political implications in their complexity and paradox within the contexts of global inequalities and uneven power structures. The emerging consequences at multiple levels - both macro structures and micro processes that influence media production, distribution, representation and consumption - deserve to be analyzed and explored fully in an increasingly global media environment. This book argues for the Korean Wave's double capacity in the creation of new and complex spaces of identity that are both enabling and disabling cultural diversity in a digital cosmopolitan world. The Korean Wave combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in an up-to-date and accessible volume ideal for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Media and Communications, Cultural Studies, Korean Studies and Asian Studies. Cover The Korean Wave Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures and tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction: Korean media in a digital cosmopolitan world Part I Power and politics of the global 1 Soft power and the Korean Wave 2 Korean Wave and inter-Asian referencing 3 Reconfiguring media and empire Part II Popular media and digital mobile culture 4 Korean Wave pop culture in the global Internet age: why popular? Why now? 5 For the eyes of North Koreans? Politics of money and class in Boys Over Flowers 6 K-pop female idols in the West: racial imaginations and erotic fantasies 7 Negotiating identity and power in transnational cultural consumption: Korean American youths and the Korean Wave 8 Digitization and online cultures of the Korean Wave: “East Asian” virtual community in Europe 9 Hybridization of Korean popular culture: films and online gaming 10 K-pop dance trackers and cover dancers: global cosmopolitanization and local spatialization Part III Perspectives inside/outside 11 Cultural policy and the Korean Wave: from national culture to transnational consumerism 12 Re-worlding culture?: YouTube as a K-pop interlocutor 13 The Korean Wave as a cultural epistemic 14 The Korean Wave and “global culture” Index