THE KOREAN WAVE
EXPLORASIAN ANNUAL PROGRAM
"The Korean Wave: Racial Imaginings, Erotic Fantasies, and Marketing Strategies in the Transnational Flows of Korean Popular Culture" -Lecture
Eun-Young Jung, Independent Scholar
The Korean Wave is the term now widely used for the rapid spread of Korean popular culture overseas since the late 1990s and has become a part of the global cultural lexicon in recent years. Initiated by the explosion of television dramas, the Korean Wave became a massive transnational cultural craze that includes pop music, films, variety television shows, online games, animation and comics, fashion and cosmetics, language, cuisine, and... lifestyles. As the specifics of local reception and responses to the Korean Wave have not been uniform and the phases in its development have been continuously evolving in many parts of the world, the Korean Wave has become not only a focus for discussing issues in the global cultural market economy but also an important site for understanding dimensions of contemporary political, social, and cultural dynamics—how Korea is presenting itself to the world.
While each individual product and regional variation deserves equal attention, my focus for today’s talk is on Korean pop music, simply known as K-pop internationally, and its presence both in the conventional media and the internet/social media, in the U.S. since late 2000s. By examining musical and visual characteristics of K-pop and the K-pop industry’s marketing strategies, I will discuss K-pop’s series of attempts to negotiate and package racial and sexual identities and how they have fallen into the entanglements of American’s popular imagination of Asia as a racial and sexual commodity. I will focus on three male acts (solo singer Rain and the two boys bands, Super Junior and BIGBANG) and three female acts (solo singer BoA and the two girls groups, Wonder Girls and Girls’ Generation), who have attempted to garner their biggest success not by offering new musical styles but by negotiating and repackaging their Asian male and female sexualities in attempts to play to the realities--and fantasies--of the U.S. mainstream pop market between 2008-2015. In addition, I will briefly discuss the case of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” phenomenon in 2012 as its comical portrayal of the Asian male and sexualized Asian females played to and revealed America’s familiar and comfortable stereotypes of Asians. In my conclusion, I will situate American responses in the larger context of those in other parts of Asia where the Korean Wave has had relatively greater impact.
Date and Time
Thursday Mar 9, 2017
7:00 PM - 8:00 PM EST
Thursday March 9, 2017
From 7 pm to 8 pm
Location
Heritage Room
Shriver Center
701 E Spring St
Oxford, OH 45056
Fees/Admission
Free and open to the public
Contact Information
| 513.529.65.18 Center for American and World Cultures | Global Initiatives
Miami University |
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