David C Oh | Syracuse University (original) (raw)

Books by David C Oh

University of Washington Press, 2024

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Combining critical race studies with cultural production studies, Navigating White News: Asian Am... more Combining critical race studies with cultural production studies, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work is the only academic book to examine the ways that racial identification and activation matters in their understanding of news. This adds to the existing literature on race and the sociology of news by examining intra-racial differences in the ways they navigate and understand White newsrooms. Employing in-depth interviews with twenty Asian American journalists who are actively working in large and small newsrooms across the United States, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work argues that Asian American reporters for whom racial identities are important questioned what counted as news, questioned the implicitly White perspective of objectivity, and actively worked toward providing more complex, substantive coverage of Asian American communities. For Asian American reporters for whom racial identity was not meaningful, they were more invested in existing professional norms. Regardless, all journalists understood that news is a predominantly and culturally White institution.

From the web page: "Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global asp... more From the web page: "Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship.

This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism,” a more nuanced translation of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others; and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats."

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asi... more Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian Americans in movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Aloha. The purpose of this book is to apply the concept of “whitewashing” in stories that privilege White identities at the expense of Asian/American stories and characters. To understand whitewashing across various contexts, the book analyzes films produced in Hollywood, Asian American independent production, and US-China co-productions. Through the analysis, the book examines the ways in which whitewashing matters in the project of Whiteness and White racial hegemony. The book contributes to contemporary understanding of mediated representations of race by theorizing whitewashing, contributing to studies of Whiteness in media studies, and producing a counter-imagination of Asian/American representation in Asian-centered stories.

Available at: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/whitewashing-the-movies/9781978808621

Diasporic Identifications looks at the relationship between second-generation Korean Americans an... more Diasporic Identifications looks at the relationship between second-generation Korean Americans and their uses and interpretations of Korean films and popular culture. The book combines intrapersonal processes of identification with their social identities to understand how they use Korean popular culture to define “authenticity” and to construct inter-group and intragroup difference and hierarchy. The book also examines the ways social identities intersect with intrapersonal identification within Korean American youth communities to shape interpretation of Korean films. Finally, the book includes new findings on the ways second-generation Korean Americans construct intragroup difference as well as identity positions within Korean American youth communities. Overall, the manuscript is a comprehensive examination of second-generation Korean American ethnic identity, reception of transnational media, and social uses of transnational media.

Available at: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498508810/Second-Generation-Korean-Americans-and-Transnational-Media-Diasporic-Identifications

Papers by David C Oh

Korean Pop Culture Beyond Asia: Race and Reception, 2024

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024

The derogatory label “Koreaboo,” used to stigmatize Korean popular culture fans, suggests Korean ... more The derogatory label “Koreaboo,” used to stigmatize Korean popular culture fans, suggests Korean media's movements are treated as a contaminant rather than a welcome presence. In this research project, I conducted focus group research and analyses of Reddit threads to understand the ways women fans of color in this study interpret and navigate taste hierarchies that mock women's interests in celebrities and texts from a racialized Asian nation. Korean popular culture fans of color reject “Koreaboo” for themselves, but they project the label onto “bad” White fans, who are perceived as having inappropriate fannish interests that deviate from popularly held standards of intercultural and interracial fan interest. The self-disciplining within fandom distances itself from the Western patriarchal gaze by re-directing its focus. Even when fans of color seek Korean media to escape White hegemony and heteronormative patriarchy, they internalize and react to its gaze in their fan practice.

Situations, 2024

The purpose of this paper is to theorize cultural appropriation using a critical perspective that... more The purpose of this paper is to theorize cultural appropriation using a critical perspective that centers structural inequity and uneven global power by examining the case of South Korean media. This paper argues that cultural appropriation is a particular form of intercultural borrowing that relies on structural inequities of power, whereby a more powerful culture takes from a less powerful culture in such a way that it causes structural and representational harm to the borrowed culture. To clarify cultural appropriation as a particular form of cultural borrowing, I provide a typology of different forms of cultural borrowing before positing six criteria of cultural appropriation in order to challenge and problematize binary notions of borrowing as appropriative or appreciative. This shifts the understanding of cultural appropriation toward one that is multifaceted and complicated by different relationships of power.

Transnationalizing Critical Intercultural Communication, 2023

For more than a century, Korea has been positioned as an inferior subject in the Japanese (post)c... more For more than a century, Korea has been positioned as an inferior subject in the Japanese (post)colonial imagination (Fujitani, 2011), but Korea has grown in its economic, political, and cultural influence, which has produced surging anti-Korean sen- timent in Japan (Iwabuchi, 2017). This chapter examines the intersection of these col- liding forces at the site of NiziU, an all-Japanese idol group collaboratively produced by Japanese and Korean entertainment companies. Because of NiziU’s Korean influences, many online Japanese-language users have expressed their resentments against Korea. Our analysis reveals that a postcolonial binary discourse of “us” versus “them” was articulated in reader comments to NiziU news articles. Users essentialized, trivialized, and demonized Korea/ns, and they presented Japan as a nation and a people as an aggrieved victim. At the same time, a discourse of hope was projected onto NiziU as a possible agent for cross-national reconciliation and change.

Co-authored with Min Wha Han

The Routledge Handbook of Ethnicity and Race in Communication, 2023

This chapter argues that Greg Pak’s Totally Awesome Hulk, Agents of Atlas, and New Agents of Atla... more This chapter argues that Greg Pak’s Totally Awesome Hulk, Agents of Atlas, and New Agents of Atlas construct Asian American identity through a “transpacific cultural repertoire.” A transpacific cultural repertoire demonstrates three qualities: (1) an assertion of racial and ethnic identities within the diaspora that are locally and transnationally informed, (2) a grounding in US Americanness as diasporic texts, and (3) ambivalence that is produced from its creation in a White racial hegemonic system, in a predominantly White comics industry, and for a primarily White imagined audience. While doing so, the series puts forward a specific diasporic identity that is syncretically built with US and Asian cultures as building blocks. The moves, while largely counter-hegemonic, are not perfectly so as they center the Asian American man as the leader, counter stereotypes through rejection rather than reimagination, and understand racism at the interpersonal level. Despite the flaws, the texts allowed Asian Americans to see themselves by centering Asian American lives and imagining ourselves as heroes.

Journal of International & Intercultural Communication, 2023

Controversy followed news of an altercation in a Seoul bar between a group of women and men; this... more Controversy followed news of an altercation in a Seoul bar between a group of women and men; this was later dubbed the “Isu Station incident.” Cellphone video complicated the women’s account, providing discursive space to air men’s grievances and to discipline recent feminist challenges. The YouTube-distributed video and comments advanced an argument of “enlightened sexism” in which users argued for gender equality while demonizing feminism and claiming reverse sexism. Drawing on hegemonic masculine discourses in South Korea, they created an affective, androcentric, and misogynistic space in which they construct themselves as idealized, tolerant victims of feminist excess.

Asian Journal of Communication, 2023

On 2 January 2022, Michelle Li, a local anchor in St. Louis, played a video on Twitter of herself... more On 2 January 2022, Michelle Li, a local anchor in St. Louis, played a video on Twitter of herself listening stoically to an irritated caller, who complained that Li was being ‘very Asian’ for mentioning that her family ate ‘dumpling soup’ on New Year’s Day. She claimed that a White person talking about White foods would be fired. The call and Li’s response resonated among Asian Americans and prompted a viral hashtag, #VeryAsian. The essay argues that users engaged in earnest accounts of their pride and lack of shame in pan-ethnic racial belonging as well as their ethnic heritage cultures. Notably, this meant eschewing memes, a common feature of Twitter discourse, and the racial humor of signifyin’, a feature of Black Twitter. As a networked counter-public, the posts were affirmative articulations of pride rather than explicit anti-racist critique. Even when anger was mobilized and anti-Asian hate was named, the systems or people that produce it were abstracted, demonstrating the liminality of Asian American experience and the context collapse of Twitter.

Communication, Culture, and Critique, 2022

This article uses the discursive construction of “Asian privilege” as a vehicle to think through ... more This article uses the discursive construction of “Asian privilege” as a vehicle to think through what constitutes racial privilege. For racial privilege to exist three conditions are required: (1) structural control; (2) racial invisibility to hide power; and (3) direct benefits of a structural racist system. For Asian Americans, the accrued “benefits” in some areas of social life, what we call contextual advantages are indirect, based on the shape-shifting of White supremacy, not Asian American self-determination. This is not, however, to excuse or deny some Asian Americans’ cooperation with White supremacy, settler colonialism, and U.S. empire, but to note that hegemonic usefulness to White supremacy is not equivalent to racial privilege.

Communication, Culture, & Critique, 2022

This article introduces the special forum on representations and transnational reception of Squid... more This article introduces the special forum on representations and transnational reception of Squid Game. The purpose of the forum is to draw together two groups of scholars into dialogue. The first are Korea experts in communication and cognate fields, who consider the politics of representation in the show against the backdrop of neoliberal capitalist precarity, and the second are scholars of audience reception, who point to the ways Squid Game’s overseas reception is marked by power—hegemonic power that reifies dominant ideological meanings at the site of reception and resistive power for marginalized groups at the site of reception, who produce Squid Game-related paratexts to imagine inter-racial, affective connection.

Text & Performance Quarterly, 2022

White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of... more White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counter-hegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest “white-expat-fans” to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with K-pop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.

International Journal of Communication, 2022

The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White... more The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White and Western sources as well as the role that journalists' race, story type, and interview type have in the selection of news sources. Furthermore, this study examines whether such sourcing biases exist across commercial and public networks, namely ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. Relying on a critical media effects approach, we drew connections between indexing theory and critical race and postcolonial studies to conduct a content analysis of more than 200 news stories and more than 600 sources in 2019 and 2020. The findings reveal significantly more sources from Western countries than non-Western countries in the coverage of international news stories with some variance with reporters, story type, and network type. Implications of the disproportionate presence of Western sources are further discussed.

Text & Performance Quarterly, 2022

White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski's Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of... more White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski's Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counterhegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest "white-expat-fans" to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with Kpop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2022

Through in-depth interviews, this study explored the voices of Asian American journalists who fac... more Through in-depth interviews, this study explored the voices of Asian American journalists who faced unprecedented stresses due to the racist discourse of Asian Americans as carriers of disease during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Socialized to de-emphasize their vulnerabilities in their professional work, Asian American reporters generally claimed they did not experience racist harms, but further probing revealed indirect harms. Women reporters discussed internalized harms such as elevated anxiety and fear, whereas men reporters referenced only external harms such as racial microaggressions. Women reporters also manifested greater self-reflexivity. The importance of analyzing race and gender in White masculine newsrooms is discussed.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022

Nike Japan's distribution of a commercial included a message of superficial multiculturalism pres... more Nike Japan's distribution of a commercial included a message of superficial multiculturalism presented through the narratives of three Japanese girls-ethnic Japanese, "hafu," and zainichi-who overcome bullying and discrimination through their shared love of football (soccer). The ad demonstrated a glocalized production to fit with the "You Can't Stop Us" global ad campaign of Nike, a transnational shoe and athletic apparel company. Thus, the ad reflects globalization from above. In response, some Japanese viewers expressed their anger at the ad to voice their grassroots resistance, reflecting globalization from below. The resistance was not against Nike for its transnational exploitation but for its alleged hypocrisy. Most substantially, the resistance was directed against generalized Koreans. Thus, the article argues that globalization from below is not necessarily, or perhaps not even usually counter-hegemonic or anti-transnational capitalism. Instead, grassroots activism takes advantage of moments to process and produce existing ideological meanings.

Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Globalization, 2021

N/A

University of Washington Press, 2024

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Combining critical race studies with cultural production studies, Navigating White News: Asian Am... more Combining critical race studies with cultural production studies, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work is the only academic book to examine the ways that racial identification and activation matters in their understanding of news. This adds to the existing literature on race and the sociology of news by examining intra-racial differences in the ways they navigate and understand White newsrooms. Employing in-depth interviews with twenty Asian American journalists who are actively working in large and small newsrooms across the United States, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work argues that Asian American reporters for whom racial identities are important questioned what counted as news, questioned the implicitly White perspective of objectivity, and actively worked toward providing more complex, substantive coverage of Asian American communities. For Asian American reporters for whom racial identity was not meaningful, they were more invested in existing professional norms. Regardless, all journalists understood that news is a predominantly and culturally White institution.

From the web page: "Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global asp... more From the web page: "Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship.

This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism,” a more nuanced translation of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others; and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats."

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asi... more Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian Americans in movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Aloha. The purpose of this book is to apply the concept of “whitewashing” in stories that privilege White identities at the expense of Asian/American stories and characters. To understand whitewashing across various contexts, the book analyzes films produced in Hollywood, Asian American independent production, and US-China co-productions. Through the analysis, the book examines the ways in which whitewashing matters in the project of Whiteness and White racial hegemony. The book contributes to contemporary understanding of mediated representations of race by theorizing whitewashing, contributing to studies of Whiteness in media studies, and producing a counter-imagination of Asian/American representation in Asian-centered stories.

Available at: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/whitewashing-the-movies/9781978808621

Diasporic Identifications looks at the relationship between second-generation Korean Americans an... more Diasporic Identifications looks at the relationship between second-generation Korean Americans and their uses and interpretations of Korean films and popular culture. The book combines intrapersonal processes of identification with their social identities to understand how they use Korean popular culture to define “authenticity” and to construct inter-group and intragroup difference and hierarchy. The book also examines the ways social identities intersect with intrapersonal identification within Korean American youth communities to shape interpretation of Korean films. Finally, the book includes new findings on the ways second-generation Korean Americans construct intragroup difference as well as identity positions within Korean American youth communities. Overall, the manuscript is a comprehensive examination of second-generation Korean American ethnic identity, reception of transnational media, and social uses of transnational media.

Available at: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498508810/Second-Generation-Korean-Americans-and-Transnational-Media-Diasporic-Identifications

Korean Pop Culture Beyond Asia: Race and Reception, 2024

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024

The derogatory label “Koreaboo,” used to stigmatize Korean popular culture fans, suggests Korean ... more The derogatory label “Koreaboo,” used to stigmatize Korean popular culture fans, suggests Korean media's movements are treated as a contaminant rather than a welcome presence. In this research project, I conducted focus group research and analyses of Reddit threads to understand the ways women fans of color in this study interpret and navigate taste hierarchies that mock women's interests in celebrities and texts from a racialized Asian nation. Korean popular culture fans of color reject “Koreaboo” for themselves, but they project the label onto “bad” White fans, who are perceived as having inappropriate fannish interests that deviate from popularly held standards of intercultural and interracial fan interest. The self-disciplining within fandom distances itself from the Western patriarchal gaze by re-directing its focus. Even when fans of color seek Korean media to escape White hegemony and heteronormative patriarchy, they internalize and react to its gaze in their fan practice.

Situations, 2024

The purpose of this paper is to theorize cultural appropriation using a critical perspective that... more The purpose of this paper is to theorize cultural appropriation using a critical perspective that centers structural inequity and uneven global power by examining the case of South Korean media. This paper argues that cultural appropriation is a particular form of intercultural borrowing that relies on structural inequities of power, whereby a more powerful culture takes from a less powerful culture in such a way that it causes structural and representational harm to the borrowed culture. To clarify cultural appropriation as a particular form of cultural borrowing, I provide a typology of different forms of cultural borrowing before positing six criteria of cultural appropriation in order to challenge and problematize binary notions of borrowing as appropriative or appreciative. This shifts the understanding of cultural appropriation toward one that is multifaceted and complicated by different relationships of power.

Transnationalizing Critical Intercultural Communication, 2023

For more than a century, Korea has been positioned as an inferior subject in the Japanese (post)c... more For more than a century, Korea has been positioned as an inferior subject in the Japanese (post)colonial imagination (Fujitani, 2011), but Korea has grown in its economic, political, and cultural influence, which has produced surging anti-Korean sen- timent in Japan (Iwabuchi, 2017). This chapter examines the intersection of these col- liding forces at the site of NiziU, an all-Japanese idol group collaboratively produced by Japanese and Korean entertainment companies. Because of NiziU’s Korean influences, many online Japanese-language users have expressed their resentments against Korea. Our analysis reveals that a postcolonial binary discourse of “us” versus “them” was articulated in reader comments to NiziU news articles. Users essentialized, trivialized, and demonized Korea/ns, and they presented Japan as a nation and a people as an aggrieved victim. At the same time, a discourse of hope was projected onto NiziU as a possible agent for cross-national reconciliation and change.

Co-authored with Min Wha Han

The Routledge Handbook of Ethnicity and Race in Communication, 2023

This chapter argues that Greg Pak’s Totally Awesome Hulk, Agents of Atlas, and New Agents of Atla... more This chapter argues that Greg Pak’s Totally Awesome Hulk, Agents of Atlas, and New Agents of Atlas construct Asian American identity through a “transpacific cultural repertoire.” A transpacific cultural repertoire demonstrates three qualities: (1) an assertion of racial and ethnic identities within the diaspora that are locally and transnationally informed, (2) a grounding in US Americanness as diasporic texts, and (3) ambivalence that is produced from its creation in a White racial hegemonic system, in a predominantly White comics industry, and for a primarily White imagined audience. While doing so, the series puts forward a specific diasporic identity that is syncretically built with US and Asian cultures as building blocks. The moves, while largely counter-hegemonic, are not perfectly so as they center the Asian American man as the leader, counter stereotypes through rejection rather than reimagination, and understand racism at the interpersonal level. Despite the flaws, the texts allowed Asian Americans to see themselves by centering Asian American lives and imagining ourselves as heroes.

Journal of International & Intercultural Communication, 2023

Controversy followed news of an altercation in a Seoul bar between a group of women and men; this... more Controversy followed news of an altercation in a Seoul bar between a group of women and men; this was later dubbed the “Isu Station incident.” Cellphone video complicated the women’s account, providing discursive space to air men’s grievances and to discipline recent feminist challenges. The YouTube-distributed video and comments advanced an argument of “enlightened sexism” in which users argued for gender equality while demonizing feminism and claiming reverse sexism. Drawing on hegemonic masculine discourses in South Korea, they created an affective, androcentric, and misogynistic space in which they construct themselves as idealized, tolerant victims of feminist excess.

Asian Journal of Communication, 2023

On 2 January 2022, Michelle Li, a local anchor in St. Louis, played a video on Twitter of herself... more On 2 January 2022, Michelle Li, a local anchor in St. Louis, played a video on Twitter of herself listening stoically to an irritated caller, who complained that Li was being ‘very Asian’ for mentioning that her family ate ‘dumpling soup’ on New Year’s Day. She claimed that a White person talking about White foods would be fired. The call and Li’s response resonated among Asian Americans and prompted a viral hashtag, #VeryAsian. The essay argues that users engaged in earnest accounts of their pride and lack of shame in pan-ethnic racial belonging as well as their ethnic heritage cultures. Notably, this meant eschewing memes, a common feature of Twitter discourse, and the racial humor of signifyin’, a feature of Black Twitter. As a networked counter-public, the posts were affirmative articulations of pride rather than explicit anti-racist critique. Even when anger was mobilized and anti-Asian hate was named, the systems or people that produce it were abstracted, demonstrating the liminality of Asian American experience and the context collapse of Twitter.

Communication, Culture, and Critique, 2022

This article uses the discursive construction of “Asian privilege” as a vehicle to think through ... more This article uses the discursive construction of “Asian privilege” as a vehicle to think through what constitutes racial privilege. For racial privilege to exist three conditions are required: (1) structural control; (2) racial invisibility to hide power; and (3) direct benefits of a structural racist system. For Asian Americans, the accrued “benefits” in some areas of social life, what we call contextual advantages are indirect, based on the shape-shifting of White supremacy, not Asian American self-determination. This is not, however, to excuse or deny some Asian Americans’ cooperation with White supremacy, settler colonialism, and U.S. empire, but to note that hegemonic usefulness to White supremacy is not equivalent to racial privilege.

Communication, Culture, & Critique, 2022

This article introduces the special forum on representations and transnational reception of Squid... more This article introduces the special forum on representations and transnational reception of Squid Game. The purpose of the forum is to draw together two groups of scholars into dialogue. The first are Korea experts in communication and cognate fields, who consider the politics of representation in the show against the backdrop of neoliberal capitalist precarity, and the second are scholars of audience reception, who point to the ways Squid Game’s overseas reception is marked by power—hegemonic power that reifies dominant ideological meanings at the site of reception and resistive power for marginalized groups at the site of reception, who produce Squid Game-related paratexts to imagine inter-racial, affective connection.

Text & Performance Quarterly, 2022

White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of... more White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counter-hegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest “white-expat-fans” to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with K-pop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.

International Journal of Communication, 2022

The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White... more The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White and Western sources as well as the role that journalists' race, story type, and interview type have in the selection of news sources. Furthermore, this study examines whether such sourcing biases exist across commercial and public networks, namely ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. Relying on a critical media effects approach, we drew connections between indexing theory and critical race and postcolonial studies to conduct a content analysis of more than 200 news stories and more than 600 sources in 2019 and 2020. The findings reveal significantly more sources from Western countries than non-Western countries in the coverage of international news stories with some variance with reporters, story type, and network type. Implications of the disproportionate presence of Western sources are further discussed.

Text & Performance Quarterly, 2022

White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski's Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of... more White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski's Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counterhegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest "white-expat-fans" to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with Kpop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2022

Through in-depth interviews, this study explored the voices of Asian American journalists who fac... more Through in-depth interviews, this study explored the voices of Asian American journalists who faced unprecedented stresses due to the racist discourse of Asian Americans as carriers of disease during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Socialized to de-emphasize their vulnerabilities in their professional work, Asian American reporters generally claimed they did not experience racist harms, but further probing revealed indirect harms. Women reporters discussed internalized harms such as elevated anxiety and fear, whereas men reporters referenced only external harms such as racial microaggressions. Women reporters also manifested greater self-reflexivity. The importance of analyzing race and gender in White masculine newsrooms is discussed.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022

Nike Japan's distribution of a commercial included a message of superficial multiculturalism pres... more Nike Japan's distribution of a commercial included a message of superficial multiculturalism presented through the narratives of three Japanese girls-ethnic Japanese, "hafu," and zainichi-who overcome bullying and discrimination through their shared love of football (soccer). The ad demonstrated a glocalized production to fit with the "You Can't Stop Us" global ad campaign of Nike, a transnational shoe and athletic apparel company. Thus, the ad reflects globalization from above. In response, some Japanese viewers expressed their anger at the ad to voice their grassroots resistance, reflecting globalization from below. The resistance was not against Nike for its transnational exploitation but for its alleged hypocrisy. Most substantially, the resistance was directed against generalized Koreans. Thus, the article argues that globalization from below is not necessarily, or perhaps not even usually counter-hegemonic or anti-transnational capitalism. Instead, grassroots activism takes advantage of moments to process and produce existing ideological meanings.

Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Globalization, 2021

N/A

Journal of Applied Communication Research, 2021

The essay is a reflection on my experience of isolation on campus as my body was marked as a carr... more The essay is a reflection on my experience of isolation on campus as my body was marked as a carrier of disease. Locating the essay in the literature about fears of Asian Americans as an alien, yellow peril threat and on the work on microaggressions in academia, I understand my colleagues' avoidance as rooted in racialized fears of COVID-19. This demonstrates the problems of colorblind racism and the limits of allyship. Through connecting the BLM protests and COVID-19, the shared risk to Black and Asian American bodies becomes highly salient, and it points to an opportunity for Black-Asian solidarity that can present a substantive challenge to White supremacy.

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2020

The episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt titled “Kimmy Goes to a Play” is widely understood a... more The episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt titled “Kimmy Goes to a Play” is widely understood as Tina Fey’s unapologetic response to anti-racist criticism of the show’s first season. By satirically vilifying Asian American protesters as intolerant of Titus, a Black queer man, for performing a one-person play about his former life as a geisha, the show hides problems of White American appropriation and advances the racial politics of the model minority stereotype. Using Titus as a stand-in for herself as a show creator, Fey argues for her right to unapologetically culturally appropriate in her racial humor. As such, the message of the episode is consistent with “White feminism,” which advances superficial, postracial anti- racism as an ideological shield while wielding it as a conservative rhetorical weapon to demand White women’s access to the benefits of White men’s privilege. This helps reveal the contradictions of White feminism that allows its adherents to believe themselves to be progressive while opting out of progressive anti-racism.

Television & New Media, 2020

Airing on Joongang Tongyang Broadcasting Company (JTBC), a South Korean television network, Non S... more Airing on Joongang Tongyang Broadcasting Company (JTBC), a South Korean television network, Non Summit represents multiculturalism on the small screen through light-hearted, loosely structured debates between eleven men from different nations that is moderated by three Korean hosts. This study approaches the show's representation of multinational, homosocial masculine friendship and commentary as a text that advances the goals of damunhwa, a locally specific articulation of multiculturalism. Non Summit does this by constructing a normative ideal of a cosmopolitan citizen who espouses liberal progressive values and appreciation for superficial multicultural difference. The ideal, which the show associates with the West, is occasionally ruptured through fleeting moments when non-Western members challenge Western superiority and Koreanness, however, the ruptures are patched through the show's policing of difference through shared, heteronormative masculinity and homosocial friendship.

Korean diaspora across the world: Homeland in history, memory, imagination, media, and reality, 2019

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Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 2019

This study builds upon a nascent body of scholarship that examines the transnational movement of ... more This study builds upon a nascent body of scholarship that examines the transnational movement of White Westerners. The purpose is to complicate the literature on multiculturalism and globalization by examining the “reverse” migration from, rather than to, the West. Specifically, it examines White migrants’ mobilization of online social protest through a Facebook group that came together in response to a report broadcast on South Korea’s Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC) that was interpreted as racist and xenophobic. In response, White residents in Korea organized dissent and engaged in symbolic protest that served a collective ego function, creating community around a perceived sense of shared oppression as racialized minorities. To do so, they drew on global hierarchies, White supremacy, and heteronormativity to challenge their lack of control over their own representations in the local culture.

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 2019

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