The Korean Wave as the Globalization of South Korean Culture (original) (raw)

From Tradition to Brand: The Making of 'Global' Korean Culture in Millennial South Korea

2015

From Tradition to Brand" examines the construction of a 'global' Korean culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries through the imbrication of cultural production and information technologies. "Global Korea" seeks to transcend the geographic boundaries of the Republic of Korea while simultaneously re-inscribing the limits of ethnonational identity by confusing the temporal distinctions of tradition and ethnic belonging to the geopolitical construct of "Korea." Globalization was introduced in Korea as a nationalist project that continued on the developmental trajectory that had been pursued by the preceding authoritarian regimes, but the movements of South Korean citizens, diaspora Koreans, and non-ethnic-Korean immigrants in and out of the country has created a transnational community of shared social and cultural practices that now constitute the global image of Korean culture. National culture had been a major site of conflict between authoritarian regimes, opposition groups, and the specter of North Korea over the representation of a unified culture and ethnic heritage. However, civil society and economic successes in the 1990s brought about a crisis of identification, while migration flows began to threaten the exclusive correspondence between citizenship and ethnic identity. Studies of contemporary Korea have recognized the nationalist appropriation of globalization, but I argue that the parallel development of national culture and information technology in South Korea has resulted in a deracinated signifier of "Koreanness" that can be performed through the consumption and practice of mediated "Korean" content. Through a study of cultural policies; international literary events; and literature, film, and popular culture texts, I trace the vicissitudes of intervention and opposition by state, institutional, and individual actors involved in the production and transmission of Korean culture. Introduction 1 Faux amies?: Segyehwa and the Cultures of Globalization 1 Segyehwa and "Korea for the World" 3 Chapter Abstracts 6 One. 12 The Culture of Development and the Development of Culture Globalization vs. Segyehwa 15 "The First Opening" and Culture in the Colonial Period 18 Cultural Policy and the Codification of Culture in the Republic of Korea (1948-1991) 21 Global Culture and Trade in the Neoliberal Global Order 23

The Korean Wave: Retrospect and prospect: Introduction

International Journal of Communication, 2017

The Korean Wave (hallyu in Korean) marks a historical point and celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2017. The Korean Wave primarily started with a few well-made television dramas that were popular in East Asia, and the local cultural industries have advanced several cultural forms, including K-pop and digital games, which have gradually penetrated global markets. This Special Section focuses on the origin of the Korean Wave, and the articles emphasize either theoretical challenges in hallyu studies or empirical cases of hallyu in various areas of the world. The primary purpose of this Special Section is to explore the history of the Korean Wave as a catalyst of regional and global change by analyzing the evolution, structure, mechanisms, and strategies employed by the music, television, film, digital games, and animation industries in the global markets and their shifting relationships with the state. As the foundational basis for the articles in this Special Section, our goal in thi...

Popular Culture and Nation-Building: A Consideration of the Rise of Korean Wave

In South Korea, popular culture serves as a form of modernity and has developed separately from (or in a dialectical relationship to) the state-culture, which was shaped by military dictatorship during postwar economic development. The military regime impacted the field of popular culture through the late 1980s with direct censorship in full swing. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, the ways in which the authoritarian government directly controlled trends in popular culture were no longer possible. Instead, the public committee, although still under the influence of governmental authority, came to be responsible for inspecting cultural products. The gradual marketization of popular culture has seen the rise of the Korean Wave, a global phenomenon that refers to the increasing popularity of Korean culture since the 1990s. In this way, popular culture in South Korea may be considered a field in which the government attempted to suppress the collective desires of ordinary people to further a political agenda. However, the attempt to mobilize the will of the people was not successful, and ironically, precipitated a democratic culture that has paved the way toward consumerism. We recognize the ambiguous contribution of popular culture to democratization in the contemporary history of South Korea-particularly the unevenness of popular culture in the postwar world system, which has brought about the rise of the Korean Wave. The uneven development of the culture industry allowed the Korean entertainment business to gain "primitive accumulation" by taking advantage of geographical differences between cultural importing countries and cultural exporting countries. My argument contends that popular culture in Korea is not only the effect of modernization, but also an affirmative response to capitalism. The culture industry produces cultural commodities, the reception and consumption of which are not merely passive on the part of audiences worldwide.

[On This Topic] Transnationality of Popular Culture in the Korean Wave

Korea Journal, 2020

Korean popular culture and its digital technologies are everywhere. From Japan and China in East Asia, the U.S. and Canada in North America, and to Chile, Argentina, and Brazil in Latin America, many global fans currently enjoy Korean television dramas, films, popular music (K-pop), and digital games. Once small and peripheral, Korea has now emerged as one of the most significant non-Western hubs for the production and circulation of transnational popular culture and digital technologies. Taking on non-Western local forms, Korean cultural and digital creations have rapidly become global sensations, as is especially illustrated by the music group BTS’s worldwide success towards the end of the 2010s and the early 2020s. Korea’s export of its domestic cultural goods and services to foreign countries has increased exponentially by as much as 44.1 times, from US$188.9 million in 1998 to US$8.3 billion by 2018 (KOCCA 2019). Over the past 20 years, the major characteristics of Hallyu have ...

The Korean Wave: The Seoul of Asia

Over the past decade, Korean popular culture has spread infectiously throughout the world. The term, "Korean wave," has been used to describe this rising popularity of Korean popular culture. The Korean wave exploded in the media across the world generating a ripple effect. The Korean government took full advantage of this national phenomenon and began aiding Korean media industries in exporting Korean pop culture. This global expansion has contributed to enhancing South Korea's national image and its economy and has been seen as a tool for public diplomacy. This paper analyzed the Korean wave and its implications for cultural influence on neighboring countries. Furthermore, this study explored how national identity impacts framing processes related to media coverage and public response.

The Korean Wave and the Impasse of Theory

South Korean popular culture has achieved startling success across much of the globe during the past decade. The first transnational form of popular culture that is not the legacy of an imperial project, the efforts to understand the significance of the “Korean wave” have been hampered by dominant scholarly approaches in the humanities that are not capable of grasping both its emergence and its appeal. This article argues that a key reason for the appeal of South Korean television and film is the fact that they explore the clash between tradition and modernity. South Korean media resonates with peoples across the world who are living out the conflicts between tradition and modernity and are thus eager for models for negotiating the competing demands of the two. Contemporary theory by contrast is a phenomenon of post-industrial society, where intellectuals have become wholly alienated from tradition, leaving them incapable of reconstructing and inhabiting the standpoints of the pre-modern past. Theory is the favored instrument to criticize the post-traditional society from which it emerges, but it cannot explain how a popular culture that is more traditional than that of the West could achieve global success. Furthermore, it cannot account for the economic and technological conditions behind the production of this transnational popular culture: the meteoric rise of South Korea itself from dire poverty to the ranks of the world’s advanced economies. This article underscores the need to pursue lines of thought that can grasp the significance of South Korea in relation to global culture.

Transnational Proximity of the Korean Wave in the Global Cultural Sphere

International Journal of Communication, 2023

This article analyzes several distinctive Hallyu contents to determine whether "transnational proximity" based on similar sociocultural experiences, including social inequality, youth culture, and fascinating choreography in the late-stage capitalist society, instead of traditional cultural proximity, works as a major frame in understanding the global popularity of the Korean Wave. Here I articulate whether transnational proximity works as a new theoretical framework for explaining the nascent flow of Korean popular culture in the global cultural sphere.