“Koreans are White? Art, Nation, and Post-Globalization,” Third Text 27, no. 4 (2013): 510–524. (original) (raw)

Hybridity and the rise of Korean popular culture

2000

Over the past few years, an increasing amount of Korean popular cultural content-including television dramas, movies, pop songs and their associated celebrities-has gained immense popularity in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other East and Southeast Asian countries. 1 News media and trade magazines have recognized the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia by dubbing it the 'Korean wave' (Hallyu or Hanryu in Korean). The Associated Press reported in March 2002: 'Call it "kim chic". All things Korean-from food and music to eyebrow-shaping and shoe styles-are the rage across Asia, where pop culture has long been dominated by Tokyo and Hollywood' (Visser, 2002). According to Hollywood Reporter, 'Korea has transformed itself from an embattled cinematic backwater into the hottest film market in Asia' (Segers, 2000). Yet a few years ago Korean popular culture did not have such export capacity, and was not even critically acclaimed by scholars. For example, The Oxford History of World Cinema, published in 1996, is alleged to have covered 'every aspect of international film-making' but does not make any reference to Korean cinema, although it pays tribute to Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Chinese and Japanese films (Nowell-Smith, 1996). 2 Korean music was also ignored by researchers, as can be seen in the following comment in World Music: The Rough Guide, published in 1994: 'The country has developed economically at a staggering pace, but in terms of popular music there is nothing to match the remarkable contemporary sounds of Indonesia, Okinawa, or Japan' (Kawakami and Fisher, 1994). The tremendous disparity between such evaluations as noted above, and the recent success of the Korean media, has stimulated

Another Form of Orientalism: Koreans’ Consciousness

During the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, the term nambang 南方 (south), which traditionally simply referred to the cardinal direction, came in Korean minds to refer to Southeast Asia in particular. This change in meaning was associated with the political situation of that period. Nambang came to carry connotations of “undeveloped countries inhabited by indigenous peoples” and evoked a sense of superiority by those who used it. This was a manifestation of another form of Orientalism on the part of Koreans, who were themselves colonized people. Following the way Japan viewed Southeast Asia, the Korean people during the Japanese colonial period regarded the Southeast Asian region as the origin of life with a focus on its abundant natural resources. Unlike the brand of Orientalism of the Western romanticist, which focused on the harsh and violent barbarity of Asia, the image of the Southeast Asian regions as created by Japanese artists tended toward the idyllic and lyrical. Ironically, the people of Korea held imperialistic illusions about Southeast Asia without a tinge of sympathy, although they displayed an infinite sense of affinity toward India. This reveals Koreans’ dual standard of Orientalism mixed with a sense of relative superiority and unease.

The Far Side: Contrasting American and South Korean Cultural Contexts

Asian Social Science, 2010

The cultural contexts of South Korea and the United States are vastly different in many ways. The purpose of this study is to examine the origins of these differences, the implications on the present-day societies, and to try to determine any trends for the future. The differing philosophies upon which each society was founded have caused Korea to become an exceptionally high-context society, while the United States represents a significantly lower-context society. While the GLOBE Study results for these countries confirm much of what we would expect of low-and high-context societies, this study concludes that the results indicate that South Koreans seem to be ready to cast off some of their traditional ways and embrace a more egalitarian society, and that the two cultures' acceptance of similar idealized cultural values will lead to a gradual convergence of even such drastically divergent cultures.