The Turn to " Bad Koreans " : Transforming Televisual Ethnicity (original) (raw)
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Television & New Media, 2017
This essay examines Korean television shows that feature foreigners encountering Korean society. A recent example, Non Summit, presents a series of formal “summits,” borrowing the format of an international strategic meeting. The show enables Koreans to consider issues involving cultural differences, racial discrimination, and national hospitality, particularly related to immigrants. Indeed, Korean TV shows that focus on foreigners living in Korea are increasingly popular, which surely reflects changes in the Korean racial imagination along with the increased number of immigrants entering Korea in recent years. Nevertheless, despite their stated purpose of encouraging Korea to be a more harmonious multicultural society, programs like Non Summit seem to reproduce racialized colonialism in the context of contemporary global capitalism, particularly through their selections of participants and their efforts to paper over revealed cultural tensions.
Ghost in the Kitchen: Multiracial Korean Americans (Re)Defining Cultural Authenticity
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This scholarly essay explores some techniques that multiracial Korean Americans employ to trouble traditional notions of cultural authenticity as markers for racial/ethnic identity construction. I position multiracial individuals as foils to the common assumptions that cultural authenticity requires “native” lived experience, “full bloodedness”, or a particular level of linguistic competency, in favor of cultural competency, analyzing the web community, HalfKorean.com. The site is a U.S.-based community of multiracial Korean Americans, where narrations of food and Korean motherwork play roles in many elements of the site, and in different ways work to reinforce new and adaptable forms of authenticity. Paying particular attention to the ways that cultural knowledge on the individual level becomes a marker for shaping community, I position Korean motherwork and household practices as vehicles of analysis. These embodied cultural practices inform community building practices, becoming ...
When Korean Wave Flows Back: The Ethnic Face of Hallyu in Korean Television Audition Programs
Post 45 Hallyu Project Cluster, 2023
This paper examines the conceptualization of hallyu [Korean Wave] in two Korean television audition programs, Super Star K and Witaehan Tansaeng [The Great Birth], in early 2010s South Korea. While hallyu has been a transnational movement exporting Korean cultural products to a global audience, few studies have paid attention to the domestic consumption of hallyu within Korean society in terms of the ethnic and racial discourse of South Korea. To this end, this essay navigates early 2010s audition programs that strongly promoted the nationalist pride in hallyu business, especially in their selection process of potential candidates of next K-pop stars as exemplary figures of Korean culture targeting a global market. As a result, these globalizing projects, in their attempt to claim global terrain, tend to include a variety of “non-Korean” subjects and social minorities, such as foreign nationals, Korean diaspora, and multiethnic Koreans. Ironically, these “non-Korean” subjects play an important role to critically reveal the discriminatory nature of hallyu discourse in South Korea against the original intention of the audition programs. This paper, in this context, argues hallyu, as a “wave,” is not a one-sided exportation of Korean culture, but a contact zone creating racial tensions and social anxieties within South Korean society. This paper investigates the cases of how hallyu challenges the hegemonic nationalist discourse and racism of Koreans, when it ironically empowers marginal subjects in the name of the Korean dream throughout the cases of South Korean television audition programs in the early 2010s.
Branding Korea: Food, Cosmopolitanism, and Nationalism on Korean Television
Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, 2021
Due to the significance of national images in global politics and trade, nations have implemented various methods to brand themselves in positive ways. Korea has used media to brand itself as aspirational and cosmopolitan. Consequently, there has been a proliferation of Korean television programs featuring foreign nationals engaging with and praising Korean culture. I analyze a popular television program entitled Mom's Touch to examine the intersections of nation-branding, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism. I argue that the program adapts discourses of cosmopolitanism to brand Korea as aspirational and cosmopolitan. The nationalist agenda that touts "Korean-ness" as an aspirational value, and the cosmopolitan ideology of global community-building may appear antithetical. However, these seemingly contradictory agendas converge to promote "Brand Korea." I suggest that cosmopolitanism, when co-opted into nation-branding strategies, become the discourse through which to discriminate against foreign nationals who are deemed as detriments to the nation's brand.
Talking Hospitality and Televising Ethno-national Boundaries in Contemporary Korea
Television & New Media, 2018
This essay examines Korean television shows that feature foreigners encountering Korean society. A recent example, Non Summit, presents a series of formal “summits,” borrowing the format of an international strategic meeting. The show enables Koreans to consider issues involving cultural differences, racial discrimination, and national hospitality, particularly related to immigrants. Indeed, Korean TV shows that focus on foreigners living in Korea are increasingly popular, which surely reflects changes in the Korean racial imagination along with the increased number of immigrants entering Korea in recent years. Nevertheless, despite their stated purpose of encouraging Korea to be a more harmonious multicultural society, programs like Non Summit seem to reproduce racialized colonialism in the context of contemporary global capitalism, particularly through their selections of participants and their efforts to paper over revealed cultural tensions.
Appetite, 2019
It has been suggested that the linkages among the sensory, memorial and social aspects of culinary symbolism for transnationals are pronounced by particular food preparations. By using direct evidence, the present investigation tests this postulate by seeking to understand the connectivity of kimchi to Korean-American identity and if so, how this functions above and below the surface. Five focus groups were conducted comprised of 35 Korean-American adults. The research was designed around a grounded theory approach with an open-ended grand tour question: How does kimchi affect your sense of identity? Seven themes were uncovered: Recreating Memories-Collectivity, Connectivity and Family; Affirmation of Family Structure; Kimchi Is Love; Territorial Space; Acquired Taste; Cheating Memories-Shame and Sadness; and Female Kitchen Agency and Power Relations. Kimchi has held on through space and time to provide a shared sense of connectivity to the Korean-American informants, perhaps more intensely and more democratically than in Korea, their ethic homeland. Reported kimchi taste acquisition followed a trajectory from aversion to familiarity to longing. The re-negotiation of kimchi's ethno-space in America has led to feelings of shame, guilt and sadness to some. Concessions have been made. Manufactured kimchi provided a common generic bridge to the trans-Korean-American community. However, the move away from home-prepared kimchi has taken a toll on family's historic and structural connectivity, emotions, the deliverance of cultural capital and has affected the distribution of household agency.
Media, Culture & Society, 2015
Contextualizing the rise in white mixed-race celebrities and foreign entertainers from the perspective of the globalization of Korean popular culture, this article aims to look at how Korean media appropriates whiteness as a marker of global Koreanness. Specifically, the article utilizes Daniel Henney, a white mixed-race actor and celebrity who was born to a Korean adoptee mother and an Irish-American father, as an anchoring text. Analyzing how Henney’s image as upper-class, intelligent, and cosmopolitan constructs what whiteness means to Koreans, the study asserts that Henney’s (cosmopolitan) whiteness is not a mere marker of race, but a neoliberal articulation of a particular mode of Koreanness. This study not only participates in a dialog with the current scholarship of mixed-race studies in media/communication but also links the recent racial politics in contemporary Korean media to the larger ideological implications of racial globalization.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
Latin America was, and still is, the most “Far West” (with a question mark in “West”) region for South Koreans. There have been no significant sociocultural exchanges/encounters between Latin America and South Korea that could evoke a “collective memory.” The wide void of knowledge about Latin America has been easily filled by the global cultural powerhouse that is U.S. media. In this context, the salience of Latin America(ns) in the Korean media productions since 2010 deserves more scholarly attention to examine the images and cultural identities of Latin America(ns). This article examines the two travel-entertainment shows that have most impacted on Koreans’ understanding of Latin America(ns): Youth Over Flowers (2014) filmed in Peru and Welcome, First Time in Korea? (2017) with Mexican travelers.
Race, Ethnicity, and Nation in Selected Contemporary South Korean Television Genres
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Communication, 2022
The myth of a "single ethnic nation" has long held sway in South Korean society. A recent trend of global migration since the 1980s, however, has caused this powerful myth to become outdated, with a shift toward imagining a new national identity as a global and multicultural Korea. This shift has been largely associated with Korean media culture, which is fitting because media do not simply reflect but, rather, simultaneously construct and reproduce reality.