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Abstract
This study questions the term ‘East Asia’ by investigating its usage in South Korean mass media and academic discourse about the Korean Wave and by reframing the Korean Wave as a source of new definitions of the cultural geography of East Asia and East Asian sensibilities instead of its current designations as either an empty signifier or a profitable market. Reframing the Korean Wave as a set of seminal iterations of East Asian pop culture includes its multiplicity and historicity, which enables the delineation of the cultural geography of East Asia as neither a unilateral nor fixed topography but rather something that is constantly re-imagined via pan-Asian pop cultures, materialized through actual encounters, and re-invented through shared historic pasts and modernizing desires. Examining East Asian pop culture also helps to illuminate current structures of feeling in East Asia (‘East Asian sensibilities’). The study concludes with suggestions for future collaborative works and theoretical endeavors, which are imperative for the establishment of East Asian pop culture as an object of analysis.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2010. I appreciate Dr. Yvonne Sung-Sheng Chang and Dr. Hyunjung Lee for their comments for this study.
Notes
1. See the special edition about Bandung/Third Worldism of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 3 (2005).
2. In 1997 What is Love All About? became the first foreign highest-rated program, with a 16.6% audience share (Lee, H.-W. 2006, p. 77).
3. This syndrome endows Yong-Jun Bae with a new title, Yonsama, loosely translated in Japanese as Beloved and Respected Yong.
4. According to Y.-H. Shin (2006, p. 15), the grosses for exporting Korean television programs were $13 million in 2000, $19 million in 2001, $28 million in 2002, $42 million in 2003, $71 million in 2004, and more than $100 million (projected) in 2005.
5. In 1995, before the beginning of the Korean Wave, the Korean government established the Cultural Industry Bureau within the Ministry of Culture and Sport and also offered tax breaks for film production in order to entice big local conglomerates (Shim 2006)
6. Several Korean scholars attempt to differentiate media and academic discourse on the Korean Wave. Han Cho (2005) names three perspectives: cultural nationalist, neo-liberal, and post-commercial/post-colonial. In a similar way, K.-H. Lee (2006) groups the discourses into three positions: neo-liberal, cultural nationalist, and culturalist. S.-J. Kim (2009) characterizes research on the Korean Wave into two approaches: capitalist and cultural. My categories are similar to those suggested by Han Cho and K.-H. Lee; however, I also attempt to refine the third approach in relation to the idea of East Asia.
7. Keane (2006) points out that (South) Korea best illustrates a rapid growth development path: the Korean government invested in high bandwidth infrastructure and in some East Asian markets strives to exploit the lure of Korean culture as an alternative to exported Japanese culture.
8. In their examination of the 2002 Korea–Japan World Cup match, Cho et al. (2009) reveal that the social spectacle of the World Cup exemplifies the combination of Korea's global desires and national intent.
9. A similar trend has begun in academia. For example, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies is devoted to the idea that Asian cultural studies scholars might actually speak to each other rather than primarily to the West (Cho, Y. Citation2008b).
10. Calhoun (2002) warns that the fear of bad nationalism leads to the hope that relatively thin identities will predominate.
11. In the discussion of the struggle to establish unique identities in East Asia, R. M. Lee (2006) also proposes that multiple modernities are potentially nationalistic.
12. Otake and Hosokawa (2005) investigate the triangulated relationship of Japan, the West, and ‘East Asia’ (excluding Japan) with respect to the phenomenon of ‘global karaoke.’
13. The term ‘structures of feeling’ acknowledges ‘the tension between the received interpretation and practical experience,’ and a kind of feeling and thinking that are ‘social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange’ (Williams 1977, pp. 130–131).
14. For a discussion of the universality of Western modernity, see Kuan-hsing Chen (Citation1996), Chua (Citation1999), and Dirlik (2000).
15. As Dirlik (2000) has observed, Eurocentrism is compelling because of its future as a constituent of most people's hybridities.
16. Stoler and Cooper (1997) suggest that the boundary of included/excluded is no longer coterminous with the distinction between metropole and colony.
17. Shiri was a critical and financial success not only in Korea but also in other Asian markets (particularly Hong Kong).
18. Non-verbal performances entitled Nanta (1997) and Jump (2002) have been economically successful both domestically and internationally (Lee, H.-J. 2010).
19. In a similar way, Choi suggests that ‘such “foreign-yet-alike” traits have enhanced Korean media's aesthetic appeal to close cultural, social and political proximity’ (2008, p. 151).
20. Chua (2004) suggests that the similarities of young, urban, middle-class consumer lifestyles and a projection of ‘Asian-ness’ facilitate audience identification across East Asia.
21. In her analysis of social issues during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis, Song mentions that the fragility of South Korean society ‘was rooted in long-standing latent issues connected with compressed modernity and rapid industrialization’ (2006, p. 51).
22. As of this writing, an anthology titled Hallyu: Korean Pop Culture Waves in Asia and Beyond is being prepared for the publication by D-Kyun Kim and Min-Sun Kim.