Transnational Korean Television

Transnational Korean Television
Author: Hyejung Ju
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2019-11-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1498565182

Transnational Korean Television: Cultural Storytelling and Digital Audience provides previously absent analyses of Korean TV dramas’ transnational influences, peculiar production features, distribution, and consumption to enrich the contextual understanding of Korean TV's transcultural mobility. Even as academic discussions about the Korean Wave have heated up, Korean television studies from transnational viewpoints often lack in-depth analysis and overlook the recently extended flow of Korean television beyond Asia. This book illustrates the ecology of Korean television along with the Korean Wave for the past two decades in order to showcase Korean TV dramas’ international mobility and its constant expansion with the different Western television and their audiences. Korean TV dramas’ mobility in crossing borders has been seen in both transnational and transcultural flows, and the book opens up the potential to observe the constant flow of Korean television content in new places, peoples, manners, and platforms around the world. Scholars of media studies, communication, cultural studies, and Asian studies will find this book especially useful.

Transnational Intimacies: Korean Television Dramas, Romance, Erotics, and Race

Transnational Intimacies: Korean Television Dramas, Romance, Erotics, and Race
Author: Min Joo Lee
Publisher:
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

In this dissertation, I examine the gendered and racial politics of women's transnational sex tourism. I draw on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with women from Europe and North America who travel to South Korea to form intimate relations with South Korean men in a phenomenon known as Hallyu tourism. Hallyu (also known as the Korean Wave) is a transnational phenomenon whereby people from all over the world consume South Korean popular culture including music, films, and television programs. In my dissertation, I focus on the transnational popularity of romantic South Korean television dramas and how they generate erotic desires in their viewers for South Korean men. I build on interdisciplinary debates in the fields of Gender Studies, Asian Studies, and Media Studies to examine the racial, gendered, and sexual politics of the Hallyu tourists' erotic desires and their intimate relationships with South Korea men. I argue that these transnational relationships of intimacy produce racialized discourses of South Korean masculinity emerging at the intersection of South Korean cultural conceptions of gender and transnational discourses of race. Furthermore, I suggest that these intimate encounters between South Korean men and "Western" female Hallyu tourists compel us to reconfigure binary conceptions of West versus East, national versus transnational, sex versus romance, and masculine versus feminine. By analyzing why and how the Hallyu tourists use South Korean television dramas to racially eroticize South Korean men, I demonstrate the inextricability of erotics from race and gender.

The Rise of K-Dramas

The Rise of K-Dramas
Author: JaeYoon Park
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2019-06-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476677476

Korean dramas gained popularity across Asia in the late 1990s, and their global fandom continues to grow. Despite cultural differences, non-Asian audiences find "K-dramas" appealing. They range from historical melodrama and romantic comedy to action, horror, sci-fi and thriller. Devotees pursue an immersive fandom, consuming Korean food, fashion and music, learning Korean to better understand their favorite shows, and travelling to Korea for firsthand experiences. This collection of new essays focuses on the cultural impact of K-drama and its fandom, and on the transformation of identities in the context of regional and global dynamics. Contributors discuss such popular series as Boys over Flowers, My Love from the Star and Descendants of the Sun.

Transnational Hallyu

Transnational Hallyu
Author: Kyong Yoon Yong Jin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2021-06-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1538146975

While the influence of Western, Anglophone popular culture has continued in the global cultural market, the Korean cultural industry has substantially developed and globally exported its various cultural products, such as television programs, pop music, video games and films. The global circulation of Korean popular culture is known as the Korean wave, or Hallyu. Given its empirical scope and theoretical contributions, this book will be highly appealing to any scholar or student interested in media globalization and contemporary Asia popular culture. These chapters present the evolution of Hallyu as a transnational process and addresses two distinctive aspects of the recent Hallyu phenomenon - digital technology integration and global reach. This book will be the first monograph to comprehensively and comparatively examine the translational flows of Hallyu through extensive field studies conducted in the US, Canada, Chile, Spain and Germany.

The Korean Wave

The Korean Wave
Author: Youna Kim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317938585

Since the late 1990s South Korea has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational popular culture - the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history. Why popular (or not)? Why now? What does it mean socially, culturally and politically in a global context? This edited collection considers the Korean Wave in a global digital age and addresses the social, cultural and political implications in their complexity and paradox within the contexts of global inequalities and uneven power structures. The emerging consequences at multiple levels - both macro structures and micro processes that influence media production, distribution, representation and consumption - deserve to be analyzed and explored fully in an increasingly global media environment. This book argues for the Korean Wave's double capacity in the creation of new and complex spaces of identity that are both enabling and disabling cultural diversity in a digital cosmopolitan world. The Korean Wave combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in an up-to-date and accessible volume ideal for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Media and Communications, Cultural Studies, Korean Studies and Asian Studies.

New Korean Wave

New Korean Wave
Author: Dal Jin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252098145

The 2012 smash "Gangnam Style" by the Seoul-based rapper Psy capped the triumph of Hallyu , the Korean Wave of music, film, and other cultural forms that have become a worldwide sensation. Dal Yong Jin analyzes the social and technological trends that transformed South Korean entertainment from a mostly regional interest aimed at families into a global powerhouse geared toward tech-crazy youth. Blending analysis with insights from fans and industry insiders, Jin shows how Hallyu exploited a media landscape and dramatically changed with the 2008 emergence of smartphones and social media, designating this new Korean Wave as Hallyu 2.0. Hands-on government support, meanwhile, focused on creative industries as a significant part of the economy and turned intellectual property rights into a significant revenue source. Jin also delves into less-studied forms like animation and online games, the significance of social meaning in the development of local Korean popular culture, and the political economy of Korean popular culture and digital technologies in a global context.

Pop Empires

Pop Empires
Author: S. Heijin Lee
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2019-07-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0824879929

At the start of the twenty-first century challenges to the global hegemony of U.S. culture are more apparent than ever. Two of the contenders vying for the hearts, minds, bandwidths, and pocketbooks of the world’s consumers of culture (principally, popular culture) are India and South Korea. “Bollywood” and “Hallyu” are increasingly competing with “Hollywood”—either replacing it or filling a void in places where it never held sway. This critical multidisciplinary anthology places the mediascapes of India (the site of Bollywood), South Korea (fountainhead of Hallyu, aka the Korean Wave), and the United States (the site of Hollywood) in comparative dialogue to explore the transnational flows of technology, capital, and labor. It asks what sorts of political and economic shifts have occurred to make India and South Korea important alternative nodes of techno-cultural production, consumption, and contestation. By adopting comparative perspectives and mobile methodologies and linking popular culture to the industries that produce it as well as the industries it supports, Pop Empires connects films, music, television serials, stardom, and fandom to nation-building, diasporic identity formation, and transnational capital and labor. Additionally, via the juxtaposition of Bollywood and Hallyu, as not only synecdoches of national affiliation but also discursive case studies, the contributors examine how popular culture intersects with race, gender, and empire in relation to the global movement of peoples, goods, and ideas.

The Rise of K-Dramas

The Rise of K-Dramas
Author: JaeYoon Park
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2019-06-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476636583

Korean dramas gained popularity across Asia in the late 1990s, and their global fandom continues to grow. Despite cultural differences, non-Asian audiences find "K-dramas" appealing. They range from historical melodrama and romantic comedy to action, horror, sci-fi and thriller. Devotees pursue an immersive fandom, consuming Korean food, fashion and music, learning Korean to better understand their favorite shows, and travelling to Korea for firsthand experiences. This collection of new essays focuses on the cultural impact of K-drama and its fandom, and on the transformation of identities in the context of regional and global dynamics. Contributors discuss such popular series as Boys over Flowers, My Love from the Star and Descendants of the Sun.

The Korean Wave

The Korean Wave
Author: Tae-Jin Yoon
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2017-10-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498555578

Since the Korean Wave phenomenon started in 1997, Hallyu has undergone many changes. Geographically, while Asia has been the largest cultural market for the Korean cultural industries, other parts of society, including North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America have gradually admitted Korean popular culture. The components of the Korean Wave have also greatly expanded. Hallyu originally implied the exports of a few cultural products, such as television dramas, popular music, and films; however, Korea has recently developed and exported K-pop, digital games and smartphone technologies as well as relevant youth culture. Meanwhile, industrial and technological contexts of the Korean Wave have changed significantly during the last 20 years. The role of social media in the Korean Wave’s transnationalization in recent years is especially intriguing because fans around the world can easily access social media to enjoy K-pop, digital games, and films. The changes in the nature and appearance of the Korean Wave, conceptual and theoretical shifts in the studies of the Korean Wave, and the influences of the development of media technologies on the Korean Wave are all very significant. This book aims to provide a better understanding of Hallyu's theoretical and institutional history on one hand, and new features of the Korean Wave on the other hand.

Understanding the Korean Wave

Understanding the Korean Wave
Author: Dal Yong Jin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000932192

A comprehensive and critical introduction to understanding the Korean Wave (Hallyu) as a transnational media phenomenon. This book provides an accessible introduction to the Korean Wave—the rapid growth of local cultural industries and the global popularity of Korean popular culture over the past 30 years—providing historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural context to its initial rise and enduring popularity. Jin explores the transnational cultural flows of Hallyu across a variety of products and digital technologies—from television dramas, film, and K-pop to online games, and webtoons—and explains the process of cross-media convergence and the socio-political contexts behind the Hallyu phenomenon. He also explores how overseas fans and audiences advance K-pop fandom as social agents in different geo-cultural contexts. The book concludes by discussing if Hallyu can become a sustainable global popular culture beyond a fan-based regional cultural phenomenon. Each chapter features detailed contemporary case studies and discussion questions to enhance student engagement. This is essential reading for students of Media and Communication, Cultural Studies, Korean Studies, and Asian Studies, particularly those taking classes on popular culture and media, media and globalization, Korean popular culture, and East Asian culture.