Understanding fans and cultural dynamics: “Korean Pop Culture beyond Asia”

Korean media has exploded in popularity across the globe in the past decade. “Korean Pop Culture beyond Asia,” edited by Benjamin Min Han, associate professor in Entertainment and Media Studies at Grady College, and David C. Oh, associate professor at Syracuse University, showcases the dynamism of cross-cultural engagement with Korean media. 

Both editors aimed to discover how racial difference matters through fans and audiences’ meaning of k-pop (popular Korean music) and k-drama (Korean drama television series).

Han shares, “Studies of the Korean Wave often emphasize how the government has propagated its globalization, but we wanted to focus on how fans and audiences as active consumers of media make sense of Korean pop culture through their locally embedded and specific cultural contexts.”

This edited collection is broken into two main sections with a total of ten subsections. The first section, “Transcultural Affinity, Excess, and Contradiction” contains five subsections: 

• “The Road to Fandom: Joy and Black “Fans” in K-pop,” by Crystal S. Anderson
• “Between Appreciation and Appropriation: Race-Transitioning among Hallyu Fans,” by Min Joo Lee
• “Korean Romance for Wholesomeness and Racism? The Transcultural Reception of the Reality Dating Show Single’s Inferno,” by Woori Han 
• “K-pop and the Racialization of Asian American Popular Musicians,” by Donna Lee Kwon
• “Soft Koreans and Sensual Cubans: Race, Gender, and the Reception of South Korean Popular Culture in Cuba,” by Laura-Zoë Humphreys

The second section of the book, “Intersectional Connection and Imaginaries,” contains the other five subsections.

• “Latin Orientalism and Anglo Hegemony in Korean Rock: Seo Taiji’s Moai,” by Moisés Park
• “I Was Probably Korean in a Previous Life: Transracial Jokes and Fantasies of Hallyu Fans,” by Irina Lyan
• “Hallyu Dreaming: Making Sense of Race and Gender in K-dramas in the US Midwest and Ireland,” by Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain
• “When K-pop Meets Islam: Cultural Appropriation and Fan Engagement,” by Young Jung
• “I Can Do Both: Queering K-pop Idols through the White Discursive Standpoint of TikTok Users,” by Julia Trzcińska & David C. Oh

Author: Lauren A. Pike, lauren.pike@uga.edu