ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |27 pages

Introduction

Korean media in a digital cosmopolitan world

part |44 pages

Power and politics of the global

part |109 pages

Popular media and digital mobile culture

chapter |18 pages

Korean Wave pop culture in the global Internet age

Why popular? Why now?

chapter |13 pages

For the eyes of North Koreans?

Politics of money and class in Boys Over Flowers

chapter |14 pages

K-pop female idols in the West

Racial imaginations and erotic fantasies

chapter |15 pages

Negotiating identity and power in transnational cultural consumption

Korean American youths and the Korean Wave

chapter |13 pages

Digitization and online cultures of the Korean Wave

“East Asian” virtual community in Europe

chapter |17 pages

Hybridization of Korean popular culture

Films and online gaming

chapter |17 pages

K-pop dance trackers and cover dancers

Global cosmopolitanization and local spatialization

part |47 pages

Perspectives inside/outside

chapter |14 pages

Cultural policy and the Korean Wave

From national culture to transnational consumerism

chapter |16 pages

Re-worlding culture?

YouTube as a K-pop interlocutor