[KS] CFP - Racial Difference & Reception of Korean Popular Culture

[Han, Benjamin]

I’d appreciate it if you could circulate the following CFP for an edited book on racial difference and reception of Korean popular culture.


Call for book chapters

Title: Racial difference & reception of Korean popular culture: Transnational empowerment and multiplying hegemonies

South Korean media have become one of the leading sites of global cultural production. The viral success of Squid Game (2021) and Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” the critical success of Parasite (2020), and the influence of BTS’s fandom, ARMY, attest to the growing overseas reception of Korean popular culture. With its counter-flows into the West and its attendant movements in the Global South, audiences encounter and negotiate transnational, symbolic meanings encoded in these texts. As Ang (1990) argues, meanings are produced at the site of reception. Thus, it is important to understand how meanings are created by international audiences, whose lived experience is racially and culturally different from the Korean texts that they are consuming. Even for diasporic Asians outside of Asia, their everyday lives are situated within dominant cultural spaces that are racially different from their own, and it is from this local site of meaning-making that Korean texts will be transnationally encountered. The purpose of this book, then, is to understand how the interaction of racial difference matters in the uses and reception of Korean popular culture either as the primary focus of analysis, as context, or with other intersectional identities.

Much of the existing research on the reception of Korean popular culture, or “Korean Wave, has been confined to the interpretive methodological framework. In some cases, the research is celebratory in its explanation of the Korean Wave as “soft” power. Expanding on the extant literature, this book aims to provide a critical lens on how the reception of Korean popular culture simultaneously reifies and challenges the West as the dominant referent as well as how fans and audiences make sense of Korean popular culture through their locally embedded and specific cultural standpoints.

As an interdisciplinary project, we are interested in contributions from fields such as Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, Media Studies, Korean Studies, Asian Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, Performance Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Though it is interdisciplinary, we limit the methods to critical humanistic approaches in order to maintain a focused epistemological vantage point. The kinds of contributions that may be considered include, but are not limited to, ethnography, online ethnography, online textual analysis of fan and audience discourse, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. We encourage contributions that deal with complexity and ambivalence, recognizing the messiness inherent in culture, much less in intercultural, interracial, and intersectional cultural encounters. Finally, all contributions must be original, unpublished work that is written in English.

 Areas of interest might include:

•         Cosmopolitan, global identities for fans of color that reject local hegemonies

•         Conflation of pop cultures and flattening of Asian ethnic difference

•         Challenges to hegemonic masculinity as norm, as object of desire

•         Transnational empowerment for Korean Americans and/or Asian Americans

•         Queer and female gaze on the male celebrity body

•         Slash fiction and queer imaginations

•         Hegemonic reinforcement of gender norms and body image

•         Western superiority and ethnocentrism

•         Intra-Asian American boundary formation and hierarchy

•         Intra-fan boundary formation and hierarchy

•         Masculinization and legitimation of specific media forms (and marginalized feminization of other forms)

•         Inter-racial, gendered, and heteronormative hierarchies in fan communities

•         “Cultural imperialism” of Korean popular culture

•         Production of subversive affect

•         Embodiment and performance through fan dance or fan parody

•         Fan impersonation and the problematics of race and “appropriation”

•         Questions about methodologies that inform reception/audience studies of the Korean Wave

•         Pan-racial fan communities

•         Fan translation and boundary policing

If interested in contributing, please submit a 250-500 word extended abstract to David C. Oh (doh at ramapo.edu<mailto:doh at ramapo.edu>) or Benjamin Han (bhan5 at tulane.edu<mailto:bhan5 at tulane.edu>) and a 100-word bio by February 1, 2022. Please include (1) your purpose, (2) justification, (3) proposed method, (4), and, if available, tentative findings. Final manuscripts should be 7,000-8,000 words, which includes all elements of the paper – title page, body essay, references, and, if necessary, tables and figures. Final book chapters will be due August 1, 2022.


Benjamin Han, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
Tulane University
219G Newcomb Hall
1229 Broadway
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504) 862-3025
bhan5 at tulane.edu<mailto:bhan5 at tulane.edu>
Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America(Rutgers University Press, 2020)
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/beyond-the-black-and-white-tv/9781978803831





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