London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Event news: Prof Keith Howard lecture and book launch

SOAS’s Professor Keith Howard is launching two books next week at one of the regular free Friday evening seminars. There will be refreshments and the opportunity to buy the books at half the normal price.

Sounding Korea

Professor Keith Howard (SOAS, University of London)
Friday 27 November, 17:15 – 19:00
B102, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London
All Welcome

K Howard books

What music, what sounds, represents Korea? Today I will be presenting three different mediatized soundworlds. All three represent Korea, but in very different ways.

First I introduce the internationally iconic soundworld of kugak, traditional music, with which many would identify. Contrasting this, the internally representative soundworld of North Korea, celebrated through ‘ideologically sound’ song lyrics, forms my second example. Third, I move to recent years, and to ‘Gangnam Style’ – a track that is decried by lovers of K-Pop, but which has been both deterritorialized in myriad parodied ‘selfies’, tearing apart concepts of the model minority and Asian difference, and also reterritorialized as a global success that, once its Korean words are lost, is celebrated at home in Korea and abroad.

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