Hegemonic Mimicry: Korean Popular Culture of the Twenty-First Century

In Hegemonic Mimicry, Kyung Hyun Kim considers the recent global success of Korean popular culture—the Korean wave of pop music, cinema, and television also known as hallyu—from a transnational and transcultural perspective. Using the concept of mimicry to think through hallyu’s adaptation of American sensibilities and genres, he shows how the commercialization of Korean popular culture has upended the familiar dynamic of major-to-minor cultural influence, enabling hallyu to become a dominant global cultural phenomenon. At the same time, its worldwide popularity has rendered its Korean-ness opaque. Kim argues that Korean cultural subjectivity over the past two decades is one steeped in ethnic rather than national identity. Explaining how South Korea leapt over the linguistic and cultural walls surrounding a supposedly “minor” culture to achieve global ascendance, Kim positions K-pop, Korean cinema and television serials, and even electronics as transformative acts of reappropriation that have created a hegemonic global ethnic identity.

“Hegemonic Mimicry presents a much-needed update on today’s South Korean pop culture—one of the most fascinating epicenters of global cultural flows. Presenting a probing insight into a wide spectrum of media productions, it is bound to be a must-read for those hoping capture symptomatic signs of the new millennium.” — Suk-Young Kim, author of K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance.

Source: publisher’s website

Contents

Introduction: Of Mimicry and Miguk
1. Short History of K-Pop, K-Cinema, and K-Television
2. The Souls of Korean Folk in the Era of Hip-Hop
3. Dividuated Cinema: Temporality and Body in the Overwired Age
4. Running Man: The Korean Television Variety Program and Affect Confucianism
5. The Virtual Feast: Mukbang, Con-Man Comedy, and the Post-Traumatic Family in Extreme Job (2019) and Parasite (2019)
6. Korean Meme-icry: Samsung and K-Pop
7. Reading Muhan Dojon through the Madanggǔk