South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea

From the publisher’s website:

Over recent decades South Korea’s vibrant and distinctive populist culture has spread extensively throughout the world. This book explores how this “Korean wave” has also made an impact in North Korea. The book reveals that although South Korean media have to be consumed underground and unofficially in North Korea, they are widely watched and listened to. The book examines the ways in which this is leading to popular yearning in North Korea for migration, defecting to the South or for people to just become more like South Koreans. Overall, the book demonstrates that the soft power of the Korean wave is having an undermining impact on the hard, constraining cultural climate of North Korea.

Youna Kim is Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris, France, joined from the London School of Economics and Political Science where she had taught since 2004, after completing her PhD at the University of London, Goldsmiths College.

Contents

Introduction: Hallyu and North Korea – soft power of popular culture | Youna Kim

PART I Popular culture as soft power

1. Soft  power and the Korean Wave | Joseph Nye and Youna Kim
2. The Korean Wave as a powerful agent: hidden stories from a North Korean defector | Thae Yong-Ho
3. Popular culture in transitional societies: an Eastern European perspective | Nikolay Anguelov

PART II Circulation of meaning

4. Black markets, red states: media  piracy in China and the Korean Wave in North Korea | Weiqi Zhang and Micky Lee
5. The Korean Wave: a  pull factor for North Korean migration | Ahlam Lee
6. Hallyu in the South, hunger in the North: alternative imaginings of what life could be | Sandra Fahy
7. South Korean media reception and youth culture in North Korea | Sunny Yoon

PART III  Contesting  voices

8. Other as brother or lover: North Koreans in South Korean visual media Elaine H. Kim and Hannah Michell
9. Discursive construction of Hallyu-in-North Korea in South Korean news media | Kyong Yoon
10. Webtoon and intimacy: reception of North Korean defectors’ survival narratives | Jahyon Park
11. Revealing  voices? North Korean males and the South Korean mediascape | Stephen J. Epstein and Christopher K. Green