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The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global

From the publisher’s website:

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.

Contents

Introduction: Korean Media in a Digital Cosmopolitan World | Youna Kim

Part I: Power and Politics of the Global

  1. Soft Power and the Korean Wave | Joseph Nye and Youna Kim
  2. The Korean Wave as Method: Inter-Asian Referencing | Koichi Iwabuchi
  3. Reconfiguring Media and Empire | Oliver Boyd-Barrett

Part II: Popular Media and Digital Mobile Culture

  1. Korean Wave Pop Culture in the Global Internet Age: Why Popular? Why Now? | Youna Kim
  2. For the Eyes of North Koreans? Politics of Money and Class in Boys Over Flowers | Suk-Young Kim
  3. K-pop Female Idols in the West: Racial Imaginations and Erotic Fantasies | Eun-Young Jung
  4. Negotiating Identity and Power in Transnational Cultural Consumption: Korean American Youths and the Korean Wave | Jung-Sun Park
  5. Digitization and Online Cultures of the Korean Wave: “East Asian” Virtual Community in Europe | Sang-Yeon Sung
  6. Hybridization of Korean Popular Culture: Films and Online Gaming | Dal Yong Jin
  7. K-pop Dance Trackers and Cover Dancers: Global Cosmopolitanization and Local Spatialization | Liew Kai Khiun

Part III: Perspectives Inside/Outside

  1. Cultural Policy and the Korean Wave: From National Culture to Transnational Consumerism | Hye-Kyung Lee
  2. Re-Worlding Culture?: YouTube as a K-pop Interlocutor | Kent A. Ono and Jungmin Kwon
  3. The Korean Wave as a Cultural Epistemic | Anandam Kavoori
  4. The Korean Wave and “Global Culture” | Yudhishthir Raj Isar

External links:

* Where the book is available from a number of sources, they are prioritised as follows: (1) Amazon UK site, or Bookshop.org for the more recent uploads (2) Amazon US site (3) Other sites in US or Europe, including second-hand outlets (4) LTI Korea, where the title is advertised as available from there (5) Onlines stores in Korea. Links to Bookshop.org and Amazon UK site contain an affiliate code which, should you make a purchase, gives a small commission to LKL at no additional cost to you.