With apologies for cross-posting.
The Research Center for the Study of Gender, Media, and Sexuality (GEMS) in the Department of Communications, Drama, and Film at the University of Exeter invites you to a book talk on Korean Pop Culture Beyond Asia: Race and Reception (edited by David Oh and Benjamin Han, University of Washington Press, 2024). As an example of counter-media flows, the global popularity of Korean popular culture challenges us to rethink and reshape gender and racial politics and global fans' subjectivities. At this online book talk, the editors and contributors to this book will discuss various forms of production, interpretation, and embodied practices by Korean popular culture fans, generating conversations about intimacy, racialized gender, gendered race, and globalization from transnational and transcultural perspectives.
Date: March 19 4:30 pm- 6:00 pm (GMT); 12:30 pm – 2pm (EDT)
You can register for the talk here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/korean-pop-culture-beyond-asia-race-and-reception-tickets-1270527695539?aff=oddtdtcreator (You will receive a zoom link once you finish registering).
Book Description:
Korean media has exploded in popularity across the globe in the past decade: BTS and other K-pop groups have packed stadiums, Parasite garnered record-breaking critical success, The Masked Singer and Single's Inferno became viral TV hits, and multiday KCON fan events have highlighted not only media but Korean food, cosmetics, and fashion. Exploring how fans from different cultural and racial backgrounds engage with Korean media in local and individual contexts, this edited collection reveals complex transcultural affinities, conflicts, and negotiations. The essays delve into the ways people create meaning from, and shape affinity to, Korean television and music. The book also explores Korean popular culture's influence on audiences' imaginative play, desires, and fantasies, critically examining topics such as TikTok as a space of Asian fetishization, Black YouTubers' K-pop reaction videos, the perception of Korean men in opposition to European hegemonic masculinity, and Middle Eastern fans' responses to appropriation in K-pop. Throughout, the contributors provide perceptive analyses that reveal what the interplay of race and Korean entertainment tells us about the complex nature of transnational fandom
(University of Washington Press:
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295752969/korean-pop-culture-beyond-asia/)
Editors of the book:
David Oh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications in the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. He authored Second-Generation Korean American Adolescent Identity and Media: Diasporic Identifications (Lexington, 2015) and Whitewashing the Movies: White Subjectivity and Asian Erasure in U.S. Film Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2022). Most recently, he co-authored Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work (Rutgers University Press, 2023). He also edited Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State (University of Michigan Press, 2022) and co-edited Korean Pop Culture Beyond Asia: Race and Reception (University of Washington Press). In addition, he has published 50 peer-reviewed essays in journals and edited collections, sits on eleven Editorial Boards in communication, cultural studies, fan studies, and media studies. In 2018-19, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
Benjamin M. Han is an Associate Professor in the Department of Entertainment and Media Studies in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2020). He is also the co-editor of Korean Pop Culture Beyond Asia: Race and Reception (University of Washington Press, 2024). His research focuses on global media, Korean popular culture, and the cultural intersections between South Korea and Latin America. His second book, Reckoning with the World: South Korean Television and the Latin American Imaginary, is forthcoming from Temple University Press. His articles have been published in the International Journal of Communication, Television & New Media, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images.
Contributors:
Crystal S. Anderson, Woori Han, Laura-Zoë Humphreys, Young Jung, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain, Donna Lee Kwon, Min Joo Lee, Irina Lyan, Moisés Park, and Julia Trzcińska
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Woori Han
Lecturer
University of Exeter
Exeter
United Kingdom
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