[Commlist] Call for book chapters: Racial difference & reception of Korean popular culture: Transnational empowerment and multiplying hegemonies

Call for book chapters

Title: Racial difference & reception of Korean popular culture: 
Transnational empowerment and multiplying hegemonies

South Korean media have become one of the leading sites of global 
cultural production. The viral success of Squid Game (2021) and Psy’s 
“Gangnam Style,” the critical success of Parasite (2020), and the 
influence of BTS’s fandom, ARMY, attest to the growing overseas 
reception of Korean popular culture. With its counter-flows into the 
West and its attendant movements in the Global South, audiences 
encounter and negotiate transnational, symbolic meanings encoded in 
these texts. As Ang (1990) argues, meanings are produced at the site of 
reception. Thus, it is important to understand how meanings are created 
by international audiences, whose lived experience is racially and 
culturally different from the Korean texts that they are consuming. Even 
for diasporic Asians outside of Asia, their everyday lives are situated 
within dominant cultural spaces that are racially different from their 
own, and it is from this local site of meaning-making that Korean texts 
will be transnationally encountered. The purpose of this book, then, is 
to understand how the interaction of racial difference matters in the 
uses and reception of Korean popular culture either as the primary focus 
of analysis, as context, or with other intersectional identities.

Much of the existing research on the reception of Korean popular 
culture, or “Korean Wave, has been confined to the interpretive 
methodological framework. In some cases, the research is celebratory in 
its explanation of the Korean Wave as “soft” power. Expanding on the 
extant literature, this book aims to provide a critical lens on how the 
reception of Korean popular culture simultaneously reifies and 
challenges the West as the dominant referent as well as how fans and 
audiences make sense of Korean popular culture through their locally 
embedded and specific cultural standpoints.

As an interdisciplinary project, we are interested in contributions from 
fields such as Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, Media Studies, 
Korean Studies, Asian Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, 
Performance Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Though it is interdisciplinary, 
we limit the methods to critical humanistic approaches in order to 
maintain a focused epistemological vantage point. The kinds of 
contributions that may be considered include, but are not limited to, 
ethnography, online ethnography, online textual analysis of fan and 
audience discourse, in-depth interviews, and focus groups. We encourage 
contributions that deal with complexity and ambivalence, recognizing the 
messiness inherent in culture, much less in intercultural, interracial, 
and intersectional cultural encounters. Finally, all contributions must 
be original, unpublished work that is written in English.

Areas of interest might include:
	• Cosmopolitan, global identities for fans of color that reject local 
hegemonies 	• Conflation of pop cultures and flattening of Asian ethnic 
difference
	• Challenges to hegemonic masculinity as norm, as object of desire
	• Transnational empowerment for Korean Americans and/or Asian Americans
	• Queer and female gaze on the male celebrity body
	• Slash fiction and queer imaginations
	• Hegemonic reinforcement of gender norms and body image
	• Western superiority and ethnocentrism
	• Intra-Asian American boundary formation and hierarchy
	• Intra-fan boundary formation and hierarchy
	• Masculinization and legitimation of specific media forms (and 
marginalized feminization of other forms)
	• Inter-racial, gendered, and heteronormative hierarchies in fan 
communities
	• “Cultural imperialism” of Korean popular culture
	• Production of subversive affect
	• Embodiment and performance through fan dance or fan parody
	• Fan impersonation and the problematics of race and “appropriation”
	• Questions about methodologies that inform reception/audience studies 
of the Korean Wave
	• Pan-racial fan communities
	• Fan translation and boundary policing

If interested in contributing, please submit a 250-500 word extended 
abstract to David C. Oh ((doh /at/ ramapo.edu)) or Benjamin Han 
((bhan5 /at/ tulane.edu)) and a 100-word bio by February 1, 2022. Please 
include (1) your purpose, (2) justification, (3) proposed method, (4), 
and, if available, tentative findings. Final manuscripts should be 
7,000-8,000 words, which includes all elements of the paper – title 
page, body essay, references, and, if necessary, tables and figures. 
Final book chapters will be due August 1, 2022. ---


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