These two excellent books expand in important ways a field of research that has developed over the last fifteen years, the study of film and other popular culture media from Korea. The books both stand at the intersection of at least two disciplines that have in recent years entered an intensified exchange and overlap, area studies and media studies. Contemporary popular culture media from Korea as an object of study seems especially well-suited to addressing two of the most pressing issues confronting that intersection, issues that are connected to two forms of border crossing: The circulation of contents across media on the one hand and their circulation across national and regional contexts on the other.
The ever-increasing number of publications on film and popular media from Korea is then part of a perfect storm: the exploding worldwide popularity of Korean films, K-pop music, and Korean online games since the early 2000s that is summarized under Korean Wave or Hallyu––a term that Youngmin Choe in Tourist Distractions calls “overused and increasingly overdetermined” (p. 3)––coincides with a broader set of concerns about transnational and transmedia dynamics. There have been significant shifts in emphasis, however.
While the early and mid-2000s saw an initial focus of scholarship on Korean cinema, the late 2000s moved toward a number of edited volumes framing their object of study as popular culture, Hallyu, or the Korean wave; while these two strands have continued, they have most recently been joined by an increasing number of monographs and edited volumes on popular music from Korea, usually focusing on K-pop. In a sense, then, we can only retrospectively understand the earlier publications on film as the beginning of a larger investigation.Footnote 1 The two books under review here are well aware of the recent history in scholarship and attempt to expand on it in different ways.
Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media is a tightly edited volume—admirably so—organized around the idea that social media has introduced a new dynamic to Korean popular culture and its international success. The chapters variably engage seriously with this idea or use it as a basis for their investigations, and all are highly aware of the other contributors’ approaches––both signs of a superior editing effort and the successful use of a 2013 conference to prepare this volume. The periodization through “Hallyu 2.0” provides a very useful conceptual base, but in the volume it also at times feels too readily reified and too accepting of the idea of radical newness. Additionally it marries such a narrative of historical rupture to digital technology, which is frequently used to claim “newness” and often obscures continuities and more long-term changes. As Abé Markus Nornes points out in his lucid afterword––and the cover of the volume strongly suggests––the symbolic moment of rupture the volume revolves around is the unanticipated global success of Psy's song “Gangnam Style” (even if the term Hallyu 2.0 is somewhat older). Fortunately the volume uses the hypothesis of a new phase to provide an important and coordinated interrogation into a number of ongoing shifts––in reception, labor, or the relation of state, economy, and popular culture.
The volume's chapters are divided into “New Agendas,” “Rethinking K-Pop,” “Korean TV Drama and Social Media,” and “Global Reception of Hallyu 2.0.” While such a division points to the above-mentioned shifts toward an interest in K-Pop, media interactions, and reception, Sangjoon Lee himself notes in his introduction that this structure mirrors the limitations of the study of Hallyu 2.0 in not covering areas such as film, online gaming, or fashion (p. 16). Total coverage is never the most viable goal, however, and the volume instead opts for a concerted effort to refocus the term “Hallyu.”
Apart from the excellent introduction by Lee, the extraordinarily useful chapters in the first section set the stage. First, JungBong Choi (chapter 1) emphasizes the “elsewhereness” of a phenomenon that is essentially defined by success beyond a national media industry in his masterful investigation of the interaction of such default border-crossing with state and industry actors and their nation-based agendas. Following this, Dal Yong Kim's highly insightful chapter connects Hallyu 2.0 to discourses and power structures connected to the rise of the intellectual property business and legal regime, which significantly entails much more than simply copyright issues. It is in such connections of the Hallyu 2.0 concept to much broader concerns that the volume develops a strong potential beyond even media and area studies. This framework makes the more historical chapters in the volume––and the tight-knit cross-references within the volume support this––useful as both case studies and links to much larger issues.
Hallyu 2.0 carries many signs of the above-mentioned renewed rise of media studies. Contributions follow the shift from appreciation and close reading to statistics and industry analysis, focus on reception through the lens of fan studies, and, apart from Irina Lyan and Alon Levkowitz's contribution (chapter 10) on Hallyu 2.0 in Israel, stick largely to a Korea-US dynamic when speaking of Hallyu 2.0's global interactions (problematically mirroring Korean industry and state discourse). The volume's overall conception and the successful integration of all of the chapters into a common intervention, however, quickly transcends the limitations of such patterns.
Choe's Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema is similarly concerned with broadening the scope of how Hallyu has been understood, and she approaches it through a similar process of tightening her focus to address a broader set of questions. Worried about the dilution and instrumentalization of the term “Hallyu,” Choe productively narrows down her project to what she terms “hallyu cinema” and its intersections with the trope of tourism. Tourism, as opposed to travel, helps Choe conceptually track the dynamics underlying increasing regional connectivities and the way they are channeled and utilized by corporations and the state. Tourism becomes metonymic of the commodifying tendencies of Hallyu in general. Choe's real focus is thus the way new imaginaries about community and of connection beyond the boundaries of the nation unfold within a neoliberal East Asian context. Choe defines the levels they operate on as national, regional, and transregional; state policy, entertainment, and conceptions of culture enter a problematic alliance that attempts to establish very specifically tuned, commodifiable, and politically useful affinities––what some have called “soft power.”
The book maps this new affective geography through three sections, each associated with an emotional relation: The relationship of Japan and Korea as it is negotiated through (representations or evocations of) intimacy, the relationship between China and Korea through amity, and the relationship of North and South Korea through remembrances. Choe productively establishes a discussion that is relational rather than focused on bounded national contexts. She does terrific work in tying together solid and eminently useful historical context information and on-site research with close readings and more speculative, very insightful discussion. It is a balance that is difficult to achieve, but one that is especially rare in the study of popular culture from Korea.
Choe's approach dovetails with Lee and Nornes's volume in several ways. Warning of the state's appropriation of—and indeed co-creation of—Hallyu has become almost a reflex in the study of contemporary popular culture from Korea. Lee in his volume introduction importantly mentions the academic-industry-state collaborations that have supported both training for and the study of the popular media culture industries. Beyond a simple narrative of unidirectional state power, Choe's book, and chapters such as JungBong Choi's or Lee's introduction especially share a concern with how a nationalist project interacts with the complexities of ever more intricate and intense global interactions.
Still, these respective projects also share blind spots. Nornes, in an afterword that masterfully bridges personal account and a macro-view on the study of Hallyu, points out that discourse on race is barely touched upon by any of the contributors, or in any other existing scholarship. Another typical aspect of the study of Hallyu is that it tends toward an implicit assumption of uniqueness, often supported by the spectacle of Hallyu's economic success. Yet any discussion of policy and the state's entanglement with Hallyu––and this is a common topic of discussion––would benefit immensely from taking the popular culture policy craze of the early 2000s in East and Southeast Asia into account.
One especially interesting common challenge of these books is their impulse to imbue their conceptual centerpieces with critical potential. While Lee's introduction is somewhat cautious, there is enough of recent media studies’ and cultural studies’ discourse in his portrayal of Hallyu 2.0 to see emancipatory potential in the de- and re-centering of media flows or in the more active role of consumers––the latter a position that Seung-Ah Lee's chapter on fan support for the boy band JYJ's lawsuit against one of the most powerful talent agencies enthusiastically picks up and channels through Henry Jenkins's concept of fan activism (chapter 5).
Choe is more explicit about her intent to apply tourism as a critical term, and it leads to an intriguing line of thought. The potential of the motif of tourism to both support and disturb the commodifying dynamic of Hallyu leads to an image of Hallyu as a self-reflexive system: “So to the question ‘Can the global commodity speak?,’ not only do these texts answer yes!, but they also infer that the speech bespeaks the fact of its own circulation, one to which hallyu cinema, again and again, compulsively returns” (p. 204). This important twist is picked up in a similar way in Michelle Cho's wonderfully insightful chapter in Hallyu 2.0 (chapter 7). Cho discusses what she terms “Meta-Hallyu TV” (p. 154), a tendency in television drama to focus on scenarios about Hallyu production, often organized around the trope of a mediated public sphere in which the public has almost immediate influence on the realms of production via a social media feedback loop. It is in this “embedding of an imagined intimate public within a global cultural export” (p. 156) that a potentially critical negotiation of the public and civic participation can take place.
As projects intent on opening up new avenues of inquiry for the study of Hallyu, these books are valuable contributions to a number of fields and disciplines. Media studies, film studies, area studies, and cultural studies as well as a number of neighboring scholarly inquiries can all benefit greatly from the solid and conceptually inspired, meaningful work presented here. If the study of Hallyu at various points in the past has produced outstanding scholarship but also at times sputtered, these books prove that it has developed into a consistently rich area of inquiry. What remains to be seen is how dependent future scholarship is on the continued economic success of popular media culture “from Korea.”
