In recent years, cultural production has taken an unprecedented and important role in trade and in discussions of national power in East Asia. In particular, the Korean Wave (hallyu), either “in a spray of radio waves or satellite signals” or “in torrents of digital information running through pipes lying on the ocean floor,” emerges as one high-profile example of the power of transnational media flows (p. v). Growing out of a workshop held at Monash University in 2006, Complicated Currents seizes this exciting moment of transnational media movements in East Asia and tries to understand the meaning, impact, and legacies of such movements.
The complexity of popular cultural flows cuts across all chapters in this volume. Case studies include flows from Korea to Japan and China, Japan to Korea, China to Korea, Korea to the United States, and Japan to the United States.
The first section (Chapters 1–5), entitled “Soft Power, Media Texts and Imagining the Other,” addresses the role that media play in relationships among East Asian nations. The first three essays attend to the mutual images exchanged between Korea and Japan over recent decades. In Korea, there is a clear desire for and at the same time a clear resistance to Japanese culture; while in Japan, there was a denial of an earlier awareness of Korea prior to the Korean Wave, which seems to be modified to some extent after the exchange of popular culture between the two countries increased. The other two essays in this section consider the relationship between Korea and China, arguing that the threat of the Korean Wave is not as severe as the Chinese state worries, and noting that watching Korean dramas indeed has produced a measurable impact on knowledge and feelings about Korea in their Chinese audience.
Essays in the second and third sections provide interesting case studies. The second section (Chapters 6–9), entitled “Embodying the Korean Wave,” focuses on the transnational reception of popular culture, particularly the depiction and construction of bodily beauty, both physical and imagined. The third section (Chapters 10–13), entitled “Wave Mechanics: Media Production and Soft Power,” takes a broader view of the East Asian cultural industries and their relationship to global forces, with attention to case studies of reverse flows from East Asia to the United States.
The fourth section (Chapters 14–16), entitled “Undertow: the Significance of Media Flows and Soft Power,” is the most intellectually engaging part of the book. All the essays in this section argue for a more rigorous definition of “soft power” and a more rigorous method for measuring “soft power.” How does one accurately measure the impact of cross-border trade in cultural products? How does one accurately evaluate “soft power”? Responding to these questions, Kean and Black introduce new conceptual categories, “creativity” and “style” respectively, to help appreciate “soft power.” In the same vein, Murphy makes the distinction between power of “culture industries” and power of “art” (p. 15.1). All these serve as meaningful first steps toward solving the vagueness inherent in the term, “soft power.” Also in this section, Murphy seriously (and iconoclastically) questions the transformative potential of the “power of cultural industries” (p. 15.2). Highly skeptical about the generative power of popular entertainment industries, he argues that only very specific forms of intellectually rigorous and aesthetically underpinned high culture are likely to have the transformative power to help solve historical grievances between countries. For him, the soft power of culture industries “cannot replace the hard power of arms” (p. 15.2).
The volume concentrates on a very exciting topic and is very up-to-date. We read about touching personal stories and experiences. We read about popular television dramas plots and interesting mangas. Particularly for this reviewer, as someone who grew up in East Asia, reading the various chapters in the book brings back the fond memories of Korean television melodramas, Japanese mangas, and the faces of those East Asian superstars. The book contributes to our understanding of the important cultural phenomenon of media flows in East Asia and brings out a crucial transnational dimension in understanding the cultures and politics of that region.
The volume speaks of the nationalistic discourses that attempt to harness the potential of soft power in popular cultural industries and to use transnational consumption of popular culture as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy. It concludes that because cultural exchange entails unpredictability and contingency, it has little appeal for bureaucrats seeking to formulate cultural diplomacy. The result is that multiple and contradictory cultural exchanges have come to exist side by side, feeding off one another but never entering into a meaningful dialogue.
To this reviewer, this is not the most satisfactory answer. We need to keep thinking along this line and apply more scholarly rigor in answering the following questions: What is soft power? How can we gauge that power? What is the limit of that power? What is the relationship between soft power and hard power? We have only begun to arrive at answers to these questions.
