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Reckoning with the World
South Korean Television and the Latin American Imaginary
Benjamin M. Han
Temple University Press, 2026
For many Koreans, Latin America is foreign and unfamiliar, but popular television shows have generated considerable interest in this region of the Global South. In Reckoning with the World, Benjamin Han explores this phenomenon by providing a close reading of Korean TV programs that take place, are shot in, or depict Latin America. These dramas, reality shows, and travel documentaries present South Koreans with an understanding of themselves by projecting an illusion of difference that underscores themes of identity, race, and modernity.

Historical dramas like The Land of Humans, about Korean migrants in Mexico, consider diasporic identity and nationalism, while the fantasy series Secret Garden explores issues of modernity. In addition, the TV drama Encounter and the entertainment show Traveler contrast the cultures of global Korea with Cuba. As these programs create appealing storytelling, characters, and aesthetics, they inspire and resonate with audiences and fans across the globe. However, Korean television’s imaginary of Latin America is not about its investment in fostering greater interculturality with Latin American nations and their cultures but instead projects a façade of progressive racial and cultural politics shaping Korea’s reckoning with the world.
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front cover of The Wandering Signifier
The Wandering Signifier
Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary
Erin Graff Zivin
Duke University Press, 2008
While Jews figure in the work of many modern Latin American writers, the questions of how and to what end they are represented have received remarkably little critical attention. Helping to correct this imbalance, Erin Graff Zivin traces the symbolic presence of Jews and Jewishness in late-nineteenth- through late-twentieth-century literary works from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Nicaragua. Ultimately, Graff Zivin’s investigation of representations of Jewishness reveals a broader, more complex anxiety surrounding difference in modern Latin American culture.

In her readings of Spanish American and Brazilian fiction, Graff Zivin highlights inventions of Jewishness in which the concept is constructed as a rhetorical device. She argues that Jewishness functions as a wandering signifier that while not wholly empty, can be infused with meaning based on the demands of the textual project in question. Just as Jews in Latin America possess distinct histories relative to their European and North American counterparts, they also occupy different symbolic spaces in the cultural landscape. Graff Zivin suggests that in Latin American fiction, anxiety, desire, paranoia, attraction, and repulsion toward Jewishness are always either in tension with or representative of larger attitudes toward otherness, whether racial, sexual, religious, national, economic, or metaphysical. She concludes The Wandering Signifier with an inquiry into whether it is possible to ethically represent the other within the literary text, or whether the act of representation necessarily involves the objectification of the other.

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