Anti-Korea: The Cultural Politics of Aversion and the Making of New East Asia

Anti-Korea investigates the rise of anti-Korean sentiment across East Asia, exploring how trending anti-Korean discourse both reflects and generates anxieties around Korea’s ascendant cultural and economic presence in the region. Moving beyond traditional international relations perspective, the book examines anti-Koreanism as a dynamic and evolving set of practices that operate through different modalities and manifest across multiple scales of affect, media circulation, and cultural production. By highlighting aversion, Anti-Korea demonstrates how Korea’s shift from a peripheral nation to a subimperial power reshapes regional cultural politics and transforms the very relations between culture and geopolitics. The book also offers a vital counterpoint to the global success and celebration of Korean popular culture by shifting the focus to the aversion it provokes, revealing how unresolved colonial legacies continue to fuel antagonisms and produce new fractures in contemporary East Asian media culture