Results by title

Bangtan Remixed delves into the cultural impact of celebrated K-Pop boy band BTS, exploring their history, aesthetics, fan culture, and capitalist moment. The collection’s contributors—who include artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and fans—approach BTS through inventive and wide-ranging transnational perspectives. From tracing BTS’s hip hop genealogy to analyzing how the band’s mid-2020 album reflects the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrating how Baroque art history influences BTS’s music videos, the contributors investigate BTS’s aesthetic heritage. They also explore the political and technological dimensions of BTS’s popularity with essays on K-Pop and BTS’s fan culture as frontiers of digital technology, the complex relationship between BTS and Blackness, the impact of anti-Asian racism on BTS’s fandom, and the challenges BTS poses to conservative norms of gender and sexuality. Bangtan Remixed shows how one band can inspire millions of fans and provide a broad range of insights into contemporary social and political life.

Contributors. Andrea Acosta, Patty Ahn, Carolina Alves, Inez Amihan Anderson, Allison Anne Gray Atis, Kaina “Kai” Bernal, Mutlu Binark, Jheanelle Brown, Sophia Cai, Michelle Cho, Mariam Elba, Ameena Fareeda, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rosanna Hall, Dal Yong Jin, JIN Youngsun, Despina Kakoudaki, Yuni Kartika, Alptekin Keskin, Rachel Kuo, Marci Kwon, Courtney Lazore, Regina Yung Lee, S. Heijin Lee, Wonseok Lee, Amanda Lovely, Melody Lynch-Kimery, Maria Mison, Noel Sajid I. Murad, Sara Murphy, UyenThi Tran Myhre, Rani Neutill, Johnny Huy Nguyễn, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Karlina Octaviany, Nykeah Parham, Stefania Piccialli, Raymond San Diego, Hannah Ruth L. Sison, Prerna Subramanian, Havannah Tran, Andrew Ty, Gracelynne West, Yutian Wong, Jaclyn Zhou

Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it shows how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of what makes “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social contexts. Junehui Ahn details the conflicting and competing ways in which the ideologies of new personhood are enacted in actual everyday socialization contexts and reveals the confusions, dilemmas, and ruptures that occur when globally dominant ideals of childhood development are superimposed onto local experiences. Between Self and Community pays special attention to the way children, as active agents of socialization, create, construe, and sustain their own meanings of their personhood, thereby highlighting the dynamism children and their culturally rich peer world create in South Korea’s shifting socialization terrain.  

Examining Netflix’s global influence through its complex global-local dynamics in Korean media.

Korea is a global entertainment powerhouse, thanks in no small part to Netflix. Analyzing the artistry and industry behind Netflix-produced Korean hits like Squid Game, The Glory, and Narco-Saints, Benjamin Han argues that Korea is ground zero for an emerging “Netflix Paradigm.” The US-based streaming platform generates massive profits by erasing boundaries of foreign and domestic production, even as it underscores the resilience of the national media within global popular culture.

Beyond Squid Game breaks down the intricate and often ambivalent relationship between Netflix and the Korean media business, drawing on interviews with creative workers navigating the streaming giant’s ever-increasing economic and cultural power. Challenging narratives that present Netflix as a revolutionary disruptor, Han shows how the company has replicated abroad the precarious labor conditions and tensions over intellectual property from which US studios have long benefited. At the same time, Beyond Squid Game underscores the complex dynamics of a globalized media industry in which cultural imperialism thrives on localization and perceived authenticity.

Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho’s enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon provides a consideration of the director’s entire career and the themes, ambitions, techniques, and preoccupations that infuse his works. As Jeon shows, Bong’s sense of spatial and temporal dislocations creates a hall of mirrors that challenges us to answer the parallel questions Where are we? and When are we?. Jeon also traces Bong’s oeuvre from its early focus on Korea’s US-fueled modernization to examining the entanglements of globalization in Mother and his subsequent films. A complete filmography and in-depth interview with the director round out the book.

Insightful and engaging, Bong Joon Ho offers an up-to-date analysis of the genre-bending international director.

In Borderland Dreams June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethnicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to “leave to live better” at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and post–Cold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the ascendant Chinese dream and the waning Korean dream.