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Home , Dawn (rapper), Jisoo, Korean language, Memories of Murder, Miss Granny, Namsung electronics

K yung H y un K im

Hegemonic Miimimicry

Korean Popular Culture of the Twenty-First Century Hegemonic mimicry Hegemonicmimicry Korean PoPu lar culture of tHe twenty- first century

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publicaton Data Names: Kim, Kyung Hyun, [date] author. Title: Hegemonic mimicry: Korean popu lar culture of the twenty- ¦rst century / Kyung Hyun Kim. Descipton: Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Ident¦ers: ¬¬ 2021000875 (pint) ¬¬ 2021000876 (ebook) µ 9781478013587 (hardcover) µ 9781478014492 (paperback) µ 9781478021803 (ebook) Subjects: ¬: Popu lar culture— Korea (South)— History— 21st century. | Mass media and culture— Korea (South) | Popu lar culture and globalizaton. | Glocalizaton— Korea (South) | K- pop (Subculture) | Popu lar music— Korea (South) | µ ¬: ¬ ¬¬ / Popu lar Culture | / Asia / Korea Classi¦caton: ¬¬ 923.23. 474 2021 (pint) | ¬¬ 923.23 (ebook) | ¬ 306.095195— dc23 ¬¬ recor ordd available at htps: // lcclccnn. lo locc. g ov / 2021000875 ¬ ¬ ebook rec orordd available at htps: // lccnlccn . locloc. g ov / 2021000876

Cover art: Tiger JK (left) and Yoon Mi-rae duing a concert, 2019. Photo by Kyung Hyun Kim. For Yourim Lee contents

ix Preface: Writing Pop Culture in the Time of Pandemic

1 Introducton: Of Mimicry and Miguk

35 1 Short History of K- Pop, K- Cinema, and K- Televsion

85 2 The Souls of Korean Folk in the Era of Hip- Hop

118 3 Divduated Cinema: Temporality and Body in the Overwred Age

140 4 Running Man: The Korean Tele v sion Vaiety Program and AÄect Confucianism

164 5 The Virtual Feast: Mukbang, Con- Man Comedy, and the Post- Traumatc Family in Extreme Job (2019) and Parasite (2019)

195 6 Korean Meme- icry: Samsung and K- Pop

220 7 Reading Muhan Dojeon through the Madanggǔk

237 Notes 273 Bibliography 289 Index Preface

Witng Pop Culture in the Time of Pandemic

One of the greatest lines in Korean cinema is delivered by venerable actor Song Kang-ho playng a gruÄ and frustrated country cop in Memories of Murder (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2003), a ¦lm based on a true story and set in 1986. “You know why Ameican Çµ [agents] insists on [forensic] investgaton?” Song yells. “ Because they’ve got to deal wth the US, where the land mass is too fiËgin’ big!” Implied in Song’s drunken declaraton is that South Korea is much smaller than the United States and does not yet have the technological resources to allow police investgators to use analy sis for solvng murder mysteies. Fast- forward three and a half de cades, when South Korea is a global leader in many areas, including infomaton technologÍ (Î, partcipatory democracy, and popu lar culture. Duing the recent global pandemic, South Korea set an example to the rest of the world wth its response to ¬ -19.Ï Ironically, it was locally manufactured polymerase chain reacton (¬Î test kits (commonly known as swab test kits) based on an / analy sis method in ven ted by Amei- can biochemist Kary Mullis in the prevous century that enabled Korea to quickly put in place systematc mea sures to eÄectvely contain the vrus wthout resortng to border closures or full- scale lockdowns. Whereas in the 1986- set Memories of Murder a seial killer eludes police investgaton largely due to the unavailability of forensic analy sis test kits, in 2020 Korea has been able to suppress the ¬ -19 infecton curve by deployng con ve nient testng sites for the general populaton, implementng eÄectve contact tracing, and, most impor tant, reappropiatng Ameican scient¦c inventons to create a testng infrastructure on its path toward global lead- ership in disease preventon. That South Korean medical technologÍ today is largely borrowed from twenteth-c centuryentury Amei c caa is perhaps no surpise: the best biomedical and pham maac eut c al research centers are stll located in the West. However, in many ways, what most experts reportng on K orea’s success story in con- trolling the spread of ¬ -19 failed to recognize was that the playbook of Korea’s response to the pandemic closely resembled that of the K- pop industry. By redeployng essentally Ameican scient¦c innovatons such as ¬, global positoning systems (, developed by the Natonal Aero- nautcs and Space Administraton [ Ò), and Code Divsion Multple Access (¬ , licensed by Qualcomm) to test, trace, and eÄectvely quar- antne ¬ -19 patents as well as potentally exposed indivduals, and then emphasizing the public’s trust in its health experts, South K orea was perfectng a system that followed a path from mimicking and piratng the West to establishing an authoity of its own. If K- pop moguls borrowed the genres and beats of the West in order to craft their own immaculate dancing idols for global consumpton, K orea’s ¬ -19 response redeployed Westen medical technologÍ and tracing tools to eÄectvely control the vrus in such a way that would serve as a model for the rest of the world. Just as South Korea had nurtured its domestc pop talents— sans songwit- ing genius— before developing them into overseas export items, it had now seized on its domestc success wth ¬ -19 to become a major global exporter of medical devces and equipment—sans recognized scient¦c innovaton in the ¦eld.Ó In this book, I have sought to understand the bluring of bound aies between innovaton and plagiaism and between hegemony and underdevel- opment that has occurred over the past several decades of the postcolonial, ultracapitalist era by studyng and analyzing the queston, “How did South Korea achieve so much success wthout necessaily developing its own unique technologÍ, styles, and culture in the twenty- ¦rst century?” I was amazed to lean that even duing the ¬ -19 pandemic, when concerts and public events throughout the world came to a screeching halt, South Korea dominated headlines not because it was a medical technologÍ inno- vator but because it was able to quickly adapt to the cisis and deploy the tools innovated elsewhere, ¦rst for local applicaton and then for mass foreign export. South Korea is a country of only ¦fty million people, so for any domestc mass producton to succeed, w hether of refigerators, K- pop ¬s, or vrus test kits, extenal markets must be found. While witng this book, I was constantly reminded of the words of Stuart Hall, who claimed that the logic of capital “would translate everyt hing in the world into a kind of replica of itself.”itself.”ÔÔ South KKoreaorea contnually excelled, not by repackaging its local cultures for the necessites of moden life but by surrepttously and

xÑÇ ¬ implicitly referencing its own cultural impulses while reenactng Ameican styles, music, and trends. Most people, including academics, who stll remember Korea as a back- ward country that suÄered from dire poverty and military dictatorship throughout the twenteth century may ¦nd perplexng the fact that duing the ¦rst two de cades of the twenty- ¦rst century, both the most successful non- English- language ¦lm (Parasite) and the best- selling non- English- language pop star (µ) in the United States have been from Korea. The year 2020, which most people wll remember as one of the worst years of their lives, was ironically a noteworthy year for Korean culture, as the country’s ¦lm industry was recognized for its achievements by the US Acad - emy of Moton Pictures and Sciences and its pop music industry produced three No. 1 tracks on the US Billboard Singles chart (µ’s “Dynamite,” “Savage Love [Laxed- Siren Beat],” and “Life Goes On”)— a feat rare for a group of foreign artsts associated wth neither a major studio deal nor a major US- label contract. These cultural products, however, exemplify the conditon oÕ “hegemonic mimicry” that I have temed for this book as a descipton of the Korean cultural conditon of the past several dec ades, which is deeply connected wth both the commercial and military ascent of the United States and the decline of a monolithic and unitary asserton of whiteness associated wth Pax Ameicana.Ö South Korea also expeienced a good porton of what Henry Luce once referred to in Life magazine as the “Ameican Century”— t hat is, taking part in the same po lit cal, economic, and linguistc sphere as the Ameicans, wth the naton’s elites growng up leaning En glish for more than two generatons.× What the success of Parasite and µ indicated was that South Koreans had come of age, which signaled both the end of the old Ameican Century and the beginning of a new era where Ameican-ness had to embrace, among others, Korean-ness. Throughout this book, I make the case that Korean cultural products of the past several de cades became ambivalently hegemonic through their creatve praxs of mimicry, a practce that is both unique, due to its eÄectvely opaque underscoing of traditonal cultural identty, and ordinary, because on the surface it in no way diÄers from other cosmopolitan neo- Ameican aesthetcs and styles commonly seen on YouTube and in shopping malls around the world. When, for instance, hallyu actress Song Hye- gÍo and K-pop idol µ are featured on billboards and department store advertse- ments around the world alongside Keira Knightley, LeBron James, and LioLio- nel Messi, this no longer comes as a surpise to most passersby. The Korean

Ç ¬Ñx faces are just as familiar and nondescipt as t hose of any other famous person gracing a Louis Vuiton or Clinique advertsement. Some Korean stars today generate a much larger fan followng outside K orea than at home and have themselves become hegemonic— and this has come about in the absence of the linguistc power or military dominance associated wth many of the more culturally power ful natons. K- pop gliter t oday represents an ideal of Asian aØuence and glamour that is just as commodi- ¦able as the porcelain beauty of a Bitsh ¦lm star, the hip- hop cool of black rappers from the ’hood, or the sensuality of Latn Ameican music icons. The authentcaton of K- pop is both vouchsafed from the Ameican capi tal ist hegemony of the past century as well as uniquely isolated from that hegemony due to its pronounced Koreanness, which is cost- eÙcient, squeaky- clean, and easily disposable in this era of fast- evolvng, ephemeral postmodenity. After renegotatng the tems of oiginality and mimicry in this book, I stress that the new Korean subjectvty in the global era is a racialized modality, just as altenatng and power ful as is blackness, which has oÄ- set whiteness as the singular Ameican hegemonic subject (see chapter 2). Throughout the past several de cades, Koreans have been racially situated somewhere between white and black. Long before the media’s atenton was captvated by escalatng tensions between Korean business owners and Afican Ameicans duing the 1992 Los Angeles upising— and, more recently, duing the post– George Floyd protests—K oreans were awkwardly caught between the white and the Afican Ameican populatons datng back to the civl ights era. Before Korean Ameican businesses became a vs i ble buÄer between white and black neighborhoods in urban areas across the United States, back in Korea throughout the past half century, local propietors who ran the clubs and shops in US military camptowns around the peninsula had often found themselves thrust into the race war between white and black clients. As explained in the introducton, it was the duty of the Korean businesses to separate entertainers and sex workers servcing white soldiers from those servcing black soldiers. For white Ameicans, Koreans were not black, while black Ameicans did not see Ko- reans as white. BuBuildingilding from their own racialized mistreatment and survval instncts wthin the militaized Ameican cultural and economic sphere of the twenteth c entury, Koreans re-c reated an Ameican-K orean nexus in the twenty-¦ rst c century,entury, one that asserted both a classic natonal identty from the Cold War Pax Ameicana peiod and a new ethnic entty in the post– xiÑÇ ¬ Cold War space that is being remapped by the increased power of social media, the ise of East Asia as an economic power, and new standards for entertainment that move beyond the po lit cally correct color palete that tends to feature only black and white. In this era of social media symbol- ized by Facebook, Twter, NetÛix, and YouTube, music and images cross linguistc fronters wth much greater eÙcacy and fa cil i ty than duing any prevous era. The populaity of Korean cultural content has proven that the new kind of globalizaton is, in real i ty, more excessively Ameican than anything else. Just as black music became emblematc of Ameican music throughout the twenteth century, in the twenty- ¦rst century, Ko- rean music, ¦lm, and other global ethnic cultural content are now mak - ing their mark as yet another iteraton and integral fom of Pan- Ameican mass culture in the new century. K- pop of the new millennium is the latest sensaton in a Pan- Ameican pop that started wth the Bitsh Invasion of the 1960s. This book both celebrates and citques the Korean Wave of the past twenty years, a phenomenon that may mark the ¦rst tme a postcolonial Asian society has become a citcal voice in the makeup of a global pop culture, as Korea has successfully breached the linguistc and cultural walls that surround a minor culture— although this success came at the cost of rendeing its ethnic background opaque.Ü This opacity of ethnicity, I argue, is precisely the reason the K- culture industry can be considered both racialized and nonracialized. It is prob ably not coincidental that Koreans entered the twenty- ¦rst century ich in soft power after enduing the traumas of a moden- day peiod of slavery duing the colonial era and subsequently confrontng spectacular foms of natonwde disrupton and trauma duing the Cold War (the Korean War, fervent ant- Communist campaigns, and military dictatorships). These are the reasons why in this book I have atempted to analyze the roots of linguistc diversions in, for instance, rap music; genre transfoma- tons in cinema and tele v sion; and the prevalent reliance on captons in Korean vaiety shows. I have atempted not only to work the “surface” of many ¦lms, popu lar cultural texts, and even songs in order to decode the opaque racializaton of Koreans therein but also to lay a foundaton for a deeper understanding of the new racialized consciousness of Koreanness in the twenty-¦ rst century.century. The ¦eld of Korean popu lar culture studies has exploded in recent years, and yet seious theoizatons based on histoical and textual analy sissis have regretably often been ignored. There are, admit- tedly, glaing omissions in this book. In a study that deals wth Korean

Ç ¬Ñxii popu lar culture, conspicuously absent are discussions about K- drama and K- games. These phenomena were largely left out, but not because I deem them insigni¦cant; in fact, they consttute topics of central importance in a volume on Korean popu lar culture that I prevously coedited. However, such topics are not only notoiously diÙcult to teach but also resist academic theoizaton, insofar as many popu lar fan and consumer ratngs sites already consttute infomatonal hubs that are far more engrossing than anything an expert opinion can oÄer at this point. The topics in queston also require endless hours of dedicated consumeist be hav or in order to adequately address them. Probing deeply into Korean games and tele v sion dramas might have jeopardized my atempt to balance my life as a father of a young child, an academic, and a witer of creatve ¦cton. From the very beginning of my career, I have leaned that it is almost always beter to remain mum about subject m aters when one’s knowledge and expertse are no more advanced than that of one’s audience. Nonetheless, I have taught Korean popu lar culture courses over the years that have included these topics. Korean dramas, especially the Reply (Ŭngtaphara) seies, which has thus far spawned three seasons (2012, 2013, and 2016), have stmulated my students’ interest in Korean history, language, and society and have in many ways consttuted teaching tools just as, if not more, eÙcacious than literary and cinematc subjects. However, these so- called miniseies are not exactly “mini” in length, and ¦nding tme both in and outside class to vew ten- plus- hour- long dramas becomes a challenge that can overwhelm their potental for productve discussion, and asking students to watch hours of telev s ion and play games can also run the isk of undergraduates getng hooked on nonacademic addictons and social gatheings that potentally yeld litle to no intellectual eÄect as academic study topics. As a fomer game addict who knows all too well the dangers of playng vdeo games into the wee hours of the moning, asking my students to play on Korean gaming platfoms such as Lineage in order to subsequently engage in seious questons about Korean identty would have been plainly irresponsible. Despite t hese cautonary wanings, theoretcal exploratons into why and how certain tele v sion dramas and computer games manufactured in Korea contnue to atract consumers outside the peninsula must contnue to be wagered. Furthemore, since we appear to be enteing a prolonged era of remote leaning, I accept that game platfoms of art¦cial intelligence and role- pplaynglayng could enhance the leaning expeience for students who must now productvely engage their screens. I completed the ¦rst draft of this book’s xvÑÇ ¬ manuscipt just as Korea was expeiencing an unpre ce dented surge of ¬ -19 cases stemming largely from the outbreak at the cult megachurch in Daegu. The manuscipt’s lengthy revsion pro cess coincided wth the im- positon of stay- at- home orders in my home state of Califonia, the murder of George Floyd, and the ise of Black Lives Mater protests natonwde. It was disheartening— for instance—to once again hear, over and over, the name of Latasha Harlins, the ¦fteen- year- old black girl who was killed by a Korean business owner in Los Angeles in 1992, which led to thousands of Korean Ameican businesses being damaged duing the Rodney King upising, but it served as a necessary reminder that Koreans are stll deeply associated wthin the systematc racial injustces that are now truly global in scale.Þ It is therefore my hope that Hegemonic Mimicry wll in a small way help further the discussion of race in Asian and Asian Ameican studies.

While working on this book, I have been plagued wth vai ous naËging injuies and illnesses, and at the moment of this witng, I, like millions of Ameicans, am tryng to recover from lung diseases associated wth ¬ -19. My symptoms have fortunately been mild but are nevertheless an ongoing reminder that the vrus’s impact on the body’s organs is real and seious. I am grateful to Courtney Berger, my editor at Duke University Press, who gave me both the courage and the tme to ¦nish this book. She also made the entre editng and vetng pro cess painless, responding to every one of my gipes and complaints wth grace and composure. Hers was precisely the kind of response I needed from my editor as I struË gled wth medical appointments, tests, anxety, and pain. This is the third book proj ect that Courtney and I have worked on together, and she—along wth her assistant, Sandra Kon—h as impressed me each and every tme. The two anonymous readers of this manuscipt also made suËgestons that far exceeded their pay scale and duty. Although disagreements did aise here and there, almost every one of the issues that they raised was expressed in a true spiit of collegiality. In an academic envronment that has unfor- tunately grown more spiteful and mean over the years, partly due to the ugly sociopo lit cal climate and partly as a result of the incendiary com - municaton modes of social media, these two readers exempli¦ed the deep value and importance of academic debate guided by care and courtesy. Carl Good and Zury Lee also read earearlier lier drafts and provded many copyedit- ing suËgestons that w wereere incisive and insightful and made the manuscipt in¦nitely more presentable. One of my gradu ate students, Sue Kim Asokan, helped me compile the bibliography.

Ç ¬Ñxv I wrote my ¦rst book, also published by Duke University Press, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, in my twentes; my second, Virtual Hallyu: The Korean Cinema of the Global Era, in my thirtes; and this one in my fortes. A famous Korean proverb tells the story of how “even iv - ers and mountains undergo change every ten years.” This has been all too true for the landscape of Korean popu lar culture in the United States and beyond as it grew from a negligent blip in global culture when I was a teenager adjustng to my new life in Ame i ca to one of the most productve and atractve worldwde more recently. Korean studies and cultural studies disciplines in general were unable to keep up wth the explosive demand by students vrtually from all over the world who sought in- depth histoical and theoretcal analy sis of Korean popu lar culture. Hopefully this book wll ease some pressure oÄ the academics who are anxous that some of the infomaton compiled by students and popu lar intenet sites simply outweigh their expert knowledge of the ¦eld of Korean popu lar culture. I know this all too well, since the motvaton to wite this book was to avoid this very shame I felt when teaching a course on Korean popu lar culture for the very ¦rst tme. With each passing de cade, I wtnessed dialogue across transnatonal paradigms on the subject of Korean popu lar culture expo- nentally grow, but now I am wary that the impact of ¬ -19 may have in de¦ nitely foreclosed these cultural and intellectual Ûows. Despite the ter- roizing power of this vrus, hopefully soon we wll be able to retun to the moves, concerts, exhibits, and academic conferences where we can again fully appreciate the energÍ of youthful Korean popu lar culture. The humanites dean’s oÙce at the University of Califonia, Irvne, ¦rst headed by Georges Van Den Abbeele and then by Tyrus Miller, has sup - ported this book by oÄeing me generous support through the Humanites Center’s publicaton subsidy grant. Andrzej Waminski, the associate dean, throughout the past dec ade also generously oÄered his tme to respond to all my administratve queies as I crawled to the completon of this book. The Korea Foundaton Field Research Fellowship also allowed me some tme oÄ from teaching to vsit K orea and to concentrate on witng. Many of the staÄ members of the department and in the School of Humanites— including Mindy Han, Joo Hoon Shin, Eica Yun, Michelle Hu, Veronica Portal, Stephanie (W.) Wijetlleke, and Amanda Swain— helped me get through one cisis afterafter another. Many of my colleagues, gradu ate students, and staÄ members at ¬ Irvne and beyond also helped me shape, share, and publish earlier ver-

xvÑÇ ¬ sions of this work. The past and pre sent chairs of the East Asian Studies Department at ¬ Irvne— Martn Huang, Michael Fuller, and Hu Ying— shared wth me the pains of havng to go through caing for a small child while witng this book and sympathized wth me greatly. Many of my past and pre sent colleagues in the department— Will Bidges, Chungmoo Choi, Ted Fowler, Jim Fujii, Susan Klein, Mimi Long, Bert ScruËgs, Serk- bae Suh and Elisabeth Tinsley—a lso provded productve conversatons and feedback on a range of subjects discussed in this book. Colleagues outside the department—i ncluding Nahum Chandler, Chis Fan, Joseph Jeon, Adiana Johnson, Eleana Kim, Horacio Legras, Jerry Lee, Sei Lee, Jane Page, Jim Steintrager, and Michael Szalay— oÄered comfort and wsdom that I lacked while working on this book. I was blessed wth intellectually sparkling gradu ate students who gave me opportunites over the past eight years to discuss the topics covered in the book in seminars; they are Benja- min Aaron, Sue Kim Asokan, Eun-ah Cho, Monica Cho, Jessica Conte, Zach Gotesman, Seok-k yeong Hong, Tiffany Hong, Kistna Hon, Yunjong Lee, Tian Li, Kiki Liu, Ying Liu, Adam Miller, Forest Muther, Hyunseon Park, Anat Schwartz- Meron, Eun Young Seong, and Jean Shon. Fiends in academia—Jinsoo An, Chis Berry, Steven Choe, Youngmin Choe, Jinhee Choi, Karen Fang, Hoduk Hwang, Andrew Jackson, Marcia Landy, Im - manuel Kim, Jisoo Kim, Suk- Young Kim, Youna Kim, Aynne Kokas, Bodu- rae Kwon, Young- Jun Lee, John Lie, IngÍu Oh, Se-M i Oh, Suk Koo Rhee, Youngju Ryu, CedarBough Saeji, Haein Shin, Ji- young Shin, Sowon Park, Young- chae Seo, Victor Shmagin, Mi- seong Woo, and Hyon Joo Yoo— invted me to discuss portons of this book in classrooms, publicatons, and restaurants. This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Educaton of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promoton Ser vce of the Acad emy of Korean Studies ( -2016- -2250005). An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Becoming- Black: Exploing Korean Hip-H op in the Age of Hallyu,” Situ- ations 12, no. 1 (2019): 23–46. Portons of chapter 4 appeared as “ Running Man: The Korean Telev sion Vaiety Program on the Transnatonal AÄec- tve Run,” Telos 184 (Fall 2018): 163–84. Last but not least, I am indebted to YouimYouim Lee, my wfe, and Sidd Kim, my daughter, who was bon duing the peiod when this proj ectect was conceptualized and then matured to be a per-per ceptve young w oman who now, when this book is g oing into producton, teaches me everyt hing there is to know about µ and Blackpink. Youim

Ç ¬Ñxvi was working as a ¦lm producer at ¬à Entertainment & Media (¬à â) in Seoul when the book was ¦rst incubated. She underwent an incred - ible career change to accommodate our life together in the United States while this book took shape. I cannot thank her enough for havng made the changes necessary for us to be together. Her insights into Korean popu lar culture—from the business side to the aesthetc one—a llowed me to stay current and focused. I dedicate this book to her.

xviiÑÇ ¬ Introducton

Of Mimicry and Miguk

Becoming- Korean: oPaquely racial and amBivalently Hegemonic

Imagine a dystopian world where Ameican cites have been devastated and tuned into slums after a long de cade of economic repression and total war. Large numbers of young people are dead, missing, or badly wounded. Survvors— mostly women, children, and the old—are forced to pull themselves together from ruins of concrete slabs, metal scraps, and war ashes. In the midst of starvaton, despair, and family loss and separaton, the foreign amy that has defended these Ameican cites is asked by the humiliated leader to remain and help restore order. Let’s say that the foreign amy that has been asked to save t hese Ameican teritoies comes from a country across the Paci¦c: Korea. They speak only Korean, eat Korean food, and socialize among themselves. Because tens of thousands of Korean lives have been saci¦ced to defend Ameican soil, once the war has ended, their rest and recreaton, or â, is given pioity by the Ameican leader. Koreans occupy the best hotels downtown and hold auditons for local singers, musicians, dancers, and vaudevlle- type magic and freak shows. Because talented young Ameican womenwomen and men desperately need work to survve the postwar devastaton, they auditon before panels of Korean military of-of ¦cers. BecauseBecause the Korean soldiers prefer to watch female singers perfom-perfom ing on stage, Ameican girls frantcally lean the musical scores and ly ics of Korean folk songs on the Ûy. Korean traditonal melodies registeing in the moody minor pentatonic scale sound foreign to young Ameican ears and are almost impossible to lean because the ly ics are in a language that sounds nothing like any of the more familiar Indo-E uropean languages they have heard before, let alone Eng lish. Yet, b ecause the income gen- erated from each week of work is easily three or four tmes the income eaned from working at any local fam, you desperately auditon for the Koreans, even though you have heard horror stoies about the long bus ides on unpaved roads, about the sex- depived soldiers who wll grope you onstage and later try to whisk you away to Korea. Because your per- fo mance is evaluated by Korean military oÙcers who serve as judges, you force yourself to lean new songs by transliteratng the ly ics into the En- glish alphabet, even though the Korean words make no sense to you. You may pass the ¦rst auditon, but even when you succeed in touing onstage for a couple of months, you must contnue to compete against newer and younger faces who try to take your place every change of season. Each auditon requires you to lean the new hit songs on the radio. Mimicking the accent and intonaton of each and every Korean word is almost painful— physically because you have to use diÄ er ent facial muscles to pronounce iotzed vowels such as yŏ (yeo) or yo and the frequent syllabic assembly of phonemes wth preceding consonants of n or k— and psychologically because Korean soldiers constantly mock you for each pidgin dicton you make. Just when you think you have mastered standard Korean, a new wave of hit songs wth beats sung in nonstandard Korean come in vogue. The new Korean songs are recorded in a regional dialect, which is much more diÙcult to lean than the songs sung in standard dialect. But you never lose hope. Soon, you tell yourself that you can ful¦ll your dream of singing in front of real Korean audiences back in Korea on a beautful stage in the poshest, most exclusive neighborhood—G angnam. You must lean each and every song wth a sincere and positve attude, or else you may not pass the constant tests, get kicked oÄ the tour, and lose your livelihood. I begin my book wth this sketch of a scene from what looks like specu- latve ¦cton because not only does this hy po thet cal reversal of a hierarchical, hegemonic cultural impeialism sound horifyng for Ameicans, bubutt this ¦ctve repres enta t tonon also pointedly decenters regimes of repre- senta t tonon prevalent throughout the twenteth c entury that have heav ly pioitzed an Ameican-c entic axs while devaluing the peipheies of any culture, naton, or history that is non-Am Ameican. Flip the Korean wth Ameican in the preceding paragraph, and you get a snapshot of what

2Ñ2 ¬ actually took place duing the postwar years in Korea before the heyday of sho- dan (Korean show troupes for the US Eighth Amy) came to an end wth the intensi¦caton of the Vietnam War by the late 1960s.Ï Most of the best- known South Korean popu lar music acts and composers throughout the ¦rst three de cades of the postwar era, such as Korea’s ¦rst diva crooner, Pat Kim, and the Godfather of Korean Rock, Shin Joong- hyun, started out their careers as sho- dan perfomers.Ó Although the United States of the twenty- ¦rst century now espouses more po lit cal sensitvty regarding issues of race, this was much less true of the United States of the mid- twenteth c entury. When the US military entered the Korean War, then remained there to defend South Korea (hereafter Korea, unless other wse indicated) from further Communist aËgression, Ame i ca was stll a racially segregated naton whose values, cultural identty, and histoical detemina- ton to bing world peace were cultvated very much in the pallor of ideolo- gies of white racial supeioity. The treatment, in other parts of the world, of nonwhite races, along wth their cultural identtes and languages, as equal to that of white Ame i ca was at the tme unthinkable. The eliminaton of racial in equality between black and white soldiers was only in the infancy of discussion, and stll far from real ity, duing the Korean War (1950–53) and the subsequent dec ades. Although black- only platoons were phased out duing the war by then president Harry Truman, racial disciminaton and segregaton remained entrenched in barracks, social life, and civlian life back home.Ô Well untl the mid-1970s, camptown clubs for US military personnel in Korea were segregated—so much so that race iots broke out in several clubs near Camp Humphreys, motvated by black soldiers upset by the de facto policies of segregaton enacted by these clubs and their propietors, which separated entertainers and prosttutes who ser vced white soldiers from t hose who ser vced their black counter- parts.Ö So intense and wdespread were some of the racial tensions between black and white ser vce members in Korea that duing the 1970s several commitees, such as Get It Together (), fomed by US military personnel, and Promote Equality Acton Commitee ( ¬), fomed between military oÙcials and Korean bar owners, had to be established in order to in- vestgate and end racial segregaton at oÄ-base clubs.× Even after more than two dec ades of desegregaton in the Ameican military, so real w ere the racial tensions and dispaites in US military bases that the music played in clubs had to be policed and the Korean club owners censured. As stated by Captain A. D. Malloy, who headed the US Amy , “We check on the vaiety of mmusicusic played in the clubs. They must mix it up; some soul, some

¬ Ñ3 rock, some country and westen. If they don’t mix the music, you get . . . segregaton.”Ü Koreans were often awkwardly caught between the white and black races and were the frequent targets of Afican Ameican anger. A bar owner in Itaewon intervewed for a 1971 artcle published in Stars and Stripes, which probed the racial war brewng in US military bases in Korea, stated, “If a black comes into a place frequented by white s, there’ll be trou ble. There’ll be ¦ghts or the whites wll just leave and not come back. The blacks don’t spend as much money as the whites do.”Þ Korean bar owners’ refusal to serve Afican Ameican soldiers or play the music of their preference out of fear of retibuton from white soldiers did not exactly help ease the tensions in these camptowns, but at the same tme it would be unethical to ¦nd Korean bar girls and propietors culpable for the escalaton of Ameican racial tensions that w ere being played out in Korea at the tme. US military oÙcials could have purchased these clubs and managed them on their own. However, the Ameican military’s acqui- escence in the illegal prosttuton arranged in these clubs largely steered it away from taking such measures. The Korean bar owners and entertainers were thus left wth a prob lem too hot to handle on their own, thereby tuning them into vctms wthout agency in another country’s race war. Korean propietors, like the 2,200 Korean Ameican business owners who suÄered heav ly from damages incurred duing the Saigu event that took place twenty years l ater in Los Angeles when four white oÙcers w ere acquited for beatng a black man, w ere beginning to ¦nd themselves awkwardly caught between white establishment power and black anger.ä As a country, Korea held a strategic geopo lit cal signi¦cance for US policy makers, but the Koreans themselves w ere merely a natve peo ple who happened to inhabit a locaton that did not and could not ¦gure into this discussion for racial equality other than as vctms sandwched between the two races.å For US politcians, K orea has always had more importance as a teritory servng as a bulwark against Communism than for the peo ple who inhabit it. The Korean bars thus had very l itle agency beyond their reluctant control of jukeboxes that had to be played sensitvely and equitably in order to reÛect the musical genres that separated white and black customers. Koreans, considered suÙciently light by white Ameicans and sim ulta n neouslyeously suÙciently dark by black Ameicans, managed to cross the stictly delineated color lines duing this racially segregated era; yet some- tmes this “crossing of the color lines” caused more trou ble than necessary.Ïæ By 2020, exactly seventy years a afterfter the war in Korea that desegregated black soldiers from white soldiers for the ¦rst tme in Ameican military

4Ñ4 ¬ history while making pemanent the divsion of the Korean peninsula along the thirty- eighth parallel, much had changed. Music, ¦guratvely speaking, has ceased to play on the jukebox and is instead listened to va social media– diven streaming apps. And some of the very talents fea - tured on these new online jukeboxes such as YouTube, Spotfy, and Apple Music apps popu lar among young generatons of Ameicans are Korean idols whose music is composed and produced by pop artsts inÛuenced by a diverse se lecton of 1970s Ameican music— including country, rock, funk, soul, disco, and even Latn beats. Korean minjok (natonal ethnic) identty, which has long been situated awkwardly between the two dominant Ameican races, often as an anxous bystander, is fast emerging as an actve global leader in health, tech innovaton, and manufactuing and is claiming a strong stake in global popu lar culture as well. It took more than several generatons for Korean identty to once again become fully engaged in amusement and plea sure through a buoyant cultural revval because re¦guing a new subjectvty under a tghtly administered cap i tal- ist expansion—u nder the auspices of the Ameican-l ed order—i nevtably took tme. Koreans are no longer meekly forced to the sidelines to cau - tously push the butons for an Ameican play list preselected along color lines or lean songs whose meaning and histoical background are foreign to them. Although it is diÙcult to compare such auditon programs of local talents held in Seoul duing the postwar peiod to the public slave auctons held in the United States in the eigh teenth century, what I would like to propose in this book is that South Koreans had to undergo a kind of trans- fomaton that included a pro cess of what Achille Mbembe descibes as “exclusion, brutalizaton, and degradaton” that despised and dishonored their own indigenous fom and spiit in order to be given a manifestaton of cultural rebirth as a “livng crypt of capital” that has become the fungible nom of the twenty- ¦rst century that expanded into the “entre planet [as] the Becoming Black of the world.”ÏÏ What Mbembe is here speci¦cally arguing for is, in the Deleuzian spiit, the renewal of a worldwde blackness that removes itself from a conven- tonal link wth a race- speci¦c category into an economic and cultural alliance of twenty-¦ rst- century subjectvtes sought by the underpivleged class. This two-w ay deracializaton and broadening of blackness is also being hatched speci¦cally in the twenty- ¦rst- century Korean cultural sen- sibility, which no longer partcipates in the Ameican racial war from the sidelines. Korea’s expanding pol itc al, economic, and cultural responsibil- ity now requires Koreans to partcipate in rede¦ning their ethnic i dentty

¬ Ñ5 in relaton to the categoies of global racial subjectvty—i ncluding Mbembe’s “becoming-B lack.” This renewed sense of Korean naton- ness or “becoming- minjok” no longer speaks to the essentalized antcolonial or antforeign kind of natonalism that was ¦rst championed by Korean intellectuals and leaders duing the twenteth century, such as Sin Ch’ae- ho, Yi Kwang-su, and even fomer president Park Chung- hee, who ideal- ized and de¦ned minjok as a pure, patiotc po lit cal idea that de¦ned the people who shared the cultural, linguistc, and geo graph i cal space of the Korean peninsula. My sense of becoming- minjok, or becoming- Korean, in the global cultural scene of the twenty- ¦rst c entury—an era propelled by social media, “divdual” subjectvtes demanded by intenet surveillance, and a renewed importance of subcultures or ga nized around hip- hop and eatng— draws on the less essentalized noton of minjok that frees Korean culture, traditon, and language from the intractable and antcolonial strug- gle for a pure and patiotc assemblage of ethnocentism. I concur wth Jin-kyung Lee, who declared that “Koreanness [has] begun to be delinked from its exclusive atachment to ethnicity.”ÏÓ But this pro- cess has taken place only after a lengthy peiod in the twenteth c entury during which Korean minjok was almost exclusively aligned wth the ethnic dif- ferentaton of the Korean peo ple u nder Japan ese colonial rule and then over its reasserton over the subsequent de cades. As Lee has also argued, “rather than [the Koreanness] that is de¦ned by a moden national citzenship,” the tem han- minjok (the tem han is deived from both one and country, hanguk havng been used by South K orea to name itself a fter 1945) has always insisted on bluring the boundary between the common blood ethnicity and the natonal citzenship that represents Korea.ÏÔ However, the contnued currency of this tem has been threatened by recent reconsidera- ton of the non- ethnocentic designatons that must be given to the tems of citzenship in order to include non-K orean ethnic mig rant setlements and the country’s expanding transnatonal cultural and economic actvtes. It has been the productve actvty of K- pop and other Korean popu lar culture products in cinema, food, and tele v sion that has ushered in this new sense oÕ “becoming- minjok” or “becoming- Korean” that has loosened the link between the noton of a common ethnic bloodline and Koreanness. As an ethnic identty of the prevous era, the Korean minjok has rarely been given any kind of notce in Amei c a, wth the rare excepton of the ever-p resent North Korean threat. The earearlier sketch of foreign military– sponsored auditons for local entertainers directly showcases what Mi - chel Foucault descibed as biopolitcs, established through “a new mecha-

6Ñ6 ¬ nism of power” that exerted a control apparatus over a large populaton of local entertainers who could be replaced, dismissed, and disposed at whim.ÏÖ Here, too, I am indebted to the work of çin-k yung Lee, who has employed Foucault’s concept of biopolitcs, as well as that of Mbembe’s necropolitcs, in examining the precaious and disposable labor of Korean sex workers in US camptowns throughout the postwar years. Lee focuses on three working- class labor contexts (Korean military l abor in Vietnam, Korean military prosttuton for the United States, and Asian migrant labor in con temporary South K orea) in what she calls the “transnatonal prole- taianizaton of race,” arguing that t hese l abors have consttuted the “most disposable ( labor) commodites.”Ï× Missing from Lee’s analy sis, however, is the extensive entertainment labor produced by K orea throughout the later part of the twenteth century. Because some of the entertainment labor devoted to the US military overlapped wth employment in Korean broadcastng companies and clubs, it is diÙcult to estmate precisely how many sho- dan perfomers were needed at a given tme in Korea. However, as early as the late 1950s, the demand for Korean perfomers in Ameican military clubs was so high that several Korean talent agencies—each employng hundreds of singers and musicians—began operatons to train for the auditons held in Yongsan.ÏÜ Trained and auditoned before Ameican military judges, these perfomers would soon come to consttute the citcal l abor base for the entre Korean popu lar m usic industry in the years to come. Many of t hese talented instrumentalists and vocalists, who included many composers and singers ranging from folk singer Cho Dong- jin to rock superstar Cho Yong- pil, could copy an Ameican song wthin days of it hitng the charts in Ame i ca. Many of these Korean male and female artsts of sho- dan were treated as disposable and forced to work under dire conditons, much like the sex workers in the military camps. However, one signi¦cant distncton has to be made between these two con spic u ous ser vce labor sectors that emerged from the US military base camp areas in Korea: unlike female sex workers, whom Lee associates wth “necropo lit cal labor” (“the extracton of labor from those ‘condemned’ to death, whereby the fosteing of life, already premised on their death or the disposability of their lives, is limited to servcing the demands of the state or empire”), some of t hese musical perfomers w ere able to move forward in their lives and c areers, prevent- ing their own l abor from becoming disposable by seeking out musical and artstc innovatons that led to them becoming the biËgest names in Korean showbiz after reting from their Ameican sho- dan careers.ÏÞ Put another

¬ Ñ7 way, what could have potentally been disposed of as simple copycat machines compising a mere footnote in world m usic history emerged from these postwar ashes to sow the seeds for au then tc acts on some of the most prominent stages in the world, incubatng an excitng hybid fom of twenty- ¦rst- century cultural identty. The demand for Koreans to produce an endless supply chain of disposable, oÄ- white/blackish entertainment bodies regulated by Ameican hegemony would, throughout the later twenteth century, become remediated, re- ethnonatonalized into a new, cool Koreanness, one that would prepare itself for the transnatonal, cosmopolitan sense of hallyu (the “Korean Wave”) located between the es - sental and the disposable, between white and black, and between Korean and Ameican. This was perhaps the entertainment version of what Joshua Neves has temed “underglobalizaton” to descibe the “fictons and folds between an emergent China and prevailing hegemonic structures” that focus on the role of counterfeits and fakes that undergird China’s relatonship to global media technologies in the twenty- ¦rst century.Ïä Despite the Korean traditonal expeience that has overvalued austere eruditon of Chinese poetry stemming from sadaejuŭi (revere the great) and has si mul tan eously underappreciated peasant per fo mances rooted in oral art and mask dance due to their vulgaity and unpredictability, the postwar cultural development in K orea steeped in mimicry of the foreign was pos si ble because popu lar culture in traditonal K orea was one that was diven by the power of sinmyŏng (in Korean, the hallucinatory divne energÍ that dives up the Shamanistc spiits and excitement for com - munal fun and entertainment), as w ll be explained in chapter 7. Be cause sinmyŏng can only be enacted by partcipatory conditons of per fo mances where the stage is arbitraily set and the demarcaton between perfomers and partcipants constantly breaks down, unlike that between yangban (aistocrats) and kisaeng (courtesans) whose separaton is citcal along the lines of class, gender, and perfomatve roles, it can be argued that Korea is among many counties, such as Ireland, Poland, and elsewhere, where its mass culture always actvely engaged in a postmoden culture long before the tem postmodernism was even coined. As Namhee Lee points out in her analy sis of madanggŭk (open- air theater) in the 1970s, when sinmyŏng had been recaptured for the purpose of transfoming the traditonal mask dance (t’alch’um) into a protest theater duing the Park Chung- hee era, the “most potent aspect of folk drama was not only the breakdown of the traditonal actor/spectator and self/other divsion, but also the transfomatve power of liminality, enabling the audience to move from observng a drama

8Ñ8 ¬ to partcipatng in a transfomatve event.”Ïå Because the entertainment industry, w hether in the West or in the East, has always been centrally engineered not by people from the class of nobility but by those from the class of daubers, crooners, shamans, and clowns, who almost always resided along the margins of the society, many Koreans, as long as they adopted the language, gestures, and styles of the foreign, could swftly purchase an agency of cultural assets or capital that could be communicated in a shared, communal envronment that moves beyond an indivdual, pivate enterpise that mythologizes the artst as a hemetc romantc genius.Óæ

sHo- dan 2.0

Through these uneven and erratc histoical developments, Korean identty as a new postmoden and a new proto- ethnic enterpise is now creeping into the lives of Ameican youth through its enomously seductve music vdeos and alluing tele v sion dramas, which draw enomous atenton and numbers of likes in the global social media scene while dominatng new culinary and fashion trends. The worldwde twenteth- century youth culture that grew up wth the intenet and social media and was no longer con¦ned to the same natonal, mono- ethnic, or even monolingual identtes found the hybid identty retweeted from Korean YouTube channels fascinatng and atractve. The prevously intractable Korean identty of the twenteth century, steeped in an antcolonial, proto- ethnic minjok identty by the tme it produced a new generaton of post- sho- dan perfomers, had already under gone a huge facelift: call it a “Sho- dan 2.0” update. Many of the young talents in Korea who ved for a spot in K- pop idol groups duing the early years of the twenty- ¦rst century were auditoning for management com pany executves who w ere either younger partners of oiginal sho- dan perfomers (such as Lee Soo- man of Entertainment) or new clientele of Ameican military â club culture in Korea (such as Yang Hyun- seok of Entertainment, who leaned breakdancing by associatng wth young black soldiers in Itaewon and was the sidekick to Seo Taiji, who was once a bassist in the legendary heavy- metal band Sinawe led by guitaist Shin Dae-ch chul,ul, the son of Shin Joong- hyun). Since the 1980s, these executves had begun to see how Ameican soldiers and Korean entertainers had started to exchange their cultural capital and socialize in places like Itaewon wthout monetary compensaton for their entertainment ser vces. “Sho-dan 2.0” loosened and rendered opaque histoical and ethnic speci¦city

¬ Ñ9 of minjok from Korean identty—a necessary step that broadened the Ko- reanness in order for its pop music, comedies, dramas, ¦lms, and food to Ûow into the everyday lives of young people livng outside K orea. When Korean entertainers ¦rst picked up their electronic guitars and sang into the microphones in order to sell their talent to Ameicans, their ethnic cultural background had to be repressed; a fter seventy years, in the era of social media, Koreans have naturalized this cultural conditon where their ethnic identty remains compromised. The several- decade- old pursuit of a musical mugukjŏk (nonnatonal) identty, or a pseudo- Ameican one, has manufactured success that is unpre- ce dented elsewhere in the world. K- pop is one of the most successful popular music genres in the world today, not b ecause of its accentuaton of beats, melodies, and rhythms that distnguish themselves from those of Ameican hegemonic sounds but because of its close proxmity to t hese sounds. The ironic eÄect is quite evdent when Korean entertainment companies hold auditons to select their new trainees— many young singers, dancers, and talents from all over the world, including the United States, make their pil- gimage to Seoul—or when fomer US president Donald Trump discusses a Korean ¦lm as a foreign cultural elem ent that unsetles the puity and wholesomeness of Ameican culture.ÓÏ The young auditonees are some- tmes asked to perfom before their Korean judges only a few miles away from Yongsan, the very spot where the auditons w ere held for Koreans to entertain the occupyng Ameican military personnel. T hese days, despite the recent diplomatc and economic war brewng between South Korea and Japan, many young Japa nese talents, some of them established stars in their own country, lean new songs in Korean to compete against the local Korean talents.ÓÓ The putatvely postethnic rendeing of Korean language, customs, rhythm, beats, and themes has pemited t hese cultural products aesthetcized, perfomed, and enacted by Koreans in the twenty- ¦rst century to reach a quasi- global and ambivalently hegemonic status. Despite the ubiquity and populaity of K- pop, K- cinema, and K- drama that seemingly reached every coner of the world today, this cultural hegemony is ambivalent because it is built on cultural reappropiaton crafted from mimicry. My usage oÕ “mimicry” is deived from Homi K. Bhabha’s seminal artcle, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Dis- course,” where he argues that the colonial subject is a product of a “refomed, recognizablerecognizable Other, as a subject of a dierence that is almost the same, but not quite.”ÓÔ Korea’s globalizaton that took place duing the post– World War II years had to do wth a new fom of mass culture constructed under

10Ñ ¬ the rubic of undeniably Ameican identty. However, Korea’s own version of its Ame i ca, or miguk (the Korean tem for the United States, which is deived from two Chinese characters— mi, beautful, and guk, country), just like India’s appropiaton of Bitshness, simulated and reinvented Ameican cultural artfacts, styles, and pop products. Between the source (Ame i ca) and its Korean quotaton (miguk), a slippage and a misappro - piaton were undeniably interjected, despite the best eÄorts by Koreans to replicate the Ameican per fo mances. This simultaneous appropiaton and misappropiaton opened the door for innovaton—an innovaton that was fraught wth an appreciaton of imitaton and fakery that framed the everyday life of many of the Korean artsts who could not even under - stand the language and gestures of the Ameican standard and model. The century- old repression of minjok identty— ¦rst under the colonial occupaton of the Japa nese empire and then under the military occupaton by the United States— was lifted, but K orea’s cultural ren ais sance duing the ¦rst two dec ades of the twenty-¦ rst c entury had to satsfy the global commercial demand, on the part of a social media–diven youth culture, for a non- ethnocentic ident¦caton that evaded the contnuing racial- cultural war between whiteness and blackness. In the newly negotated cultural plenitude of the post–P ax Ameicana era, miguk- i¦ed South Korea was the perfect “Murica,” celebratng the new post-ethnonatonalist K- pop and K- cinema and also rejectng the category of both Donald Trumpian whiteness and the intense, urban subjecthood of blackness.ÓÖ The blackish or oÄ- white Korean subjectvty that emerged in the era of social media was a perfect assemblage of codes, styles, and memes that would self- correct the potental errors and insults that could isk damaging one’s reputaton around the issue of race.Ó× A new cultural post- minjok (or becoming- minjok) Korean popu lar sentment was bon out of t hese citcal imitatons that re- membered the foundaton of the soul—of both Korean and black Ameican. There was prob ably no other place in the era of Pax Ameicana outside the United States where the leaning of the Ameican— the aesthetcs, styles, and language— was as intense and durable as it was in Korea over the past three- quarters of a century. Duing this tme, releaning the foreign culture meant not only recalibratng the Korean soul and the wounds of being a Korean but also forgetng the oigins of black resentment that were deeply rooted in many m usic genres, such as jazz, blues, soul, rock ’n’ roll, âµ, and hip-h op. Koreans leaned to enact a two- step, double gesture of mimicking and innovatng—whichw hich immersed its own miguk in the

¬ Ñ11 Korean movements, rhythm, and language. This pro cess of miguk- i¦caton both weakened and intensi¦ed the Korean emotons and soul, which for many dec ades ended up playng hide- and- seek wth Korea’s survval acts of mimicry. Thus, one can argue that South K orea has exploited a close sociopo lit cal alliance wth the United States over the past several de cades that produced a simulaton of Ameican concepton of culture— one that rescrambled and rendered opaque the local Koreanness before it began cir- culatng through global social media. If Bhabha’s postcolonial employment of the tem mimicry sought to queston the level of success of the cultural appropiaton the colonial and postcolonial elites w ere forced to adapt by raising the impossibility of approxmaton in every act of simulaton or imitaton (he sarcastcally transfoms “almost the same, but not quite” into “almost the same but not white”), there are other instances of the use of mimicry that come to de¦ne the traditon of, for example, mask theater.ÓÜ As wll be discussed l ater, especially in the chapter on Korean comedies, mimicry can be a fom of car- nivalesque play where the hierarchical diÄerence between adult and child, oiginal and imitator, and the colonizer and the colonized breaks down. I am drawn not only to the postcolonial employment of the tem mimicry but also to the theoies of Roger Caillois, a postwar French theoist who has argued for the tem mimicry as the de¦ning tendency of human nature toward play.ÓÞ In the followng chapter’s discussion of Korean real ity comedy programs, I rely on Caillois’s de¦niton of mimicry. Afican Ameican literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory on the “Signifyn(g) mon- key” is also one trope that references ¦gures of ticksters and talking ani- mals from black folk tales and verbal games of exchanging insults such as “ Dozens” in order to foreground the importance of game and play in in - stances of black cultural producton. Here, mimicry becomes a crucial tool to oÄset not just one fom of power but all foms of power. Gates’s theo - ies valoize parody, mask theater, and the tauntng that constantly seek to deconstruct power to the extent where much of the essences of power disintegrate. Gates’s observaton on “Signifyn(g),” which broadly includes imitatons, jokes, and even travesty as a citcal practce exhibits the plea- sure of liberty that is at stake wthin the discourse of mimicry. This book also pays atenton to how the act of mimicry passed from an inital colonial simulaton of the dominant colonizer to an ambivalent and ironic one before assuming a hegemony in an ambivalent fom. When I examine the controversy oÕ “kimchi impeialism” in China in a later chapter,

12Ñ ¬ I queston w hether this charge against Korean impeialism in China is valid. Perhaps the biËgest cultural paradox of the ¦rst two dec ades of the twenty- ¦rst c entury is that South K orea, a country that once had no identty to the rest of the world other than the naton ravaged by war and the threat of Communism, has not only survved the “auditon” tests administered by US military oÙcers but wthin a generaton and a half has graduated from these acts of simply copyng Ameican hit songs to achievng its sta - tus as one of the most successful cultural content makers in the global arena. Auditons are stll popu lar, but in the place of foreign military advsors tryng to entertain their soldiers, local businessmen who grew up themselves listening to Ameican songs serve as judges to select young perfomers who wll together set the new global standard in world pop today. Young Korean talents do stll fear getng kicked oÄ the “tour bus,” but even if they do get kicked oÄ eventually, they w ll not face starvaton and poverty. And once they are oÙcially on the bus after years of hard training, the results may be much sweeter than shaing a stage in front of an audience of drunk soldiers. Over the ¦rst two de cades of the twenty- ¦rst century, a Korean’s ac cep- tance of Ameicanizaton and commercializaton helped overcome their own deep intenal contradictons between global and local, and eÄectvely allowed them to transcibe cinematc language, music genres, and even ide- ologÍ that oiginated in Ame i ca into a power ful discourse that we now brush aside along wth the coinage of hallyu. However, what needs to be recognized h ere is that this ¦rst step or act of appropiaton- cum- double gesture that at least had to acknowledge and abandon its own minjok (ethnic naton- ness) was not just a natonal reenactment but a reconsttuton of itself as a proto- ethnic identty wthin the Pan- Ameican global order. The unraveling of the boundary between authentcity and quotaton ges- tured through the Korean act of mimicry, in other words, proclaimed the birth of a new ethnic and natonal subjectvty that is both Ameican and Korean and that is raciopo lit cally located somewhere between oÄ- white (complicit) and blackish (resistant). I insist on this refusal of the essentalist bifurcaton between “whiteness” as a fom of complicity and “blackness” as a res is tance b ecause for a Korean throughout the days of Pax Amei- cana to identfy more wth an Afican Ameican than a Caucasian Amei- can would have stll required one to subversively reinscibe the praxs of AmAmeicaneican hegemony. Throughout the book, I oÄer these two tems, o- white and blackish, as a discourse that ties to read t hese two colors as

¬ Ñ13 metonymic references to suËgest the two- headed conditon of hegemony that inseparably interartculates the Gramscian tropes of coercion and sub- version.Óä How this new identty trapped between neo co lo nial subjectv- ity and a postcolonial one became reartculated into a dominant wave of culture— where its new act of the day (µ, for instance) has totally sub- verted the dominant hierarchy between oiginal and copy and can now ival even several of the top Ameican music acts, such as Taylor Swft and Justn Bieber, in tems of album downloads, YouTube vews, and concert tcket sales—is what foms my theoretcal frame of hegemonic mimicry. In other words, what my book aims at is, ¦rst, to situate Korean popu lar culture of the past two de cades as one of the most discenible and con- spic u ous examples of the blurred boundary between oiginal and copy that has rendered a cata log of postmoden cultural contents par excel- lence. Second, this book explores the phenomena that made this K- pop fame pos si ble, including not only the ingenuity and per sis tence of Korean artsts and cultural innovators who notoiously spend countless hours in training but also the global culture dominated by social media, which over the past two de cades has empowered users’ parody, fandom, and remakes, and these, in retun, have weakened the traditonal borders between natons, languages, and the oiginality- copy divde. Third, what I would like to also insist in this pro cess of Korea’s act of creatve mimicry, or as I call it, “hegemonic mimicry,” is the recogniton of Korean reclamaton of both the proto- and post- minjok identty that has rendered opaque its natonal identty, for its very survval, and which has shadowed many of the Korean per fo mances, expeiences, and cultural uterances of the moden age. This book considers race, along wth natonal identty, as one of the most impor- tant, if not the most signi¦cant, citeia through which the K- pop and other Korean culture waves of the twenty- ¦rst century have enacted a cultural re nais sance. Though the era of colonial rule more or less came to a halt wth the conclusion of World War II, the cultural Koreanness that was developed in the later part of the twenteth century and has atained a recognizable global awareness in the twenty- ¦rst century is one case that exempli¦es an idea that Stuart Hall insisted on when he stated that the “noton of a natonal fomaton, of a natonal economy, that could be represented through a natonal- culturalcultural identty is underunder considerable pressure.”pressure.”Óå Hall was then discussing the untenable nature of natonal- cultural identty fomaton for the UK and the decline of unitary Bitsh culture throughout the early part of the twenteth c entury. But this untenable trend has become more or

14Ñ ¬ less true also for Ameicanness, which replaced Bitshness duing the lat- ter part of the twenteth century. Also valued is Hall’s emphasis on the “de- centeing of natonal- cultural identty,” for this moden Koreanness is linked to an expeience of oppositon: colonial subjecton and not subscipton to major language blocs divded into En glish, Spanish, French, Chi- nese, and so forth that now signify the structure of world culture today.Ôæ The increased signi¦cance of the new “becoming- Korean” identty is less unitary and more transnatonal, and is the cultural consequence of the ac- celerated pace of expansion of Ameican cultural impeialism of the twenteth century. Koreans have nouished a system of popu lar culture that has rendered its own ethnic and natonalist Ûavors opaque in order for its survval in the face of global competton against Ameican cultural content and media industies. So the ambitons of cultural power for the Koreans setle for a milder and tamer version of Koreanness that is as deeply fied as its own recipe oÕ “yangnyeom chicken” that was once imported from the United States soon after the Korean War but, since then, has made great stides as a foreign- adopted Korean cultural product to achieve a Ûavor all its own. If just one short de cade of severe cultural and ethnic eradicaton in the fom of naisen ittai (squashing of the two natonal bodies, Japan and Korea, into one), ushered in duing the Japan ese colonial era between 1937 and 1945, produced an entre generaton of Koreans who were later forced to relean their own language and reacquire their own ethnic pide, by con- trast the hallyu identty cultvated duing the Ameican military occupaton, although making the ethnic identty of Koreans opaque, also clearly celebrated Korean as a unique language, thereby leading to the ise of global stars who were not necessaily Ûuent or even semi-Ûuent in English. Most µ members, wth the excepton of RM, stll refuse to speak any En- glish on Ameican tele v sion shows, and ¦lmmaker Bong Joon-ho wll not publicly appear on stage wthout the aid of a translator. Even a fter generatons of close military, economic, and cultural alliance wth the United States, can Koreans, who stll insist on speaking a minor language that most Ameicans do not register as a distant cousin of En g lish, such as Spanish or French, atain more than the status oÕ “honorary” Ameican partner? Can Koreans achieve the status of a “true” Ameican fiend wth crossover sensibilites that diversify the very meaning of Ameica or, in Korean tems, a miguk, a “beautful country” that stretches even beyond the neoliberal idea of multethnic diversity and a parochial sense of Amei- can exceptonalism?

¬ Ñ15 miguK- ification after tHe rusH to defend Korea

After 1945, South K orea was po litc ally and econ om ically already well placed wthin the column of Pax Ameicana, but culturally a Korean had to chart a path forward between “two waring ideals”— the clash of these ideals being not between the Korean and the foreign but between one occupyng foreign impeial power and another. Japan ese music, language, and fashion had totally overwhelmed those of Korea duing the era of naisen itai (1937–45), and, despite the vo lence and the resentment that Kore- ans suÄered duing the Japa nese colonial peiod, because of the proxmity of race, geography, and shared cultural heitage between the two natons, Japanese- style songs and culture did not immediately vanish a fter 1945.ÔÏ Furthemore, some histoians argue that Japanese- style songs called enka are rooted in Korean folk traditon, which may further complicate the use of the tem Japanese- style.ÔÓ Ethnomusicologist Dohee Kwon wites that telev sion and radio statons in South K orea often had to face a choice between Ameican- style Korean pop music ( ) and Japanese- colored songs (à¬, which w ere composed in the Westen- Japanese pentatonic scale), which had the fourth (Fa) and seventh (Ti) notes of the octave scale (Do- Re- Mi-Fa- Sol- Ra- Ti- Do) missing.ÔÔ By the 1980s, the à¬-inspired trot ballad songs had declined rapidly against the increasing populaity of songs. The most dominant band of the 1980s, Tŭlgukhwa, for example, was heav ly inspired by Ameican rock bands such as the Ea gles and Styx, and the popu lar songs they perfomed for the past four de cades did not pay any homage to the trot ballads that w ere cousins to the à¬. Cho Yong-pil, who has remained a bona ¦de superstar in Korea for the past several de cades and is beter known as an Ameican- style rock star, started his career as a trot ballad singer. As wll be discussed in chapter 1, the hallyu idol at the tun of the millennium was incubated after Korean entertainment management com pany heads were inspired by J- pop idols; however, K- pop has developed a genre and style that is decisively . The thud- ding sounds of drums and low bass lines— accompanied by power ful dance choreography—d istnguish K- pop from other m usic genres that are popular among young teens. InÛuenced in part by the Swedish songwitng phenom Max Martn, who produced for the Backstreet Boys and Bitney Spears s imple melody-d iven hit songs laid over exaËgerated bass instru- mentaton and drum tracks, some of the top songs of K- pop, such as µ’s recent “Icon” and ë ’s “Growl,” feature an addictve balladic chorus soar- ing over the distnguished bass lines and hard- hitng drum tracks. Though

16Ñ ¬ trot beats and melodies stll resonate deep in the soul of most Koreans today, as sensatonally popu lar auditon programs Mister Trot and Miss Trot aired in 2020–21 on Chosun have proven, K- pop has eÄectvely erased the specter of à¬- inspired trot music from its repertoire. The tension between à¬ and resulted in perhaps the big - gest cultural batle duing the second half of the twenteth century in Korea— wthout e ither of the two being the decisive wnner for several de cades. The Godfather of Korean rock, Shin Joong- hyun, wrote not only rock tracks but also ballads inspired by both and à¬ inÛuences, re- spectvely blues and trot, such as a 1970 song, “Nim ŭn mon kot e” (Love so far away), crooned by female diva Kim Ch’u-ja. Sung in the key of E minor, “Nim” is quite possibly the most beloved song composed duing the post– Korean War era.ÔÖ Just like many of his other songs, such as “Mi-in,” “Nim” is composed in a pentatonic scale, which has brought the charge that it falls neatly into the trot style. The song was revved again in 2014 in a music auditon program called Trot X. However, the minor pentatonic scale alone does not a Japanese- style song make.Ô× Many popu lar guitar iÄs and solos, including Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and “Stairway to Heaven,” rely on guitar play that deives from the same minor pentatonic scale, and yet hardly an ounce of what Koichi Iwabuchi has called “a cultural odor” can be sniÄed on t hese classic hard- rock songs that would carry a fragrance oÕ “Japan.”ÔÜ They rely on a minor pentatonic scale because Led Zeppelin and many rock bands duing the 1970s w ere inÛuenced by blues melodies that veer away from the octave scale.ÔÞ Well- known rock ’n’ roll ballads composed duing the 1970s, including “Another Bick in the Wall (Part 2)” by Pink Floyd, used this scale, simply because it was then fash ion able for white Ameican and Bitsh rock bands to appropiate the minor pentatonic blues scale from Afican Ameican music of the South. Since both enka and blues are built on a minor pentatonic scale, as is much of folk m usic from vai ous traditons, one could argue that the fact that “Nim” is sung in an E- minor pentatonic scale does not de¦ne its sound as distnctvely Korean, as opposed to distnctvely Westen or, more speci¦cally, Ameican. But stll the queston remains, which between the two consttutes a larger influ - ence on the song “Nim”? Is it the Japan ese, and therefore East Asian, enka icon Hibai Misora, or the Afican Ameican blues icon Eta James singing “Swng Low, Sweet Chaiot”? The truth is prob ably somewhere in the middle. Shin Joong- hyun was inÛuenced by both classic Korean trot structures and Afican Ameican blues melodies when he composed the song; in fact, “Nim” could be sung in the style of e ither Hibai Misora or

¬ Ñ17 Eta James. There are many versions of the song available—in blues, trot, or even disco and rap.Ôä The batle between à¬ and tlted heav ly in favor of the later as the sho- dan perfomers started to produce, compose, and sing for t hese Korean consumers who were increasingly embracing Ameican trends and fads. Throughout the later part of the twenteth century, blackness in South K orea was both a taboo subject and a cultural fascinaton. The Korean War was the ¦rst war engaged in that oÙcially ended racial segregaton wthin the US military, which resulted in the higher vsibility of Afican Ameican soldiers. Duing the Korean War, the all- black infantry that were in exstence in the US military since 1869 were disbanded, of- ¦cially ending the era of segregaton in the US Amy.Ôå Six hundred thou- sand Afican Ameicans served in the Amed Forces duing the Korean War, and millions more since have served their duty in K orea after the amistce was signed in 1953. Black soldiers have consistently represented a higher share of actve- duty military personnel over the past several decades than their share of the US populaton.Öæ Though it was illegal for the US military to racially identfy their personnel in the 1950s and 1960s, black soldiers contnued to occupy a central place in the popu lar imagina- ton of Koreans who perceived black soldiers as a vs i ble and integral part of the US military. Much of the popu lar ¦cton that depicts the Korean War, ranging from Ahn Junghyo’s novel Silver Stallion (1990) to the more recent ¦lm Swing Kids (dir. Kang Hyong- chul, 2018), centrally foreground black military personnel in the US Amy.ÖÏ While the postwar Korean literary canon does not feature a witer such as Ōe Kenzaburo, who sought alliances between “Negro Ameican Lit er a ture and Moden Japan ese Lit- er a ture” by creatng, in the words of William H. Bidges IV, “an analogical link between his own works and black lit er a ture,” the impact oÕ “blackness” on Korean popu lar culture is profound and unerasable.ÖÓ In a recent intervew, Han Myung- sook, one of the most famous singers of her day and stll known today for her megahit song “Noran shassŭ ŭi sanai” (The man wth a yellow shirt) from 1961, was one of the perfomers who leaned her trade while singing for the US military sho- dan. She was so popu lar among the Ameican troops that she led several tours of her own in Vietnam duing the 1960s and perfomed for the US troops t here. Han recalls, “E very tme an auditon was held, we had to pull an all- nighter. New songs w ere sung, especially in black pronunciaton, so it was even more diÙcult. But we stll try to copy it . . . ccopy opy it all the way. . . . WWe e could never leave behind a tape recorder. We would always carry it wth us. Because if a new hit song came

18Ñ ¬ out, we had to study it on the spot.”ÖÔ The act of mimicry that singer Han Myung- sook is recollectng here is a speci¦c kind of cultural appropiaton located among the full vaiety of Ameicanness. It was the black vaiety of Ameicanness that needed to be copied by the Korean in order to survve as an entertainer duing postwar poverty- idden Korea. As test¦ed in numerous intervews given by Korean entertainers of the 1960s and 1970s, the essence or act of putng on Ameicanness was, in other words, authentcated by Asian, speci¦cally Korean, musicians and artsts by emulatng and reproducing black voices, black bodily movements, and black styles.ÖÖ If En glish colonialism in India, to borrow the words of Bhabha, was a tongue “that is forked, not false,” the expeience of Ameican neo co loni al ism in K orea over the past seventy-¦ ve years was steeped in a tongue that occupied a teritory de¦nitvely beyond s imple dichotomies of black and white, somewhere between oÄ- white and blackish.Ö× This is true despite the fact that Koreans as subjects occupied by a dominant global- politcal power often consttuted a positon that fell lower than that of either black or white Ameican, as reÛected in both novels and ¦lms of the tme. The Korean ethnic identty that was bon out of a post-1945, neo- co lonial expeience wth the United States was diÄ er ent from that of the postcolonial identty de¦ned by Bhabha and Hall, whose scholarship was shaped by the En glish colonial expeience in India and in Jamaica wthin the span of their or their parents’ generaton’s lifetmes. The style of Bol- lywood ¦lmmaking that began in postwar, postn de pen dence India also reshaped global music, fashion, and food, and contnues to impact con- temporary global culture today, while the reËgae and Rastafaian fads from Jamaica that took the world by stom in the 1970s have sustained their populaity and global inÛuence well into the twenty- ¦rst century. How- ever, these cultural phenomena initally served largely the Anglophone and global ethnic populatons that motvated fandom across regions that shared common cultural heitage. Bollywood, for example, contnues to enjoy populaity almost exclusively among English- speaking or Hindi and Hindustani- diaspoic regions. The unique and ironic characteistc of Korean popu lar culture is that its cultural essence has been carved out by Korean, a minor language spoken by only seventy-¦ ve million peo ple among a global populaton of seven and a half billion. This number makes Korean a minor language but certainly unique if one considers the fact that it is a language that stepped onto the global stage wth its use among almost exclusively one single ethnic identty. This opaque, and yet linguis- tcally unique, raciality that Koreans and Korean cultural producton have

¬ Ñ19 staked helps establish an ambivalent cultural hegemony in other counties that do not feel as threatened by this Koreanness as by Ameican cultural dominaton. We must remember that merely a few dec ades earlier, cultural content made by and featuing Koreans was barely known outside Korea. In real ity, this content was barely known inside Korea. The biËgest hit ¦lms, hit dramas, and most con spic u ous songs blaing in the streets and cafés of Seoul were products that bore stamps of the foreign. No natonalist campaigns, no foreign ¦lm quotas, and not even outight cultural bans against par tc- u lar counties could help relieve the percepton of Korean cultural content as poor entertainment consumeist products. Just about the only popu lar cultural products made in Korea that were popu lar among Koreans before the tun of the millennium were tele v sion dramas broadcast in the eve- ning hours that catered largely to female audiences and ballad songs called kayo that sentmentally appealed to audiences of vai ous age groups. Be- fore the unique and uni¦ed linguistc system of hangul helped relaunch K- pop and other Korean cultural content in the twenty-¦ rst century, far more popul ar than the local vaiety in the Korean soil was the music by Ameican and Bitsh rock groups. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the Korean music industry went into a deep recession. The biËgest reason was, of course, the po lit cal censorship of the tme that targeted popu lar culture in Korea, resultng in the blacklistng, impisonment, or exle of many g reat musicians. But t here were other reasons as well. Kim Young, the rec ord com pany head executve who led the re nais sance of Korean kayo throughout the late 1980s representng Korean blues singers Kim Hyun- sik and Kim Hyun- cheol alongside rock bands like Tǔlgukhwa, states, “At the tme [from 1978 to 1982, when Kim Young was r unning a small rec ord store], Westen classical and pop consttuted about 80 or 90 percent of total sales of s. Who would buy kayo those days? . . . In my store, I would play music all day long. Beatles, Bee Gees, and Simon and Garfunkel, and then I would play a Korean album . . . and it was embarrassing. Professional engineeing was absent in Korean a lbums at the tme. . . . Arrangement, producton, and recording technologÍ had to all change, and be updated.”ÖÜ South Korea’s failure to technologically keep up wth the recording and cinema industry of the rest of the advanced world could not satsfy the consumers who w ere beginning to have more choices as K orea was open- ing its cultural sector market to the West. ThroughoutThroughout the 1980s and 1990s, Korean cinema also similarly slumped and could not recapture the glory days of the 1960s. Theaters were old,

20Ñ ¬ subject m aters anachronistc, and the producton value of ¦lms not up- to- date wth the standards set by Hollywood. An average Korean duing the 1990s only chose to watch one ¦lm per year (compared to more than four ¦lms annually now), and chances are he or she would choose to watch a Hollywood ¦lm rather than a local one.ÖÞ As I have witen elsewhere, against the ¦repower of Hollywood stars such as Anold SchwarzeneËger and Sylvester Stallone, Korean cinema could throw only naked bodies of women and erotc images to compete for just a sliver of domestc market share.Öä While Hollywood blockbusters dominated the local box oÙces, it was also foreign ¦lms featuing Kevn Costner and Sharon Stone and tele- v sion drama and acton seies such as The Incredible Hulk and MacGyver that consttuted the talk of the town as popu lar entertainment’s center- piece. So popu lar w ere Hollywood seies and ¦lms on telev s ion that Ko- rean voice actors cast to provde the voices of Hollywood stars such as Al Pacino and Sharon Stone were even busier than the local Korean stars.Öå Even for the toddler and youth audiences, Japa nese animatons such as Doraemon, Candy, Sailor Moon, and Dragon Ball, dubbed in Korean voices, ¦lled the airtme on daytme tele v sion.×æ So what happened? Well, leavng out miguk- i¦caton from the equaton for now, in two words, the intenet. South Korea was one of the earliest adopters of intenet technologÍ. In Korea, cell phones, personal computers, and high- speed intenet technologÍ caught on very quickly— penetratng the majoity of personal homes as early as the 1990s. If the military dictatorship from the 1960s to the 1990s achieved one thing in Korea, it was the protecton of the chaebol industial conglomerates to become compettve in the global marketplace. Electronic companies in par tc u lar grew very fast in Korea. Many electronic companies, such as ¬, Samsung, and , rose to intenatonal power through their manufactuing eÙciency and innovatons in digital technologÍ, and the smartphone market in South K orea proved fertle testng grounds.×Ï Korea Telecommunicaton ( ) was one of the ¦rst companies in the world that allowed smartphones to leap beyond the hoops of 3, , and now 5 networks and equally fast- paced cable intenet speeds. This paralleled the upward swng of Korea’s youth to become power players in online games, peer- to- peer technologÍ- based streaming vdeo channels, and K-po popp m usic content distibuton. Both the dazzling speed through which Koreans could type because of the unique alphabet system of hangul that allows for faster typing speeds and the Korean telecommunicaton companies that dive each other to compete for higher intenet and mobile data network speeds allowed early online forums for

¬ Ñ21 young fans of K- pop and K- cinema to meet, socialize, and trade infomaton at a clip faster than that of any other place in the world.×Ó While entertainment industies in the rest of the world remained wary about pos si ble copyight infingement and the illegal downloads that would result from actvely postng oÙcial music vdeos of their artsts online, when YouTube caught ¦re in the early years of the twenty-¦ rst century, K- pop management companies saw its potental as a partner for the fu ture and began postng their content on the vdeo- shaing website to create an immediate connecton wth their fans overseas.×Ô Needless to say, this bold move paid oÄ, as YouTube became as sensatonal and vral as K- pop over the past de cade and a half. It is extremely diÙcult to imagine the global K- pop sensatons of the 2010s—“ Gangnam Style” in the early part of the dec ade and µ, the boy idol group from Korea, in the later part of the decade— wthout the aid of YouTube and other social media platfoms to galvanize fans around the world. It is temptng to say that the intenet was the sole f actor that changed the game for Korean pop culture and leave it at that. But, as the tem K- pop has become ubiquitous and has boasted perhaps the most recognizable icons around the world over the past two de cades, Korea’s early adopton oÕ “intenet” culture and its quick embrace to spread K- pop content cannot alone explain the reasons behind K- pop’s success. Korean popu lar culture did indeed suÄer duing the era of the military dictatorship, and the Ko - rean hallyu wave did bene¦t from the South Korean govenment’s policy to promote cultural content initated by the more liberal presidents that followed the long peiod of military dictatorship. But again, that alone does not suÙce to explain the global success of K- pop or other Korean cultural content. Neither can South Korea’s economic ise as one of the most signi¦cant ¦nancial global powers over the past half century oÄer on its own an adequate explanaton for the rapid global success of Korean cultural content. If economic indexes were to serve as the most impor tant citeia through which popular cultural values are set, then the United Arab Emir- ates and Norway, which boast two of the highest per capita s in the world, should occupy a level of global dominance for their respectve cultural content far beyond the level that these counties currently do. While all t hese f actors—K orea’s utlizaton of the intenet as a tool to spread its cultural content, the govenment’s actve engagement to promote cultural content through its subsidy programs, and South Korea’s meteoic ise to the top of the world’s leading economies in the twenteth century— played a role in creatng one of the most dynamic cultural industies in the world

22Ñ ¬ today, one crucial reason has remained unprobed in most discussions held on K- pop studies. Over the past three- quarters of a century, Koreans have leaned to gain atenton in global popu lar culture by redubbing Ameican hegemonic music, vsual culture, and drama through a pro cess of revaluing, reauthen- tcatng, and, perhaps most importantly, reidentfyng their ethnic subjects, aesthetcs, and content. As well publicized through the compulsory vs- its to the demilitaized zone (ïÎ by almost every sitng US president since Dwght D. Eisenhower (John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the only two presidents of the postwar years who were unable to complete their presidental tems, are notable exceptons), the Ameican military presence in South Korea has remained strong ever since Korea was liber- ated from Japan in 1945. The military presence the United States has maintained in the peninsula not only inÛuenced the politcs and economics of South Korea that provded Ame i ca its bulwark against Communism; it has also had a profound impact on South Korean culture. Shin Joong- hyun, the aforementoned guitaist- composer, a fter being inspired by black soul music and psychedelic rock in the 1960s, leaned his trade growng up near the Ameican military base.

Duing the 1960s, the inÛuence of the US 8th Amy [statoned in Korea] was absolutely strong. I thought that they were not here to ¦ght any war, but here to ¦ght a war to defend their culture. If we were to go to war, I can’t imagine that there would be any place for music. But for the Amer- icans, it was diÄ er ent, it felt as if they w ere here [in K orea] to listen to their music. After their training hours, they would wthout fail come to one of the clubs to listen to music. Every base had at least three clubs— one for the oÙcers, one for the sergeants, and one for the soldiers.×Ö

Among soldiers, as had been mentoned prevously, clubs were also segregated along color lines. Duing the ¦rst several dec ades of the postwar years, the foreign cool that swept South K orea oiginated from the United States but also elsewhere. Alain Delon, for instance, a French ¦lm star who was litle known in the United States, became a house hold name in Korea because his ¦lms wwereere popul larar in the major cites, and stoies about his personal life became magazine headlines. Plein Soleil (T ’aeyang kadǔkhi, dir. Rene Clemont, 1960) was one of his most sensatonally successful ¦lms in Korea, and the phrase handsome like Alain Delon became vral in K orea several decades before messenger apps were in vogue. Very few Koreans spoke French

¬ Ñ23 duing the 1960s, and the war- ravaged country had no colonial vestge owed to the French, but one of the reasons atibuted to the success of these Eu ro pean ¦lms in Korea, and other popu lar cultural items such as the chansons of Yves Montand like “Les Feuilles Mortes,” was their populaity in Japan. Despite havng very l itle to no direct exchange between Korea and France, Koreans accessed t hese Eu ro pean cultural fads by look- ing to Japan to satate their intellectual hunger.×× Eu ro pean stardom and pop icons, in other words, ¦rst spread to Japan before making their way to Korea through book vendors, publishing com pany heads, and cultural con- noisseurs who stll subscibed to large volumes of çapan ese books, magazines, and other cultural merchandise. The global cultural Ûow, before the advent of social media, had a major transit stop between Eu rope and K orea, and that was Tokyo, the fomer metropole for Koreans duing the Japan ese colonial peiod. Much of the populaity in Korea of Euro pean move stars, songs, and even high-brow literary books by Franz Kaða, Jean- Paul Sartre, and Fiedich Nietz sche was owed to their populaity in Japan. Most ¦lms, magazine artcles on Eu ro- pean trends, and even lit er a ture were translated by Korean publishers and ¦lm distibutors not from their oiginal French or English but from exstng Japa nese subttles or translatons. In other words, even twenty or thirty years after Korea’s liberaton from Japan, and despite the ban on almost all cultural products of çapan, wth the sole excepton of çapa nese tele v sion animaton, K orea was in many ways reliant on this preexstng colonial Ûow of infomaton, scholarship, and popu lar culture. Most Koreans working in the literary and cultural establishments duing the 1960s and 1970s were Ûuent in Japa nese, for they had atended school duing the colonial era, when Korean schools pioitzed leaning Japa nese for several de cades.×Ü Like the black Martnican in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, Wite Masks who retuns home from Pais, where he “can no longer understand Creole; he talks of the Opera House, which he has proba bly seen only from a dis- tance,” a member of the postcolonial cultural elite in Korea only wanted to talk in his “master’s language,” but his Japan ese, unlike French, English, or Spanish, became not only frowned upon but downight forbidden, even at home.×Þ Fanon wites, “When I meet a Geman or a Rus sian speaking bad French I try to indicate through gestures the infomaton he is asking for, but in ddoingoing so I am careful not to forget that he has a language of his own, a country, and that perhaps he is a l lawyerawyer or an engineer back home.”×ä Un- fortunately for South Koreans, it’s prob aablybly not an exaËgeraton to say that it would have been almost impossible to ¦nd an Ameican oÙcer working

24Ñ ¬ in Korea around the tme when Fanon was witng this ¦rst book, in the 1950s, who shared similar sympathies that Fanon had toward the Geman wth poor French- speaking skills. A Korean wth poor English- speaking skills simply had no value for an Ameican—no mater his profession or his mastery in other languages. The linguistc conundrum that Korean elites entered duing the postlib- eraton era was far more complex than the one that Fanon or other postcolonial intellectuals found wth their own humiliatng expeiences involvng the mastery of a Eu ro pean language. Unlike the expeience of Fanon, who spoke and wrote French beter than the French themselves and found Pais, for beter or for worse, his home away from home, where he could publish and help other antcolonial eÄorts after World War II in other Francophone counties such as Algeia, for Koreans the value of çapa nese, the fomer colonial master’s language, simply collapsed after 1945. For a Korean intellectual, the linguistc and cultural contnuity between the new metropole (Washington, DC) and the old one (Tokyo) was simply non ex s tent. As such, the cultural bidge between the new metropole (Washington, DC) and the occupied capital (Seoul) had to be built from scratch, while the one between the old metropole (Tokyo) and Seoul only exsted in old rec ords and photo- graphs that were literally locked up in f amily chests.×å The old metropole, now also occupied by the Ameicans, was a new land of exle, humiliaton, and, perhaps most importantly, forced amnesia for Koreans.Üæ Koreans had to overcome symptoms of aphasia in a tiplicate of languages— the pre sent natve language of Korean, which was suppressed in fomal educaton and had to be brought back from oblivon in 1945 wth the end of çapa nese rule; the old colonial language of çapanese, which became obsolete wth the de- feat of Impeial Japan in 1945; and the new colonial language of English, which was heav ly censored duing the later part of the Japan ese colonial era, for it was the language of the “ enemy” and had to be completely suppressed, and therefore leaned from scratch by Koreans u nder their new, Ameican miltary occupiers. PyongÍang emerged as an intiguing social- ist altenatve but quickly became unatractve because of the spread of Stalinist terror and the volent war that pemanently split K orea. K orea’s purchase of Eu ro pean fads duing the ¦rst two dec ades after the Korean War was not ¦rsthand but one that was akin to a clandestne consignment store shopping stnt in the dilapidated and haunted h ouse of old colonial glory. By the tme the 1990s came around, wth the Ameican Forces Korea Network ñ Ç Î generaton now coming of age, a cultural shift of seismic

¬ Ñ25 proporton had placed K orea totally wthin an Ameican sphere of inÛu- ence.ÜÏ The dominance of second hand cultural purchase in which Japan was the con spic u ous gateway to cultural imports by what Iwabuchi calls “cultural odor” or what Jinsoo An refers to as “Japa nese color” (waesaek in Korean) waned by the 1980s and came to a close ironically when the ban on cultural goods from Japan was lifted in the late 1990s.ÜÓ All the major ¦gures of the Korean entertainment industry of the ¦rst two dec ades of the twenty- ¦rst century—i ncluding Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan- wook, star directors in Korean cinema; as well as Yang Hyun- seok and Bang Si- hyok, two corporate heads of K- pop management companies ( and the Big Hit); Lee Woo- jeong, head witer of top vaiety shows such as Grandpa over Flowers and the Reply (Ŭngtaphara) drama seies; and Na Young- seok, the producer- director of these hit tele v sion programs—a re from a generaton that spoke litle to no Japa nese and instead grew up as Ç - generaton kids in the 1970s and 1980s, when South Korea could receive images and sounds from Ame i ca on telev sion and radio.ÜÔ Though they also wtnessed the ant- Ameican sentments that swept the college cam- puses duing the 1980s and 1990s when South Korea went through intense democ ratzaton, the act of cultural mimicry that shadowed the Korean peninsula duing this pre- hallyu peiod was one that ironically had to embrace a cultural consent to Ameican culture—f or the concept of Ame i ca, especially the black and ethnic postwar entertainment Ûowng from it, was fun and divertng. Ame i ca was inculcated and disseminated to many Korean youth of the tme as not only a manifestaton of cultural- politcal exploitaton and coercion but one that eaned the unintended consent of locals when the Ameican tele v sion statons intended to entertain only the US troops statoned in Korea ended up aÄectng a far larger number of local people than ever imagined, simply b ecause Ç content was fr ee and much more enjoyable than the local Korean broadcast channels that were heav ly censored throughout the 1970s and 1980s.ÜÖ The Ameican inÛuence in South K orea was not resticted to just one part of the country. Unlike Gemany or Japan, where US military forces were mostly concentrated in either Frankfurt or Okinawa duing the post– World War II occupaton, South Korea, partly because of its small size and mountainous geography and partly b ecause of the heavy casualtes suf- fered in the all-o outut war duing the early 1950s, had Ameican military bases established throughout the entre southen half of the peninsula. The cencen- tral military headquarters was located in a 620- acre garison in Yongsan— a distict in central Seoul—wwhile hile a handful more were in operaton in almost

26Ñ ¬ every coner of South Korea. Operatng a colossal- sized military base in the middle of Seoul, South K orea’s capital and one of the most signi¦cant cosmopolitan cites of the past several de cades, was rather unpre ce dented even for the Ameican military. Yongsan and its neighboing distict of Itae- won oÄered a vsual testmony to the almost unscipted consequences of Ameican cultural hegemony. Itaewon, which was oiginally known as a land of foreigners even as early as the Chosun Era (Yi- t’a-in , “ people of 異他人 the foreign land,” after some of the Manchus and their bi- ethnic descendants had setled t here in the seventeenthc entury and w ere eventually given the ttle “Yi-t ’ae- won,” which means “pavlion of the foreign land”), became rather infamous for its red- light distict dubbed Hooker Hill since the relocaton of the headquarters of the US Eighth Amy in Yongsan in 1953, and for its clubs that oÄered opportunites for Koreans to mingle wth Ameicans.Ü× South Korean musicians of several postwar generatons leaned their trade through their consumpton of radio and telev s ion and their interactons wth Ameican military personnel who needed to be entertained through live m usic per fo mances. While the Ameican telev s ion and radio statons in Gemany and Japan were available to only a small segment of the local populaton concentrated in Frankfurt, Stutgart, and Okinawa duing a similar tme frame, the Ç was ubiquitous in South K orea because it broadcast signals from eight statons (Seoul, Hwaaksan, Paju, Gunsan, Busan, Daegu, Daejeon, and Gwangju) using the all- access Ç signal for four citcal dec ades (from 1957 to 1996).ÜÜ Untl 1996, almost all Koreans wth long- range antennae could easily access Ç , a phenomenon that rendered it an inadvertent yet signi¦cant inÛuencer of Korean moden culture. Even before the days of the intenet, by tuning into this Ameican channel, Koreans could advance their En glish leaning, watch live Amei- can sports broadcasts such as the Ç and µ that were not aired on Korean tele v sion, and even watch Hollywood ¦lms that w ere banned in Korea. Many Korean children, including myself, leaned the alphabet and the En glish count oÕ “one, two, three” through the Electric Company broadcast on the Ç channel. The network circumvented the Korean censors, and rumors Ûoated around that sexually explicit scenes were screened on Ç duing the wee hours of the night at a tme when no scenes of nudity werewere pemited even in Korean move theaters.ÜÞ This reauthentcaton and redialing of Ameican culture w ere si mul- ta neously unintended and yet intended for Koreans, since local Korean- languagelanguage newspapers posted the daily guide for the Ç ight next to the listngs for Korean-languagel anguage channels. The Ameican military presence

¬ Ñ27 in Korea chipped away at Korean po lit cal sovereignty but also helped re- tool the Korean cultural identty in preparaton for the new challenges of the twenty- ¦rst century. The compettve auditon system that the US military maintained throughout the 1950s and 1960s for the locals undoubt- edly helped Koreans reinvent their music, culture, and identty throughout those de cades in ways beyond simply aligning them wth that of the Amer- icans. The same club distict in Itaewon that had local women prosttute for the Ameican s also served as the incubaton lab for K- pop where local b- boys leaned how to dance to black music throughout the later part of the century. All these ironic expressions of Ameican cultural hegemony would help cultvate a substantal local innovaton platfom for Koreans duing the twenteth century, which then helped Koreans launch a reverberated holler back to global audiences over the past two dec ades, including even Ameican audiences. This ambivalent fom of Ameican hegemonic culture that loops through the act of Korean mimicry is what I propose as the core idea behind the concept of hegemonic mimicry. Much of the prevous work on K- pop studies has focused on the natonal producton of K- pop, citcally analyzing govenmental involvement and branding it as “made in Korea.” As a mater of fact, a recently published book on the subject of Korean popu lar m usic is ttled Made in K orea.Üä In his book K- Pop, John Lie states, “From tax breaks to outight subsidies, the govenmental policy of soft- power promoton would serve to propel the Korean Wave around the world. By 2013, the govenment’s budget for pro- motng the popular- music industry was reportedly $300 million, roughly the same amount as total tunover in the industry a de cade earlier.”Üå It is diÙcult to get an exact ¦gure on how much govenment spending is used to promote the popu lar music industry, but the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Touism quotes a budget in 2019 of roughly US$5.5 billion.Þæ Of course, not all of this money subsidizes K- pop; much of this bud get is eamarked to support natonal museums, arts and sports schools and academies, and promoton in touism and natonal sports teams. However, through its subsidiaies, the K orea Creatve Content Agency and the Korean Cultural Centers scatered around the world, along wth local training programs, the Korean govenment’s funds and initatves to support and expand K- pop and other cultural content such as K- dramas, games, and even food overseas quite possibly consttute much more than a subsidy package that easily cancan be projected to be about US$1 billion per year. The Korean govenment has actvely engaged in promotons of Korean cultural products overseas because it has calculated that for everyevery $100 in cultural goods exported, it

28Ñ ¬ can generate a $412 increase in exports of other consumer goods, including food, clothes, cosmetcs, and manufactuing products such as smartphones.ÞÏ In other words, in the era of transnatonal capitalism, K- pop and other cultural content made in K orea cannot help but contnue its asso- ciaton embedded in a fom of ethnic identty despite their eÄectve way of crossing borders as an export product that erases its natonal oigins, just as Hyundai Motor’s best- selling model, the Santa Fe, is known to many people globally as a mugukjŏk brand in isolaton from K orea, the com pany’s naton of oigin. Many consumers across the globe are clueless about the natonal oigins of the apparel and cosmetcs brands they con- sume, such as Zara, Uniqlo, or Estée Lauder, but it is unlikely that µ, or any other boy or girl idol group from Korea, can be cleansed of its natonal oigin, for m usic and other cultural producton, no m ater how commer- cialized and Westenized, must be rooted in the linguistc, aesthetc, and ethnic background of the perfomers and artsts. However disposable each and every new K- pop act that emerges every two- or three- year- cycle, there is a soul embedded in every cultural product “made in Korea,” even when it is appropiated from another naton, one that makes it distnct from, for example, the Samsung electronics goods that are also “made in Korea.”

BeHind tHe Hegemonic mimicry

My use of the tem hegemonic mimicry already acknowledges that the Korean popu lar culture that blossomed duing the twenty- ¦rst century was incubated from a contested ¦eld of negotaton between two natonal identtes— the hegemonic Ameican culture and the local culture— and between, as discussed earlier, two racialized subjectvtes, oÄ- white and blackish. I argue that Korea contnues to straddle what W. E. B. Du Bois tems double consciousness. Du Bois, one of the pioneeing ¦gures of Af- ican Ameican studies, descibed the conditon of black citzens in the United States in the earlier part of the century as “two- ness, an Ameican, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stivngs; two waring ideals in one dark body, whose doËged strength alone keeps it from being ton asunder.”ÞÓ Any Korean raised duing the twenteth century prob ably knows what it would feel like being torn asunder between the two waring ideals in one body. The ¦rst half of the century was split between a Korean natonal identty and a Japan ese one, replaced in the later half by a split between a Korean identty and an Ameican one. One could even

¬ Ñ29 argue that it wasn’t just the double consciousness wth which Koreans were atemptng to reconcile but a tiple consciousness, as the vestges of çapa- nese consciousness did not recede completely into oblivon the moment Japan was defeated and retreated back to its archipelago in 1945. Also, the Ame ica that Korea expeienced duing the postwar years was not only a white Ame i ca but a motled one that was very much both white and black. Many Koreans were exposed to Ameicans in the military, in business, and in everyday life, and in so d oing, they encountered two types of Ameicans as de¦ned by Ameican racial subjectvtes— one white and the other black. This book focuses on blackness and hip- hop alongside black humor and Korean comedy because hip- hop in Korea was perhaps the ¦rst Westen music genre that paid l itle to no tibute to the vestges of culture from the Japan ese colonial era.ÞÔ In K orea, hip- hop is a m usic genre that was introduced through a direct link wth Korean hip-h op artsts’ interactons wth the US cultural inÛuence. Rapper Seo Taiji’s “Nan Arayo” (1992) and his subsequent hit “Hayeoga” (1993) are regarded as two of the most signi¦cant songs in the history of Korean pop, not because they successfully erased any trace of enka- style emotonal root that fomed the backbone of Korean m usic aesthetcs throughout the twenteth c entury but because they were made in direct cultural exchange wth Ameican rap. Korea was arguably the ¦rst non- US naton that came into regular contact wth Ameican rap, because many of the Afican Ameican soldiers statoned in Korea wanted to listen to, dance to, and even perfom this innovatve music genre in clubs, partcularly in Itaewon, as early as the 1980s. Many of the pioneeing Korean rappers, including Yang Hyun- seok, were frequent vsi- tors to this Ameican hip- hop scene set in Itaewon. Also, Korean Ameican rappers, such as Tiger JK, Yoon Mi- rae, and Epik High’s Tablo, all retuned from the United States to dominate the Korean rap scene duing the new millennium after spending their youth in the United States exploing the relatonships between Korean and English rhymes (¦gure I.1). These artsts were the ¦rst to reconceptualize the meaning of hip- hop in the Korean sense, a move that allowed for the matuity of the Korean hip- hop music genre in the 2010s through both K- pop idol and in de pen dent solo artsts. Chapter 1 histoicizes the emergence of hallyu, detailing how K orea, in the postcolonial and postwar years, broke wth a histoical narratve centered on the US military occupaton and K orea’s place as a piece of bulwark in the Cold War confrontaton. With the recent thawng of re - latons between the United States and the Demo cratc People’s Republic

30Ñ ¬ I.1 Tiger JK (right) and Yoon Mi- rae during a concert, 2019. Photo by Kyung Hyun Kim. of Korea ( Î, this chapter explores how m usic, telev sion programs, and ¦lms channeled South Koreans’ fears and anx etes into a pleas ur able and Ûuid cultural producton throughout the later part of the twenteth century and also prepared for the peace pro cess of the Korean peninsula in the ¦rst two de cades of the twenty- ¦rst century. The translaton of music, for instance, that culminated into hallyu—an aesthetc fom that both con- foms to natonal bound aies while also resistng them—is this chapter’s main consideraton. The chapter also lays down the theoretcal foundaton of this book and engages in the discussion of how the act of mimicry passed from an inital colonial simulaton of the dominant colonizer to an ambivalent and ironic one before assuming a hegemonic, and even a sub- empiic, fom. Chapter 2 analyzes the history and aesthetcs of rap m usic in K orea from an ethnic studies perspectve. If Koreans excelled in the “hegemonic mimicry” of the dominant Ameican culture by equatng it wth white - ness projected in many of the girl and boy K- pop idol groups, how does the prominent placement of hip- hophop in K- pop refomulate and complicate the queston of race? With the ise of Ameican hegemony in South Korea over the past seventy- ¦ve years, the centrality of blackness also becomes

¬ Ñ31 pronounced in the discourse of hallyu. One of the key questons I address in my book is about race and authentcity. Korean hip- hop artsts—m any of whom barely speak English—are forced to grapple wth, for instance, this issue when their music is brushed back by illegitmacy because it does not actvely engage wth au then tc claims of the gheto and the street ver- nacular of Afican Ameican Eng lish through which rap was bon. What I am interested in examining further is how this par tc u lar accentuaton oÕ “blackness” complicates the binary through which the most dominant paradigm of natonal bound aies (US/Korea) or racial bound aies (whites/ Asians) is drawn. Beyond the queston “Can Koreans rap?” are the cit - cal interventons in Afican Ameican studies such as Du Bois’s theory on race and culture, and recent hip- hop studies. This is all to perhaps creolize the hierarchies, the binary structures of sustained colonial forces, and the racialized hegemony that remain wthin the discourse of K- pop or hallyu. Chapter 3 explores how digital- age surveillance, partcularly pronounced in South Korea, has impacted the ways in which narratves, both ¦lm and tele v sion, are made. If the New Korean Cinema led by Lee Chang- dong and Bong Joon-ho had thematzed temporality, the pres ent age of data- ism— wth its in¦nite capabilites of digitzaton and power ful algoithms—has enabled Korean cinema and tele v sion dramas to generate narratves that are no longer bound by speci¦c meta phors and allegoies. This chapter ex- amines popu lar body- swtch ¦lms such as Masquerade (Gwanghae, 2012) and Miss Granny (Susanghan kŭ nyŏ, 2014), and argues that Korea’s entry into the overwred era has allowed these body- swtch ¦lms to dominate on screen. This chapter also focuses on how K orea has successfully localized Eu ro pean “hero” models such as Ivanhoe and Ameican Hollywood body- swtch stoies that have been delineated from the plotline of Mark Twain’s “The Pince and the Pauper.” Chapter 4 asks why and how a Korean vaiety game show such as Running Man has achieved a smashing global success on the intenet. It explores how the game show’s “transmedia storytelling” taps into passing around a global kind oÕ “aÄect.” This chapter also explores how the on- screen captons, which are pervasive in Korean tele v sion, promote a sense of non- phonocentism, which counters the pimacy of phonocentism that Jacques Derida had once identfied as the root of the prob lem behind Westen ethnocentism and Saussuian fomalism in order to help realize what I call “aÄect Confucianism.” The Chinese remakes of Running Man allow this chapter to foray into the transnatonal exchange of remakes between China and Korea.Korea. By compaing this East Asian cultural exchange to

32Ñ ¬ that of France and the United States, where French citcs and ¦lmmakers, as early as the days of André Bazin, condemned Hollywood’s practce of the remake as a debasement of the French “oiginal” and a fom of vulgar Ameican commercialism, it problematzes some of the charges made in China against “kimchi impeialism.” Chapter 5 deals wth two very recent ¦lms about food— one perhaps well known only in K orea (Extreme Job) and the other well known worldwde (Parasite). At first glance, these two films seem worlds apart, and yet they share their commonalites in food. In both ¦lms, the predictable melodramatc codes usually reserved for blockbuster ¦lms are swtched out for comedic conventons of wordplay, con- artst schemes, and food drama. These themes not only problematze the divsion between real and fake and a larger subject of the tension between haves and have- nots but also allow us to look at how food has lost its social or even cultural signi¦cance and has instead assumed a perverse, negatve, and almost undesirable asso- ciaton wth glutony and psychological depression in the era of mukbang (mŏkbang; eatcast). Both Extreme Job and Parasite explore the theme of vcaious eatng in South K orea. In the fomer ¦lm, a fied- chicken joint is used as a cover for the narcotcs police squad whose mission to bust a drug lord tuns sour when they ¦nd unexpected success in the rotsseie chicken business; in Parasite, witer- director Bong Joon-ho pays close atenton to the preparaton and servng of food, sickness and hysteia around fruit al- lergies, and the secret door in the kitchen pantry. Chapter 6 pairs a study of Samsung wth that of K- pop through the trope of what I call “meme- i¦caton.” This chapter discusses Samsung not simply because Samsung’s products and K- pop are the best-known exports Korea had to oÄer over the past two de cades but because the Korean electronics com pany’s corporate system called chaebol in many ways reÛects that of the K- pop industry. As argued throughout the book, the enactment of mimicry inscibes a hegemonic fom through the everyday use of digital media and social media platfoms, and nowhere is this more evdent than in Samsung’s “innovatve” technologÍ and products. I examine in this chapter how the ambiguity of distncton between oiginal and counterfeit in both K- pop and Samsung is emblematc of the broader Ûows and tensions in the global economic and cultural structures in which Korean industial and entertainment products have claimed a place as ironic inÛectons of both hegemony and mimicry. This book’s ¦nal chapter goes back in tme—¦ rst to the madanËgǔk traditon of the 1970s and then to Choe Sǔng- hǔi’s dance piece “Eheya

¬ Ñ33 Nohara” from the Japa nese colonial peiod—in order to retrace the oigins of satre in moden Korean per fo mances and connect it to the comedy sketches and the double gestures of mimicry as well as the recreaton of global Korean phenomena in the “Muhan Sangsa” episode of Muhan Dojeon (Innite Challenge) and “Gangnam Style” by Psy in the 2010s. This chapter retuns to the basic cultural ele ments of mŏt (beauty), hǔng (joy), and sinmyŏng (exaltng joy) and argues how they contnue to reproduce the beats and souls of Korean popu lar culture. This chapter aims to aÙm to the reemergence of the double consciousness of Koreans, even duing the era of social media, va the detour of hegemonic mimicry rebuilt around the disavowal, indignaton, and negatvty through which Koreans have had to both accept and reject the fate of subjugaton by foreign rule.

34Ñ ¬ notes

Preface

1. Thompson, “What’s behind South Korea’s ¬ -19 Exceptonalism?” 2. Millar, “South Korea.” 3. Hall, “Local and the Global,” 180. 4. In one of the most in ter est ng books to date about Korean popu lar culture, Joseph Jeon argues that the ascendance of Korean cinema coincided wth the end of the Ameican century. Jeon adopts the theory of Giovanni Arighi, an Italian economist who theoized that the hegemonic Ameican empire’s signal cisis (the beginning of the end) began in the 1970s, wth the teminal cisis (the end of the end) occuring sometme in the early years of the twenty- ¦ rst century. Korean cinema startng in this peiod, and more broadly even hallyu, which began after Korea had under gone an intense economic restructuing mandated by the Ç bailout in 1997, was both a marker oÕ “a shift toward a program of free trade and liberal capital markets . . . and an economic response to the declining productvty of the industial sector.” Jeon, Vicious Cir cuits, 19. 5. Luce, “Ameican Century.” 6. If all the global cultural sensatons bon outside North Ame i ca and Eu rope over the past seventy- ¦ve years since the conclusion of World War II, such as Jamaican reËgae, New Latn Ameican cinema, or India’s Bollywood, have proven both an innovatve mix of local brands of beats, edits, and footpints combined wth the dominant pop structure of rock ’n’ roll and Hollywood ¦lms, the Korean brand of cinema, music, and tele v sion over the past twenty years, which has more recently captured global atenton, stands out as falling short of innovatvely integratng the local Ûavor of Koreanness into its cultural output. Even the most popu lar fom of Korean culture has found success by repressing and making opaque its own natonal and ethnic subjectvty. 7. Zheng, “Black Lives Mater.” Introduction

1. The year 1968 was the peak for the number of Ameican troops deployed to Viet- nam. The increased demand for entertainment for the US troops deployed in Vietnam forced some of the Korean sho- dan members to seek jobs in Vietnam— leading to the demise of the local sho- dan industry in Korea. Many Korean entertainers, including the best bands led by, for instance, Shin Joong-hyun, went to Vietnam for an extended peiod of tme throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were called Wolnam ch’amjŏn migun wmun kongÍŏndan (Entertainment Band for the US Military Servng in the Vietnam War). 2. I have actually extrapolated the ¦rst couple of pages in this chapter after closely reading Pat Kim’s biographical account as a young perfomer growng up in Seoul, dreaming of perfoming on the big stage of Manhatan. See Cho Yŏng- nam and P. Kim, Kŭ nyŏ, Patti Kim. 3. In 1948 President Harry S. Truman signed Executve Order 9981, which abolished disciminaton “on the basis of race, color, religion, or natonal oigin” in the United States Amed Forces. Of course, this new order hardly made a dent on eradicatng racism in the US military, as Truman himself declared, “I wsh to make it clear that I am not appealing for social equality of the Negro. The Negro himself knows beter than that, and the highest types of Negro leaders say quite frankly, that they prefer the society of their own people. Negroes want justce, not social relatons.” The Ko- rean War was the ¦rst war that tied to phase out all-b lack units in the US military. However, many personnel in the military refused to desegregate the amy, and the last of the all- black units in the US military was teminated in 1954— one year after the cease-¦ re agreement was signed in K orea. Jon Bauer, “Truman and Executve Order 9981: Idealistc, Pragmatc, or Shrewd Politcian?,” Harry S. Truman Library, accessed February 3, 2020, htps:// www . trumanlibrary . goFebv / educaton /lesson -plans / truman - and - executve - order - 9981 - idealistc - pragmatc - or -shrewd - politcian. 4. Fifty black soldiers from Camp Humphreys, in protest of segregated clubs in the nearby town of Anjong- Ni, Pyeongtaek, destroyed several bars there. The Korean Na- tonal Police and the Ameican military police were called in to break up the ioters and the Korean vlla gers, who were also angry because of the damages. Some Koreans were rumored to have been killed duing the race iot aimed at the camptown segregaton. A black Ameican soldier was severely injured and several Koreans w ere reportedly stabbed— promptng the military police to use tear- gas grenades to disperse the angry Korean mob that was protestng the vo lence and damage of property in the camptown. Freeland and Lea, “Black s on Rampage.” In a blog that reports on Korean moden history, Gusts of Popu lar Feeling, this same artcle from the Anjong-N i race iot is uploaded. In the comments secton, Rob- ert Gardner, an Afican Ameican who claims to have been statoned in K orea duing this race iot, comments that four clubs w ere in operaton in Anjong-ni, the camptown that served Camp Humphreys: the “T” Club, the Lower 7 Club, the Tiple 7 Club,

238Ñ ¬ and DuÄy’s. Gardner wites, “Of the four clubs[,] only the Tiple 7 Club catered to the Black G.I. This was done by the type of music played and the fiendliness of the club girls.” It was the closing of the Tiple 7 Club for renovaton that had forced the black soldiers to patronize other clubs that did not play âµ and soul—t he preferred m usic among Afican Ameicans— and the refusal of club girls to sit wth them that eventually led to the escalaton of the tensions. “The 1971 Anjeong-i Race Riot, Part 2,” Gusts of Popu lar Feeling, July 8, 2011, htp:// populargusts . blogspot . com / 2011 / 07 / 1971 -anjeong - i - race - iot - part - 2 . html. 5. Kathaine H. S. Moon wites, “Throughout 1971, racial tensions between black and white ser vcemen increased, spread through vai ous camp areas in Korea, and exploded on the weekend of çuly 9, 1971, in the vllage of Anjongni in Pyeongtaek County, the site of Camp Humphreys. The demographics of Anjongni at the tme of the July racial iots was as follows: 4,759 Korean vllag ers, including an estmated 970 prosttutes; 1,700 US military personnel at Camp Humphreys, including approxmately 500 black ser vcemen.” Moon, Sex among Allies, 71. 6. Lea and Brown, “: Key to Racial Equality,” 12. 7. Lea and Brown, “: Key to Racial Equality,” 10. 8. Constante, “25 Years after LA Riots.” 9. Though prosttuton was outlawed in South Korea in 1961, by 1964, 145 disticts were specially designated for l egal prosttuton. All w ere in camptowns. When vene- real diseases became a constant complaint made by the US military, then president Park Chung- hee initated a ¦ve- year cleanup campaign in 1971 that “intensi¦ed and expanded exstng eÄorts to control . . . and teaching club owners and hostesses how to equitably treat black and white soldiers. At each step of the way, the U.S. military prodded the Korean govenment into acton. . . . This creates the illusion that it is pimaily the Korean govenment that regulates prosttuton and the camptowns, but in real ity such regulaton is demanded and orchestrated by the Ameican military, wth a weak Korean govenment able to do litle but acquiesce.” Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, 26–27. 10. Korean citzens were often caught between black and white soldiers duing the era of the civl ights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As Ji- Yeon Yuh reports, rejecton of black soldiers by Korean prosttutes was common, but Korean “club owners and camptown women countered that it was the prejudices of white soldiers that dictated camptown segregaton.” Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, 28. 11. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 6. 12. J. Lee, Ser vice Economies, 19. 13. Henry Em notes that the Japa nese pronunciaton of the “compound minzoku (K: minjok), understood as ethnic nation, began to circulate in K orea in the early 1900s.” This was well a fter the neologism of minzoku began to circulate in Japan followng Miyazaki Muryu’s translaton oÕ “French Assemblée Natonale as minzoku kaigi.” Em, Great Enterprise, 67.

¬ Ñ239 14. Foucault wites, “New mechanism of power applies pimaily to bodies and what they do rather than to the land and what it produces. It was a mechanism of power that made it pos si ble to extract tme and l abor, rather than commodites and wealth, from bodies.” Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 35–36. 15. J. Lee, Ser vice Economies, 15, 7. 16. Yi Yong- u, “Miguk k’ǔrop so hǔnryŏn patǔn taejung ǔmak.” 17. Lee, Ser vice Economies, 6. Although I support Lee’s thesis, which stems from equat- ing Korean ser vce labor for the Ameican military wth disposable and necropo lit cal labor, I would also suËgest that missing from her analy sis is not only the enomous and rather con spic u ous (mi- p’al- gun) sho- dan (the US Eighth Amy Entertainment troupe) but also the possibility that many of t hese foms of sex ser vce labor resisted condem- naton to death and ended up revvng and reproducing life. Some of the best-k nown Korean Ameican biracial star athletes and singers, ranging from fomer Ç star Hines Ward to rapper Yoon Mi- rae, have Afican Ameican fathers and Korean mothers who ¦rst met in US military camptowns in Korea duing the 1970s and 1980s. Although it cannot be speculated that t hese stars’ m others w ere sex workers, their diÙcult child- hoods due to the lack of patenal support might suËgest that their mothers’ lives were in some way construed as “disposable” and necropo lit cal. However, the successful lives not only of these stars but also of many more oÄsping reared between Korean m others and Ameican military ser vcemen throughout the twenteth century are testaments to a (re)productive labor on the part of Korean sex workers, which extended well beyond a conditon of disposability and necropolitcs in the US military throughout the twenteth century. For more on this, see chapter 2. 18. Neves, Underglobalization, 3. 19. N. Lee, Making of Minjung, 202. 20. One of the arguments that John Lie makes in his book K- Pop is that K- pop, while embracing a commercial music route, de¦es the “ele ments of authentcity, autonomy, and oiginality [which] are the essence of the Romantc ideologÍ of the artst.” Lie, K- Pop, 142–43. Of course, perhaps this era in which “Romantc ideologÍ of the artst” ruled the day may have vanished— not only in K- pop but also in the global pop music scene dominated by hip- hop and electronic dance music (). 21. Cillizza, “Donald Trump’s ‘Parasite’ Citque.” 22. J. Park, “K- Pop Stardom Lures Japa nese Youth.” 23. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 86. 24. I thank the anonymous revewer who has urged me to think broadly and deeply into the distncton of two United States (“Murica” and miguk)— one wthout a Ko- rean other and another that produces the Korean mimicry—and how they seek to transfom the paradigm of minjok. 25. This is not to suËgest that some of the careless or unthoughtful tweets or postngs by K- poppop or hallyu stars were never found to be racially insensitve. Lack of cultural

240Ñ ¬ understanding of Ameican racist history has led to, for instance, blackfacing that contnues to pop up on the media scene as some Korean celebites try to explic itly and insensitvely become comically black. 26. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 89. 27. Caillois, Man, Play and Games. 28. Antonio Gramsci’s concepts oÕ “civl society” and “hegemony” are prob ably understood best in “State and Civl Society,” 206–76. 29. Hall, “Local and the Global,” 175. 30. As a mater of fact, South Korea today is often caught wthout alliance to its more power ful neighbors— China and Japan—d espite the populaity of its cultural content in these natons. The relatonship between K orea and China has signi¦cantly cooled since South Korea’s deployment of Teminal High Alttude Area Defense ( Î, which propelled China to ban Korea’s cultural products in 2016. As of February 2021, despite signs of diplomatc improvements between the two counties, China contnues to oÙcially ban many Korean tele v sion and ¦lm exports. In 2019, Japan began its economic retaliaton against South K orea for the same year’s court rulings that found Mitsubishi and several other Japa nese companies liable for damage duing the war and responsible for compensaton. 31. One of the greatest ironies of the postwar Korean War era is that the Syngman Rhee regime was unable to block the Japanese-language radio broadcaster from reach- ing almost the entrety of the Korean peninsula even though it had eÄectvely banned Japa nese cultural products and ¦lms throughout the 1950s. This was pos si ble because the Voice of Ame i ca ( ) and the Voice of United Natons Command (¬), which were quickly mobilized after the Korean War had broken out on June 26, 1950, in order to combat the North Korean propaganda that had taken over the Korean- l anguage broadcast statons in the South, had to rely on Japan ese broadcastng transmit- ters. Duing the Korean War, pro–R epublic of K orea ( Î (ant- Communist) radio broadcasts were only available in shortwave radio broadcasts, while the largest broadcasts (Korean Broadcastng System [ µÒ) in South Korea began broadcastng pro–Democratc People’s Republic of K orea ñ Î (Communist) programs. The power- ful transmission of çapanese radio airwaves from Tokyo and Fukuoka sent not only the US military radio channels but also broadcast radio that caried news programs as well as sports and entertainment programs that many Koreans at the tme understood. Yun Sang- kil, “Naengjŏnki µ,” 13. 32. Korean natonal ident¦caton of yuhaengga (trendy songs) of the twenteth ce ntury, which are frequently charged as oiginated from Japan, warrants further discussion. Many aesthetcs of the two neighboing counties, Japan and Korea, including music, histoically resemble each other. As Min-J ung Son explains in an essay, Koga Masao, a Japa nese composer who helped establish the enka genre and has a museum built in honor of his achievements in Shibuya, spent his fomatve years in Korea (from ages seven to eight een) from 1912 to 1923 and has acknowledged that he was “heav ly inÛuenced

¬ Ñ241 by traditonal Korean music and that the enka melodies he created oiginated from Korean traditon.” Son, “Young Musical Love of the 1930s,,” 265. 33. Kwon, “Shin Joong Hyun’s Sonoity,” 125. 34. Cho Kwan-woo’s remake of the song also became a big hit—on e of the best- selling songs of all tme in the 1990s— and then in 2008, it became the ttle song and the ttle for a blockbuster ¦lm about the Korean amy’s dispatch to Vietnam directed by Lee Joon-ik and staring Soo Ae: Nim ǔn mŏngot e (En glish ttle, Sunny). 35. Among many of Shin Joong- hyun’s classic tunes is “Arŭmdaun kangsan” (Beautful mountains and ivers), composed in 1972, which remains beloved by both North Kore- ans and South Koreans even a fter almost ¦fty years since its oiginal release. Though the song is not composed in the pentatonic scale, it combines a s imple rock m usic ballad wth the stoic Geman marching m usic beats that reportedly caught the atenton of North Korean m usic students. Singer Lee Sun-h ee remade the song in 1988 and sang it duing her PyongÍang concert in 2018. According to Chu Sŏng-ha, one of the t’albukja (North Korean defector) reporters working in South Korea, it was one of the songs that was well received by the North Korean audiences. Ironically, the song was composed in protest of Park Chung- hee’s military dictatorship a fter Shin had refused to wite a propaganda song that praises Park’s Yushin Consttuton that guaran- teed him a lifetme presidency. Chu, Pyongyang chaponchuǔi Paekkwa chŏnsŏ, 181–82. 36. Iwabuchi argues that most of the cultural and consumer products Japan has made duing the postwar years atempted to be “culturally odorless.” These odorless products include “consumer technologies (such as ¬s, karaoke, and the Walkman); comics and cartoons (animaton); and computer/vdeo games.” Iwabuchi, Recentering Globaliza- tion, 27. 37. That Shin Joong- hyun shared the same kind of inÛuence as did Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin is probably not surpising since they come from the same generaton of musicians (Shin was bon in 1938 and Jimmy Page in 1944) and grew up listening to black music broadcast over the Ameican military forces radio network. “We didn’t have the same cultural exchange you had. We didn’t have Black Ame i ca,” Plant stated on Late Night with David Letterman: “We couldn’t tun our dial and get an absolutely amazing kaleidoscope of music. (In the UK) now and then, if you were lucky, there was this Ameican Forces Network radio coming out of Gemany. If you were lucky, you could hear Muddy W aters or L itle Richard coming through the waves.” Smith, “Airwaves Carry U.S. Culture.” The unintended audience in places as far removed as Westen Eu rope and East Asia included both Page and Shin, who quite possibly ended up developing their own brand of Afican Ameican m usic using the blues chord structure of Buddy Guy and Muddy W aters, inspired by the same radio program broadcast over the Ameican Forces Network ( Ç). 38. Jang Sa-ik, a popu lar kugak (traditonal Korean music) singer, remade “Nim” in 1995. Also, it was sung by a trot singer, Na Mi-ae, in 2014; the song helped her wn the Trot X auditon program that year.

242Ñ ¬ 39. Throughout documentaies on the subject of the Korean War, such as µ’s The American Experience: The Battle of Chosin (dir. Randall MacLowry, 2016), black soldiers are seen integrated among the Ameican military forces. 40. The 2015 data from the US Department of Defense ( ) indicates that black soldiers made up 17 percent of the actve- duty military compared to their percentage of the US populaton, ages eight to forty- four, which stands at only 13 percent as docu- mented in 2015. Parker, CilluÄo, and Stepler, “6 Facts about the US Military.” 41. Swing Kids is an extravagantly made musical drama set duing the Korean War in the Geoje Pison Camp. It centers around a fiendship that develops between a young North Korean pisoner and an Afican Ameican oÙcer, Jackson, who teaches him tap dancing. It was perhaps the ¦rst Korean ¦lm that featured a black character as one of its main characters, but it failed to do well at the box oÙce. 42. Bidges, “In the Beginning,” 326. 43. Kim Ŭn-kyŏng, “Yuhǔi ro sŏ ui nodong,” 34. All translatons are mine unless other- wse indicated. 44. Shin Joong- hyun, perhaps the most famous guitaist and composer duing the entre history of Korean pop, used to peek out from backstage when he played for the sho- dan at the Ameican military camps duing the 1960s. If he saw that the majoity of the crowd was black, he knew that he had to give a ¦rst- rate per fo mance that night. Shin’s father was Korean and his mother Japa nese. Before 1945, he also lived in Manchuia, where he grew up listening to Chinese m usic. Duing the Korean War, his biËgest musical inÛuence was Korean traditonal folk m usic. He admits that his diverse musical tastes—country music, black music, Japanese music, Korean music, and Chinese music— gave the foundaton to cultvate his compositon style, which often was the fusion of many diÄ er ent music genres: “Among all of the music I have listened to, I thought the Korean faming m usic and folk m usic was the best. It is b ecause the best music is bon naturally from the working people. It is because of this root I think that people insist that my m usic is very Korean. ‘The W oman in the Rain’ [“Pi sok ǔi yŏin”] from 1964 feels a litle bit Westen, a litle bit Japa nese, but inside there is a deep culture of traditon.” Shin Joong-H yun and Ki- t’ae Kim, “Majimak mutae aptun rokŭi taebu Shinjunghyŏn.” Pat Kim also found black music to be much more advanced than nonblack music. As musicians from this peiod, including Tommy Shim, atest, the sho- dan bands catered to the diverse musical tastes of the Ameican military personnel—“ the Beatles or the Beach Boys for the white s, country music for the old white ¬ s, and soul music of the Temptatons or James Brown at the black clubs.” Hyunjoon Shin and P. Kim, “Birth, Death, and Resurrecton,” 277. 45. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 85. 46. Yi Jum, “Tŭlgukhwa, Kim Hyŏn-s ik.” 47. K. H. Kim, “Korean Cinema and Im Kwon- Taek,” 25.

¬ Ñ243 48. K. H. Kim, “Korean Cinema and Im Kwon- Taek,”34. 49. Despite the fact that theatical and vdeo releases in Korea did not provde dubbed versions of foreign ¦lms— only subttles— voice actors for televsion were in heavy demand. For instance, Park Il, bon in 1949, was a big star duing the days when Amei- can tele v sion seies were extremely popu lar in the 1970s and 1980s. Park was so popular as a voice actor, he actually took on other roles, as a telev sion vaiety show MC and radio DJ, duing the 1980s. 50. Well before Nelson Shin and his Seoul-based com pany, Akom, infamously provded the tedious animaton l abor needed for The Simpsons and other Ameican animaton ¦lms and programs, such as The Transformers and X- Men, for the past three decades, it was Japa nese animaton companies that ¦rst saw the potental to engage in oÄshore Korean animaton l abor duing the later half of the 1960s, even before the ink died on the 1965 - Japan Nomalizaton Treaty. A Korean broadcastng com pany founded by Samsung, µ¬, set up an animaton sweatshop wth Japanese animaton creators and helped Fuji produce Golden Bat ( Ōgon Batto; 黄金バット Korean, Hwanggum pakjwi) and Humanoid Monster Bem ( Yōkai Nin- 妖怪人間ベム gen Bemu; Korean, Yogwe ingan) in 1966 and operated in a close collaboraton eÄort. Such joint ventures in animaton between South Koreans and Japa nese gave many of these tele v sion animaton programs exempton status from banned import goods from Japan before the cultural ban was lifted in the 1990s. Many Korean children grew up watching Mazinger Z as well as the other ttles mentoned here as dubbed animaton programs— not knowng that they had oiginated from Japan. See Kim Jong-ok, “Sanŏphwa sidae hanguk hach’ŏng aenimeisyŏn e taehan yŏngu.” 51. Jin, New Korean Wave, 151. As I elaborate further in the ¦nal chapter, these companies maintained an ant- union policy well into the twenty- ¦rst century. 52. With the combinaton of fourteen basic consonants and ten vowels that make up the alphabet system of hangul, Korean is very simple to use. Its simplicity has made both South and North Korea today vrtually 100 percent literate counties. As an Econ- omist artcle explains, “Advances in computng [in K orea] may also have been boosted by the ease wth which Hangul can be entered into ¬s and phones.” S.C.S., “How Was Hangul Inven ted?” 53. John Lie wites, “The South Korean entrepreneurs (of Entertainment, , and à)—by using new Intenet- based technologies to market a new musical style, and by devsing a new business model that relied more on the Intenet than on pressed rec ords— made South Korea the ¦rst country where sales of digitzed music exceeded sales of music in nondigital fomats.” Lie, K- Pop, 119. 54. Shin Joong- Hyunyun and Ki- t’ae’ae Kim, “Majimak mutae aptun.” 55. From the postwar years through the late 1990s, the Japa nese cultural ban prohibited Koreans from importng from Japan almost all popu lar culture content, including popular magazines. However, Japan ese inÛuence dominated Korean popu lar culture well into the 1990s. Duing the 1970s and 1980s, many Korean magazines, especially many

244Ñ ¬ teen and children’s magazines published in K orea, plagiaized their Japan ese counter- parts cover to cover. So wdespread w ere the copycat magazines in K orea that, by the early 1990s, several news reports were made on this phenomenon, including one by ©¼¨ Nightly News u nder the headline “Waesaek yua chapji to ilbon chapji kŭdaero pekkyŏ silt’ae” [Even baby magazines copy Japa nese ones— cover to cover]. 56. Even one of the best- known Korean literary citcs, Kim Yun- shik, who taught for many years at Seoul Natonal University, could not be free of the charges of plagiaizing from Japan ese literary citcs. T here are reportedly more than seven para- graphs in his book Hanguk kŭndae sosŏlsa yŏngu [Study of the history of moden Korean lit er a ture], published in 1986, that w ere plagiaized from Karatani Kojin’s oiginal Japa nese publicaton of Origins of Modern Japa nese Lit er a ture. Yi Myong- won, a young literary citc in K orea, citcized Kim Yun- shik in his research, which eaned him a place on the blacklist in the literary circle in K orea in 2000. See Yi Myŏng- won, T ’anŭn hyŏ. 57. Fanon, Black Skin, Wite Masks, 7. 58. Fanon, Black Skin, Wite Masks, 17. Fanon is tryng to state that the lost Geman or Rus sian stll fares far beter than a black man. In the next paragraph, he reminds you that “‘ there is nothing comparable when it comes to the black man. He has no culture, no civlizaton, no ‘long histoical past.’” 59. Such was also the fate of my grand father’s old photo graphs from the colonial peiod. I once found them in the atc in the early 1970s— locked away in a chest. 60. In another work, I discuss the rampant copyng of çapa nese manga by Korean manhwa artsts that “saturated the [Korean] market up to the late 1980s” as a “ mater of histoical rec ord.” K. H. Kim and Choe, Korean Popu lar Culture Reader, 39. 61. Klein, “ Ç Nexus.” Chistna Klein here argues through her intervew wth director Bong Joon-ho that he and other New Korean Cinema ¦lmmakers of his generaton may have leaned genre conventons of Hollywood ¦lmmaking through the Ç broadcasts duing the 1970s and 1980s. 62. An, Par ameters of Disavowal, 35. 63. The populaity of Ç prob ably peaked in the mid-1970s and remained strong for another de cade. By the late 1980s, the disseminaton of machines and the liberal- izaton of the Hollywood ¦lm market made Ameican moves and tele v sion programs aired on Ç less novel. Bec ause Ç broadcast longer hours—f or children and women duing the day (Sesame Street, Electric Company , and daytme soaps) in the aftenoon, (Ameican sportng events such as ¬ , µ, Ç , professional wrestling, and µ ) and duing late- nights (talk shows and moves)—it was a channel that many youth, especially t thosehose who came of age duing the 1970s and 1980s, fondly remember as a source of cultural growth. 64. Yu Chae-y yong,ong, ¡½´® K’idŭ. 65. Kim Chu-hŭi, ““MigunMigun kijich’on,” 42.

¬ Ñ245 66. Park Yong- gÍu, “ Ç - ǔi tǔksŏng,” 108. Even after 1996, when Ç discon- tnued its ser vce through Channel 2, Koreans could access it through Ç and also the cable network. It took Ameican media companies’ petton (not Koreans’) to the US military for Ç not to be available for free to Korean audiences. By the dawn of the new millennium, sitcoms such as Friends and dramas such as the ¨¯ seies were popu lar among young audiences who also spoke some Eng lish. Ameican tele v sion companies wanted to sell t hese products to Korean telev sion for broadcastng ights. Pemitng Ç to be accessible to all Koreans wth a subscipton to a cable network put their sales negotatons at a disadvantage. 67. Through an intervew survey conducted in 2014 of people who grew up watching Ç , Park Yong- gÍu found that several of the intervewees had commented on how they would stay up past midnight duing the 1960s watching moves broadcast on Ç because it was the only network in Korea that would broadcast past midnight and also because Ç broadcast more “sexually explicit” content than anything available on Korean telev sion. Music programs like Soul Train were popu lar especially among young people because you could easily be entertained by music and dance programs wthout comprehending a word of Eng lish. By the 1970s, newspaper columns began to appear in the Korean language to citcize the sensatonal content allowed on Ç . Park Yong- gÍu, “ Ç - ǔi t’ǔksŏng,” 117–18. 68. Hyunjoon Shin and S. Lee, Made in Korea. 69. Lie, K- Pop, 119. 70. Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Touism, “Podojaryo.” 71. John Lie citcizes the exported- oiented development strategÍ the Korean govenment has used in cultvatng its brand of K- pop. But just as much as the Brazilian govenment cannot be faulted for its export of soccer players, ¦nding South Korea culpable for the overseas success of its pop stars seems to me a misguided citcism. Lie, K- pop, 114. 72. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 7. 73. The sensatonal 1995 Japa nese hit song “Da.Yo.Ne” by mixed- gender hip- hop group East End X Yui seemed to have inÛuenced mainstream Korean hip- hop groups such as Roo’Ra, which ended up being accused of plagiaizing Japan ese songs in 1996. However, early Korean hip- hop scenes since the late 1990s w ere dominated by Korean Ameican rappers who were more familiar wth Ameican rappers than the Japa nese ones.

Chapter One. K- Pop, K- Cinema, and K- Television

1. The ise of K-po popp has positvely impacted the study of Korean in educatonal insttu-insttu tons around the world. Even in the United States, where almost all languages taught in higher educaton had shown a precipitous decline in recent years, Korean showed an impressive growth of 13.7 per percent:cent: from 12,256 students enrolled in 2013 to 13,936 in 2016. Looney and Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other than En glish.”

246Ñ ¬