Hegemonic Mimicry

Korean Popular Culture of the Twenty-First Century

Kyung Hyun Kim

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781478014492, 9781478013587
• eBook ISBN: 9781478021803
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: Social Sciences

In Hegemonic Mimicry, Kyung Hyun Kim considers the recent global success of Korean popular culture—the Korean wave of pop music, cinema, and television, which is also known as hallyu—from a transnational and transcultural perspective. Using the concept of mimicry to think through hallyu's adaptation of American sensibilities and genres, he shows how the commercialization of Korean popular culture has upended the familiar dynamic of major-to-minor cultural influence, enabling hallyu to become a dominant global cultural phenomenon. At the same time, its worldwide popularity has rendered its Koreanness opaque. Kim argues that Korean cultural subjectivity over the past two decades is one steeped in ethnic rather than national identity. Explaining how South Korea leaped over the linguistic and cultural walls surrounding a supposedly "minor" culture to achieve global ascendance, Kim positions K-pop, Korean cinema and television serials, and even electronics as transformative acts of reappropriation that have created a hegemonic global ethnic identity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface: Writing Pop Culture in the Time of Pandemic
• Introduction: Of Mimicry and Miguk
• 1. Short History of K-Pop, K-Cinema, and K-Television
• 2. The Souls of Korean Folk in the Era of Hip-Hop
• 3. Dividuated Cinema: Temporality and Body in the Overwired Age
• 4. Running Man: The Korean Television Variety Program and Affect Confucianism
• 5. The Virtual Feast: Mukbang, Con-Man Comedy, and the Post-Traumatic Family in Extreme Job (2019) and Parasite (2019)
• 6. Korean Meme-icry: Samsung and K-Pop
• 7. Reading Muhan Dojeon through the Madanggǔk
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index