TY - JOUR
AU - Diaz Pino, Camilo
AB - Abstract Amid a rapidly growing wave of anti-neoliberal protest emerging in late 2019, Chile’s government scrambled to respond to the massive scale of this dissidence by attempting to find some external agent to pin the blame on. Initially seeking evidence of Venezuelan or Russian involvement, the state eventually pinned the blame on K-pop as an agent of “social rupture.” This article examines this framing of K-pop by Chilean authorities and what this says about the position of Korean media’s integration into a Latin American pop-culture landscape that is growing ever more globalized and non-Western. It likewise examines the contestatory embracing of K-pop by Chilean anti-neoliberal activists, their broader integration of globalized cultural objects, and how this reflects on wider current anti-neoliberal activist cultures operating in the Global South. “Big data”: Framing K-pop The waning months of 2019 saw a distinct rupture in the politics of post-dictatorial neoliberalism that had defined the Chilean social landscape since the re-establishment of formal democracy in 1990. Sparked by a seemingly minor hike in public transit prices, a sudden wave of anti-neoliberal dissidence sprang up, quickly incorporating agendas as diverse as transgender rights, indigenous nationalism, pension reform, and expanded access to abortion (Delgado, 2019). Faced with this sudden, disruptive, multifaceted dissent, Chile’s government sought to both understand and quell a situation that seemed to them to have come out of nowhere. In response, the Chilean Ministry of the Interior and Public Security released a 112-page report on the problem of Chilean society’s “social rupturing” (“estallido social”) on the 19 December 2019. While the ministry’s stated agenda was to find a way to address the various public grievances that had come to occupy the public sphere since October 2019, its underlying, strategic intent was also to find some concrete link between these events and an external entity to pin blame on. Since November, Chile’s center-right president Sebastian Piñera—himself caught completely off-guard by these events—had insisted that foreign intervention, probably from Venezuela, Cuba or Russia, had provoked the recent social rupture (El Mostrador, 2019).1 His administration then hoped that this report would expose the interference of foreign actors, both quelling mainstream activism, while also isolating and delegitimizing its most fervent participants. Upon release, the report did identify certain areas of foreign visibility, though these were by and large not from expected leftist/“communist” political actors (Ayala, 2019). Rather, this “big data” (as it was touted) scouring of Chilean social media yielded another foreign entity correlating with Chile’s most vocal anti-government political discourse: Korean pop music. Both clumsily raised and widely ridiculed, the government’s linking of K-pop to Chile’s social problems did nonetheless make some tactical sense. In looking for markers of foreignness in their report to pin this social breakdown on, Piñera’s administration was following well-established practices. By folding K-pop in with social unrest, they appealed to both the xenophobia and disdain for youth culture expected of their conservative base. This strategy likewise corresponded with a wider perception of K-pop fandom as odd or overly-emotional by Chilean media sources (Min, Jin, & Han, 2019, p. 606). Such framing, along with its concurrent linking of these protests to local left-leaning musicians such as Mon Laferte (The Guardian, 2019), can in this way be seen as an attempt to frame this phenomenon primarily as a culture war, rather than a political conflict rooted in embedded structural, historical, and legislative issues. Despite its established underpinnings, this accusation against K-pop received backlash almost immediately, perhaps most notably and visibly for its politicizing of the genre as an avenue of dissident socialism. In spite of its subcultural youth popularity, the Chilean popular framing of K-pop was up until this point largely apolitical, more a marker of subcultural fan devotion than anything else (Min, et al., 2019, p. 608). With its frequent exaltation of discipline, hard work and self-responsibility within the structures of corporate governance, the argument could indeed be made that if anything, K-pop’s social impact reaffirms, rather than attacks, the same neoliberal structures challenged by Chilean dissidents (Ragatieri, 2017, p. 516). Apart from this, the most obvious barrier to such influence is the language barrier between Korean and Spanish. Even if accounting for both official and fan-translations, the lyrical content of the vast majority of K-pop circulating to Latin America has only ever tangentially been explicit in social commentary, if it was present at all. Despite repeated public defenses by the administration, this report has been widely mocked as both a fiasco and boondoggle, placing the government on the defensive again almost immediately (The Clinic, 2019a). Its conclusions were repudiated across the political spectrum and the judicial community as evidence of incompetence and a willful misunderstanding of the situation (Ferrer, 2019; The Clinic, 2019a). Among other scathing responses, one outcome of this report was the defiant embracing of K-pop by activists themselves, with multiple K-pop themed protests organized in the days following the report’s release (The Clinic, 2019b; Figure 1). Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Ad for one of several K-pop protests in December of 2019. Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Ad for one of several K-pop protests in December of 2019. This contrarian embracing of K-pop corresponds well with Chile’s wider anti-neoliberal popular responses, at once ludic in tone, serious in their grievances, and syncretic in their incorporation of references, agendas and participants (Diaz Pino, 2018, p. 204). Piñera’s administration had effectively transformed K-pop into the same tool of dissent they had framed it as. In trying to stigmatize anti-government sentiment with linkages to youth subcultures and visibly foreign media, it however revealed to what extent this cultural import was able to be embraced by a much broader base than they assumed, perhaps suggesting a deeper integration of K-pop into the Chilean cultural imaginary as a whole than they (or we) might have otherwise perceived. This vilification of K-pop and its corresponding popular re-appropriation is a timely example of how globalized culture is being negotiated by cultural and political actors in the Global South in ways that add other considerations to the once-assumed cultural centrality of the “North/West” and the dualistic identification frameworks it often engenders.2 Seen with an eye towards dynamics of transculturation and global media flow, it also sheds light upon the ways in which these new geometries of cultural flow are being incorporated into peripheral and semi-peripheral responses to neoliberal hegemony more widely. As an example of the sudden politicization of transcultural processes usually left in the realm of depoliticized pop culture, this scenario suggests several questions: What does the accusation of K-pop as an agent of social rupture have to say about its current positioning in the Chilean imaginary? How does this phenomenon correspond with the wider integration of commercial pop culture texts in wider anti-neoliberal protest movements that must, by virtue of their very existence in the contemporary sociopolitical landscape, make use of referents and imaginaries borne of neoliberal industrial frameworks? To what extent is this situation idiosyncratic to the Chilean context, subject as it has been to authoritarian neoliberal experimentation and the memories of an attempted democratic socialism this system tried and failed to erase (Pino-Ojeda, 2014, pp.126–127)? Finally, and perhaps most instrumentally to wider understandings of such processes, how can this situation illuminate other discursive challenges engendered by the integral failures of neoliberal structures? “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years” In spite of its history of human rights abuses during the 1973–1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s relative stability and growth since its adoption of neoliberal policies during this period have long been celebrated as a success story by both internal advocates of his regime and external observers invested in market liberalism as an overarching political system. Pinochet’s military regime came into power as a counter-revolutionary reaction to Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity administration, which for its part had won its 1970 presidential mandate on an agenda dedicated to achieving socialism through fully democratic reforms and apparatuses (Klein, 2007, pp. 63–64). Allende’s adherence to democratic principles was all the more dangerous to capitalist plutocrats for its lawfulness, making it difficult to effectively taint his administration with the anti-democratic stigma of socialist movements elsewhere. Backed by both local and U.S.-based industrialists, anti-communist technocrats, and the CIA, Pinochet’s 1973 coup and subsequent dictatorship sought not only to restore Chile’s capitalist neocolonial frameworks, but also served as the first experimental delivery system for Milton Friedman’s neoliberal reforms, submitting as many areas of Chilean public life as possible to market frameworks, logics and governance (Klein, 2007, p. 7). These structural reforms stayed intact with Chile’s transition back to democracy between 1989 and 1990, enmeshed as they were by then into the political, economic, and social fabric of the traumatized citizenry (Pino-Ojeda, 2014, p. 123). Chile’s current positioning on the global stage is thus often problematized by this history, with condemnations of Pinochet’s regime for its crimes against humanity intermingling with celebrations of their neoliberal policymaking. In spite of such celebration, the implied successes touted by these reforms is obviated somewhat by Chile’s indices of economic inequality—the highest in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]; Merelli, 2019). As Walescka Pino-Ojeda notes, popular actors have taken care to present anti-government grievances as both demands for progressive social change as well as refutations of neoliberalism as a whole, explicitly framing its policies as vestiges of the dictatorial era (2014, p. 127). Despite the persistent articulation of such grievances across several waves of protest since the re-establishment of formal democracy in 1990, this latest rupture was a revelation to many in power, especially because it sparked from such a seemingly minor grievance. On 1 October 2019, high school students led by the Chilean Association of Secondary Students (ACES) organized a widespread campaign of toll-dodging in the capital city of Santiago’s subways. This was done in response to a recently announced fare hike for the municipal public transport system (Bartlett, 2019). The increase was to be of 4%, so 30 pesos, or $0.04 USD (Johanson, 2019). While this increase itself wasn’t obscene, it sparked immediate pushback from a population already overburdened by neoliberal economic precarity. The students’ actions are thus notable for two reasons. Firstly, they reflect the highly politicized (and organized) character of Chilean secondary student activism.3 Secondly, their act of civil disobedience was a spark that set off a much larger and widespread reaction from both state agents and the public at large, evidencing to what extent such social tension had been mounting. In response to this initial protest, Chile’s already overly-militarized police force responded with drastic violence, leaving several dead, permanently disabled, and otherwise injured (Guzman, 2019). This in turn massified anti-government action and the widespread destruction of public infrastructure (Bonnefoy, 2019). As police responses grew more repressive and indiscriminate, cities began flooding with newly-made dissidents from all sectors of society (Bartlett, 2019). President Piñera’s unwillingness to engage in any kind of response beyond the vilification of protesters themselves further galvanized civil unrest to the extent that one demonstration organized in Santiago for the 22 October (shortly after the government report’s release) gathered over one million participants—over a fifth of the capital city’s residents, and over 5% of the total Chilean population (Magallanes, 2019). Simultaneously and subsequently, popular action escalated, with roadways, public infrastructure, and businesses decimated in riots. The wider popular response has now come to incorporate a sprawling, interrelated network of actors and agendas, disparate in identity and priorities but united under anti-neoliberal principles further crystalized by anti-authoritarianism. Among these participants there seems to be a conscious effort to present grievances as standing apart from “formal” procedural politics. As such, in place of political party or other institutional affiliations there has instead emerged a whole new lexicon of agendas, symbols, iconography and popular figures. Within this tendency, indigenist/indigenous agendas have come to the fore, with the Wenufoye Mapuche flag figuring prominently. These protests, active even and especially in COVID-19 pandemic conditions, have also featured blacked-out versions of the Chilean flag (apparently evoking Anarchist symbology) as well as the donning of green bandanas indicating participation by the wider movement’s feminist contingent—a uniform item inherited from Argentina’s pro-abortion rights campaigns (Arbildo, 2018). Among its many slogans, the wider movement connects its current grievances explicitly to the structural remnants of Pinochet’s regime, chanting “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years!” This slogan pulls the double duty of likewise evoking similar mass protests held in Brazil in 2013 (“It’s not for 20 cents!”) which were likewise sparked by mass transit costs but spoke to much deeper structural inequalities under neoliberalism (Zibechi, 2013). Alongside these other symbols, perhaps the most prevalent and “spreadable” of these is the protesters’ various representations of wounded eyes (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 3–4 ), a pointed response to the partial or total blinding of hundreds of protesters by police violence (Reeves, 2020). K-pop gets political This new symbolic landscape has been quick to absorb, appropriate and reinterpret commercial culture, absorbing everything from the Simpsons, Spider-Man and Pikachu alongside various homegrown folkloric figures. This range of referents raises the question of why K-pop was highlighted by the Chilean government’s report to begin with—particularly when considering that other cultural imports had been more actively mobilized at the time of its publication. Chile’s activist culture in the past has demonstrated an established proclivity for the adoption of such global pop culture objects (Diaz Pino, 2018, pp. 204–205). This corresponds with the wider integration of both transregional and global cultural flows in the national mediascape. On any given day, Chile’s terrestrial TV channels incorporate programming from Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Korea, Turkey, Japan and the United States, among others (Min, et al., 2019, p. 616). The radio landscape likewise prominently features foreign imports and content not in Spanish. In this sense, Korean media is not a uniquely “foreign” presence in the Chilean cultural imaginary. The issue raised then by the Chilean government’s report is that K-pop is implicitly the wrong kind of foreign. Chile’s commercial mediascape has historically been subject (as with much of the rest of Latin America) to Eurocentric hegemonic frameworks. Consequently it has tended to mirror European and Anglo American ethnic ideologies (Min, 2020, p. 5). Barring Japanese animation, it is only since the 2000s that Asian bodies and subjectivities have emerged as quotidian elements of Chile’s mediascape (Han, 2017, p. 2257). Its East Asian representation was by and large limited until then to the abstracted realm of cartoons. Accusations against K-pop as an agent of social discord are then significant because they evidence to what extent Korean media’s popular impact reached a tipping point of institutional recognition, and in this case, repudiation. Despite the numerous multigenerational diasporic East Asian communities throughout Chile and the rest of Latin America, Asian bodily representation in Latin America’s broader mediascape (within which Chile is firmly enmeshed) is marked both by relative novelty, and the fact that this representation is not via the visibility of these homegrown Asian subjects, but through media imports from a small handful of media capitals situated in Asia itself. This positioning has several implications for the state of Korean ethnic and cultural representation in the wider Latin American media market. In some ways, it could be seen to democratize and facilitate its spreadability (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013, p. 3–4). After all, these shows, films and music are now entering and circulating a highly import-driven media market, alongside not just U.S. and European media, but also Turkish, Japanese, and Indian cultural imports. Unlike in other markets—see for example the separate K-pop category created for the 2020 U.S. Grammy Awards (Willman, 2019)—Korean media’s integration in Latin America has occurred less jarringly thanks to this mediascape’s existing plurality of intermingling cultural flows. In accounting for this context, the consumption of Korean media formats could be understood as more quotidian than purely subcultural, especially considering televised imports, which are typically the purview of family viewing in the vein of the telenovela format. Seen in another light however, this same trajectory could likewise mark Korean media as a perpetual externality—one import among many—thus cementing its otherness and/or exoticism. As noted by Wonjung Min in her research into Chilean K-pop fandom, the persistence of the term “chinito” (a diminutive of the term Chinese) to refer to all East Asian media and identities demonstrates to what extent a strain of orientalism persists among Chilean understandings of Asian media imports (2020, p. 14). Ragatieri makes note of similar dynamics with regard to Brazil, a media market with a similar history with Korean cultural imports (2017, p. 517). The last 20 years of Korean transcultural integration in Chile have occurred with differing levels of visibility, and apparently different perceived levels of cultural “proximity” (Straubhaar, 1991, p. 56) across the textual modes being circulated. Notably, all the television texts being circulated in Chile from Korea, Turkey, as well as most from India, can be framed within the parameters of melodrama. As globally-circulating melodramas themselves, telenovelas offer the most ubiquitous intraregional tether for these extraregional formats in the Chilean TV market. Both Turkish and Korean series circulating in Chile are indeed commonly understood as “telenovelas” (TRT Español, 2017). This, in conjunction with the common “voice” given to these shows by the handful of dubbing centers throughout Latin America can likewise be seen to affect their spreadability, enacting a cultural flattening or equalizing effect. The protagonist of a K-Drama may indeed sound exactly the same as a character from a Turkish series or a U.S. sitcom to Latin American audiences, because all of their Latin American iterations share a Mexican vocal actor. In contrast to other Asian media in Latin America, Korean media’s integration has been uniquely bifurcated across the distinct landscapes of television and pop music. This has positioned Korean cultural products more strongly with teenage consumption and online media cultures in Chile than other Asian media imports (Min, 2020, p. 2). This may indeed be a factor in the singling out of K-pop as distinctly “foreign” by its government. Drawing on Koichi Iwabuchi’s concept of cultural odor (2004, p. 56), we might say then that this accusation of K-pop as an element of social “rupture” takes advantage not just of K-pop’s “odor” as a Korean product alone, but also of the associations it has accrued within the Chilean cultural landscape as a marker of both youth and online cultures. To Chilean detractors, K-pop “smells” not just foreign, but also becomes a synecdoche for esoteric and disruptive youth cultures as a whole. This framing is complicated further by Chilean society’s lingering and often reinforced mirroring of Eurocentric and white-supremacist discourses, themselves now mobilized not just as a reaction to such cultural imports, but also in response to flows of humanity. Chile has seen unprecedented levels of immigration in recent years, not only from bordering states, but also from Venezuela, Haiti and beyond, with its relative stability making it an attractive destination when compared to others within reach of refugees and the poor. The stress of this demographic shift has been further exacerbated by the Chilean government’s slowness in developing institutional social services equipped to deal with the scale of immigration (Doña Reveco, 2018). All of this is to say that K-pop’s framing as a disruptive and politically dangerous element may be understood not (just) as an anti-Korean or Asian reaction, but also as a means of manifesting wider neo- and xenophobias. This xenophobic framing adopts yet another “internal” orientation when noting how it connects to Chile’s history of indigenous subjugation and its accompanying biopolitics. Seen through this lens, what is perhaps most jarring about Korean transculturation in Chile is not its display of East Asian bodies in and of themselves, but also that these bodies’ beauty and spectacularization in music videos, concerts and other media exalt ethnic markers (and masculinities) that fall outside established Eurocentric biopolitics of beauty and value (Lee, Lee, & Park, 2020, p. 5904; Oh, 2015, p. 63–64). This in and of itself may disrupt Chile’s patriarchal sensibilities, articulated as these are with Eurocentric notions of gendered embodiment and performance. It may further represent an even greater source of friction for the ways in which K-pop models and represents paradigms of beauty (particularly masculine beauty) that align so well with indigenous American phenotypes. The dark straight hair and slighter builds of Korean performers contrast pointedly with the bodies framed as desirable in other avenues of Chile’s media environment—even and especially those produced in Chile itself. Korean media thus destabilizes multiple interconnected modes of ideology and social hierarchization present in Chile, on the one hand pluralizing cultural referents along lines of global transculturation, while on the other offering subaltern and otherwise neglected communities in Chile a new set of representational tools through which to reevaluate their own embodiment and identities. This dynamic in some ways relates to Timothy Havens’ observations on the ways in which the globalization of Black Anglo-American culture has offered ethnic minorities elsewhere a means of situating themselves (2013, p. 148). Where this situation differs though is in the context of K-pop’s circulation to Chile and how this affects the meanings it accrues. Because while Black media made in the United States necessarily represents a subaltern ethnicity in its very conceptualization, K-pop and K-drama only come to embody non-“dominant” ethnic markers once they travel beyond their original national boundaries.4 This interplay is key to K-pop’s politicization in Chile, contingent as this phenomenon has been on the specific meanings K-pop has accrued as a transculturated cultural import brought in during this stage of Chile’s post-dictatorial neoliberal history. Such contextual factors far outweigh the “internal” messaging of any particular track or star-text in this regard, enabling the transformation of a relatively depoliticized (and certainly neoliberal) media format into a marker of anti-neoliberal political affiliation, polysemically offering multiple opportunities for identity formation to mestizo, indigenous and non-heteronormative Chilean youth otherwise alienated and excluded from hegemonic imaginaries. Seen in this way, the possibility of Chilean K-pop culture and anti-establishment activism merging and feeding into one another was a latent possibility long before the Chilean Government forced the issue. Cultural relationships such as these may go largely unperceived by habitual public perspectives but can flare up suddenly and unexpectedly in moments of urgent discursive reformation. The Chilean government’s politicization of K-pop in this way may then be not quite as feeble as its popular repudiation suggests. Or put more precisely, its failure was not necessarily in identifying K-pop as a cultural element of this social friction, but rather in its incapacity to meaningfully interrogate why love of K-pop was visible among Chile’s diverse range of anti-government voices. While the Chilean government was able to see that K-pop was an element of these subjects’ lives, its focus was on what authorities imagined this data point did itself, rather than what it might expose. The administration’s failures in addressing this conflict are in part then a product of their inability to see the current conflict as an integral structural concern. Invested as they are in downplaying such problems, Chile’s government instead performed an act of neoliberal externalization, pinning the locus of the problem on disruptors from both without (foreigners) and within (communists/socialists). In identifying K-pop as one such agent, Chilean authorities were ignoring their own responsibility for such grievances, alongside the ways in which these new cultural referents give voice to unaddressed tensions that are nonetheless inherent to Chile’s history and social imaginaries. Coherence in syncretism: K-pop’s place in the anti-neoliberal semiotic ecosystem This rhetorical battle over K-pop’s place in Chilean culture is part and parcel of a broader semiotic conflict. On the 25 October, 2020, Chilean activists’ persistent efforts, even and especially under pandemic conditions, came to real structural fruition with the implementation of a plebiscite that would ratify the creation of a new constitution (Watson, 2020). The current constitution indeed had been drafted by Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1980 with the guidance of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys,” legally consecrating many of Chile’s most pernicious neoliberal policies. The movement fighting such policies—insofar as it can be called a unified entity—is notable for the ways in which its logics and methodologies have mirrored the system it has been navigating and opposing. If the strength of capital in general is, as Hardt and Negri argue, in its ability to commodify and incorporate dissent, exclusion, and even its own internal failures (2000, p. xv), the strength of the current Chilean anti-neoliberal movement (or moment) is in activists’ own commensurate ability to incorporate and adapt signifiers, identities and agendas. Protesters have consistently demonstrated a tendency to eschew the purist (and vanguardist) notions, agendas, and aesthetics that were once a significant aspect of decolonizing praxis throughout the 20th century. Rather, they have adopted a popular (in all senses of the word) approach that syncretically incorporates media objects introduced through neoliberal structures even as it repurposes them. This approach allows and encourages imported and/or corporate-produced media objects such as K-pop stars like BTS along with Pikachu, Naruto, Homer Simpson and Spider-Man to function within the same discursive environment as the persistent activist chants, songs, folk heroes and iconographies that have marked Chile’s leftist campaigns since before the election of Allende’s democratic socialist administration in 1970. This syncretic impetus in turn has helped the movement’s massification and collectivist tendencies, placing the symbolic onus of coherence and unity on these same texts and icons, rather than in the personae of vanguardist intellectual and/or political leaders (Diaz Pino, 2018, p. 210). If under the frameworks of neoliberalism, popular cultural products can be seen as serving the need to obfuscate structural power behind grand narratives, the current Chilean moment serves as a case study of ways in which popular movements contend with, navigate and even co-opt such mechanisms. In embracing these globally trafficked media objects, Chilean activists take advantage of the same permutability, polysemy, and collective engagement that made them so spreadable in the first place, building with them an otaku “database” of sorts (Azuma, 2009, p. 53–54), collectivizing their symbolic power and often even re-appropriating collectivist frameworks that were already present in them. This syncretic tendency is perhaps most visible in the ways in which the movement has integrated, created, and framed the pantheon of icons, martyrs and folk heroes which K-pop music and stars now integrate. The Chilean popular sphere has for its part collectively labelled these as “Los Avengers Chilenos”—“the Chilean Avengers.” (Figure 2) Named after the Marvel superheroes, this group consists of figures made ubiquitous as participants and representatives of the anti-neoliberal movement. Some, such as “Pareman” are real protesters whose images became memes. Others were established folk icons prior to this current wave of protests. Such is the case of el Negro Matapacos (“Black Copkiller”)—a stray dog looked after by Santiago locals and typically seen wearing a red bandanna. He became a popular figure in 2011 thanks to his active and independent defense of street activists being attacked by police (Martínez, 2012). Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide The “Chilean Avengers.” Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide The “Chilean Avengers.” Other figures from commercial popular culture were absorbed through activists’ playful participation in protests. For one family, this involved dancing in protests dressed in inflatable costumes of a T-Rex and the Pokémon Pikachu (Baila Pikachu, Figure 2). Another protester came dressed as Spider-Man, climbing and dancing sensually on statues and streetlights, thus labelled “Estupido y Sensual Spiderman” (“Stupid Sexy Spider-Man”)—a double reference to both the superhero and dialogue from The Simpsons (Tubarco, 2019). The phenomenon represented by Los Avengers Chilenos and their easy “recruitment” of new heroes is compelling for the way in which it so legibly and coherently performs a discursive flattening of such disparate elements as corporate media imports, local community fixtures, activist youth, and people simply having fun within the context of a committed popular movement. It is furthermore notable that it does so without losing the thread of the structural grievances these figures emerged from. At no moment is there ever a question that the integration of corporate and/or commercial figures such as K-pop songs, Spider-Man, Pikachu or the Avengers in some way cheapens or diminishes the popular power, or anti-neoliberal (and, by implication, anti-colonialist) efforts of these activists. Rather, these networks of meaning-making treat these figures as if they already belong in the realm of polysemic popular governance. They can never contaminate, but only add strength to the overall discourse—all the more so because they are seen as already belonging to the communities in question. This is a far cry from the post- and de-colonialist cultural criticism taking place in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s in such works as Dorfman and Mattelarts’ How to Read Donald Duck (1975), or the Third Cinema movement. At the same time, these actions are also not an outright refutation of the ethical frameworks or political objectives these earlier movements established either. So much of what is being demonstrated in these protests is a pointed recovery and evocation of the politics, ethics, and cultural objects mobilized by decolonizing figures throughout the Global South prior to their quashing by counter-revolutionary movements. Spider-Man’s sensual dances coexist and indeed support feminist performances about police sexual assault and access to safe abortion, just as they do with performances of songs by Chilean socialist icons like Violeta Parra and Victor Jara. These new evocations aren’t seen as either a contradiction or a tainting of such discourses, but rather a popular acceptance of Chile’s current cultural landscape. Where K-pop fandom has been similarly been mobilized in U.S. protests, its function there was in contrast more tactical, less contingent on the interpretive frameworks it was contributing to than on its value in culture jamming and crowding out opposing messaging with discursive “noise” (Reddy, 2020). In Chile’s current activist culture, the “threat” represented by K-pop is more integrally the threat represented by a populace for whom any and every pop culture object can be re-purposed as a rallying-point. Seen in this way, the syncretism inherent in globalized postcoloniality becomes an inevitability to be negotiated and even mobilized, rather than simply rejected or lamented. Conclusion: Situating “playful” protest in the global periphery The consolidation of the neoliberal world order during the 1990s touted the concept of globalization by creating a disingenuous equivalence between global transculturation and the deregulation of private global economic exchange (Orr, 2007, p. 110). Conveniently, this perspective framed opposition to global market deregulation as a movement entrenched in retrograde nationalism and dangerous tribalism. This rhetorical turn was a product of the politics it emerged from: Cold War divisions of state power and the stratification of the world along the categories supplied by the supposed First, Second and Third Worlds. With the emergence of a uni-polar global hegemonic system, integration into the capitalist fold could be presented less as imperialism than a utopian integration of peoples—all the more so if it occurred first and foremost at the depoliticized level of commerce rather than through overt state conquest (Kraidy, 2005, p. 90). It is within this context that K-pop emerged as a globally trafficked cultural commodity, at once imminently mobile and commercial, and marked by the fact that it was part of a new crop of media objects circulating not as a reflection of top-down economic power and cultural empire, but as a reflection of a presumably multipolar world. Several years later, these same logics and affordances would allow K-pop’s re-articulation as a tool of anti-neoliberal activist discourse in Chile, and racial justice in the United States (Reddy, 2020). Given the accelerated pace at which cycles of excorporation and incorporation (Fiske, 1989, p. 15) have emerged amid the advent of digital convergence culture, it should not be a revelation to us that the vernacular systems of popular appropriation being seen here with cultural objects such as K-pop, Pikachu, and Spider-Man should work so quickly and effectively in their assertion of popular ownership and power over these objects. Phenomena such as these represent a pivotal step in the popular history of neoliberal globalization as seen from its multiple peripheries. As noted by Hardt and Negri, the externalizing logics of global capital have the effect of manufacturing crisis even as they position themselves as the solution to structural inconsistencies and exclusions of all kinds (2000, p. xv). Given the timeline of neoliberalism’s imposition around the world towards the end of last century, fractures such as those occurring in Chile can only likewise accelerate and amplify as the vast inadequacies of neoliberal structures lead to increasing inequality, dysfunctional social systems, and intertwined systems of exploitation and exclusion. This is something brought to bear even more visibly in the wake of COVID-19’s global spread, exposing as it has so many of the fractures and oversights of the current world order. Amid such circumstances, it is tempting to frame Chile (like Argentina during its economic collapse in 2000) as a model and precedent for other counter-movements. While I do believe that there are productive uses for these evaluations, these need to be considered with some key caveats. As their acts of civil disobedience illustrate, Chile’s anti-neoliberal activists have had several key advantages in their efforts to both disrupt and challenge the systems being addressed. For one, the rolling waves of protest that emerged since the imposition of Pinochet’s regime in 1973 have now created a robust culture of praxis with regard to the tactics and logistics of national protest. Chilean activists have developed semi-formal divisions of labor, with the “first line” (“primera linea”) of shielded protesters—mostly hardened teens, forming only one wing of a much larger network, including medics and other support personnel (Agencia EFE, 2020). Activists in societies not encultured along these lines are nowhere near as able to maintain sustained efforts on this scale, though as these protests themselves demonstrate, such activities can become a facet of popular culture more quickly than we might imagine. The state of the United States between 2020 and 2021 might be testament to this. Perhaps even more importantly, the Chilean people have, despite all efforts to the contrary, demonstrated a strong vein of cultural memory-keeping that both remembers and continuously re-evokes the agendas and ethical foundations of Allende’s Popular Unity government even as it attaches these to new cultural vehicles, agendas and identities (Pino-Ojeda, 2014, pp. 126–127). This has provided the current moment with a fundamental paradigm—a project to evoke, and an imagined future to work towards. It is because of this solid core that so many “external” semiotic elements can be continuously integrated, reinterpreted and mobilized within the wider movement. As neoliberal systems continue to fracture elsewhere, the capacity to make use of such tools will depend on counter-publics’ ability to re-evoke or newly create such propositional frameworks. Their survival will depend on the extent to which they are able to grasp a paradigm to build upon, rather than simply one to work against. As with Chilean activists’ own sudden political mobilization of media objects from Korea, Japan and elsewhere alongside those of the U.S.’s pop culture, such associative frameworks may right now be latent in other social contexts as well, simply waiting to be thrust into visibility and action. From a cultural studies perspective, such ruptures are fascinating for the ways in which they transform the popular life of these objects even as they shed light on the latent values and meanings they held even before being mobilized . Footnotes 1 These claims were preempted and supported by the Organization of American States (OAS), an institution born of Cold War politics and heavily intertwined with U.S. interests in Latin America (ANSA Latina, 2019). 2 See Min et al. (2019, p. 615), for examples of such discussions by Chilean K-pop fans themselves. 3 Highschool activism has prominently integrated Chile’s overall anti-neoliberal movement since the dictatorial period. This presence was so visible that the 2006 wave of protests were dubbed the “Penguin Revolution,” so-called because Chilean high schoolers are often endearingly nicknamed “penguins” (pingüinos) thanks to their standard school uniform (Bustos Verdugo, 2016). 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TI - “K-pop is Rupturing Chilean Society”: Fighting With Globalized Objects in Localized Conflicts
JO - "Communication, Culture & Critique"
DO - 10.1093/ccc/tcab047
DA - 2021-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/k-pop-is-rupturing-chilean-society-fighting-with-globalized-objects-in-mS0go18kMs
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -