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Visualizing and Invisibilizing the Subempire: Labor, Humanitarianism, and Popular Culture across South Korea and Southeast and South Asia

Visualizing and Invisibilizing the Subempire: Labor, Humanitarianism, and Popular Culture across... This article examines five South Korean TV programs, The Age of Global Success, Love in Asia, Asia Hunter, KOICA’s Dream, and Saving Mrs. Go Bongshil, all of which belong to varied and hybrid genres such as news magazine, serialized documentary, reality show, and television drama. Due to its partially elevated status as a middlebrow medium and its ability to combine multiple functions such as entertainment, information, education, and social engineering, South Korean television is a more socially influential popular medium than its Western counterparts. I argue that South Korean popular culture, as represented by these television programs, produces, circulates, and promotes the meanings of respective nation-states (e.g., South Korea, Vietnam, Sri Lanka) and of Asia as a bloc in relation to the region’s ongoing economic and cultural globalization. The following five aspects of South Korea’s relationship to the less developed parts of Asia emerge in the popular culture of the television medium: Southeast Asian and other Asian migrant/immigrant/off-shore labor for South Korea, and the distinct ways in which some are made visible and others invisible; popular cultural imaginings of a pan-Korean regional-global network; popular cultural production of a pan-Asian imaginary; South Korean humanitarianism and its subimperializing dimensions; and dissemination of popular culture within and outside South Korea—that is, the emergence of popular culture as a significant instrument of imaging South Korea as a subempire. I conclude by offering a couple of broad speculations on the changing and varied meanings of subempire for contemporary South Korea. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Korean Studies Duke University Press

Visualizing and Invisibilizing the Subempire: Labor, Humanitarianism, and Popular Culture across South Korea and Southeast and South Asia

Lee, Jin-kyung
Journal of Korean Studies , Volume 23 (1) – Mar 1, 2018
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15 pages

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Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York
ISSN
0731-1613
eISSN
2158-1665
DOI
10.1215/21581665-4339071
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article examines five South Korean TV programs, The Age of Global Success, Love in Asia, Asia Hunter, KOICA’s Dream, and Saving Mrs. Go Bongshil, all of which belong to varied and hybrid genres such as news magazine, serialized documentary, reality show, and television drama. Due to its partially elevated status as a middlebrow medium and its ability to combine multiple functions such as entertainment, information, education, and social engineering, South Korean television is a more socially influential popular medium than its Western counterparts. I argue that South Korean popular culture, as represented by these television programs, produces, circulates, and promotes the meanings of respective nation-states (e.g., South Korea, Vietnam, Sri Lanka) and of Asia as a bloc in relation to the region’s ongoing economic and cultural globalization. The following five aspects of South Korea’s relationship to the less developed parts of Asia emerge in the popular culture of the television medium: Southeast Asian and other Asian migrant/immigrant/off-shore labor for South Korea, and the distinct ways in which some are made visible and others invisible; popular cultural imaginings of a pan-Korean regional-global network; popular cultural production of a pan-Asian imaginary; South Korean humanitarianism and its subimperializing dimensions; and dissemination of popular culture within and outside South Korea—that is, the emergence of popular culture as a significant instrument of imaging South Korea as a subempire. I conclude by offering a couple of broad speculations on the changing and varied meanings of subempire for contemporary South Korea.

Journal

Journal of Korean Studies – Duke University Press

Published: Mar 1, 2018

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    Abelmann, Nancy Shin, Jeongsu
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    Espiritu, Yen
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    Jameson, Fredric Guins, Raiford Cruz, Omayra Zaragoza
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    Kim, Minjeong Lie,
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    Kim, Nora Hui-Jung Lie,
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    Redfield, Peter Bornstein, Erica Redfield, Peter Bornstein, Erica
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    Sahara, Ayako
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    Ticktin, Miriam Redfield, Peter Bornstein, Erica
  • Body
    Wegenstein, Bernadette Mitchell, W. J. T. Hansen, Mark B. N.
  • The New (Korean) Wave: A Global Social Mobility Story: Please Look after Mom
    Abelmann, Nancy Shin, Jeongsu
  • ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the ‘Fall of Saigon.’
    Espiritu, Yen
  • Kukppong e ch’wihan: T’aeyang ŭ huye
    Hwang, Chinmi
  • Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture
    Jameson, Fredric Guins, Raiford Cruz, Omayra Zaragoza
  • Can the Union of Patriarchy and Multiculturalism Work? Family Dynamics in Filipina-Korean Rural Households
    Kim, Minjeong Lie,
  • Korea: Multiethnic or Multicultural?
    Kim, Nora Hui-Jung Lie,
  • An Introduction to the Anthropology of Humanitarianism
    Redfield, Peter Bornstein, Erica Redfield, Peter Bornstein, Erica
  • Globalized Humanitarianism: U.S. Imperial Formation in Asia and the Pacific through the Indochinese Refugee Problem
    Sahara, Ayako
  • From Redundancy to Recognition: Transnational Humanitarianism and the Production of Nonmoderns
    Ticktin, Miriam Redfield, Peter Bornstein, Erica
  • Body
    Wegenstein, Bernadette Mitchell, W. J. T. Hansen, Mark B. N.