The Korean Wave In Southeast Asia

The Korean Wave in Southeast Asia offers fresh details and new perspectives on the globalization of Korean popular culture, better known as ‘Hallyu’. Focusing on the dissemination, localization, consumption and fandom of Korean TV dramas, films, pop music and other forms of youth culture within the cultural geography of Southeast Asia, the chapters in the book offer a compelling analysis of the globalization of Hallyu and detail the various social and cultural mechanisms involved. Deeply accomplished, this book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in cultural and social change in Southeast Asia, as well as for graduate and undergraduate students learning about popular culture in Asia. Nissim Otmazgin Chair of the Department of Asian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author, Regionalizing Culture: The political economy of Japanese popular culture in Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013). This book proves to be an important addition to the growing scholarship on the Korean Wave and the resulting new pop culture trends in Southeast Asia. In addition to introducing new concepts for further comparative research, the roster of case studies on Hallyu consumption and production in the region (informed by interdisciplinary expertise) offer readers fresh analyses and diverse experiences of the phenomenon. The publication of this collection is timely for our new course elective focusing on the ‘Korean Wave’, in which this book will certainly be a required reading. Sarah Domingo Lipura Associate Director, Ateneo Initiative for Korean Studies, Ateneo De Manila University (Philippines)

This book aims to provide comprehensive empirical and theoretical studies of expanding fandom communities in East Asia through the commodification of Japanese, Korean and Chinese popular cultures in the digital era. Using a multidisciplinary approach including political economy, East Asian studies, political science, international relations concepts and history, this book focuses on a few research objectives. In terms of methodology, it is an area studies approach based on interpretative work, observation studies, policy and textual analysis. First, it aims to examine the closely intertwined relationship between the three major stakeholders in the iron triangle of production companies, consumers and states (i.e., role of government in policy promotion). Second, it studies the interpenetration, adaptation, innovation and hybridization of exogenous Western culture with traditional popular cultures in (North) East Asia. Third, it studies the influence of popular cultures and how cultural products resonate with a regional audience through collective consumption, contents reflective of normative values, the emotive and cognitive appeal of familiar images and social learning as well as peer effect found in fan communities. It then examines how consumption contributes to soft cultural influence and how governments leverage on its comparative advantages and cultural assets for commercial success and in the process augment national (cultural) influence. These questions will be discussed and analyzed and contextualized through the case studies of J-pop (Japanese popular culture), K-pop (Korean popular culture or Hallyu) and Chinese popular culture (including Mando-pop and Taiwanese popular culture).

The Republic of Korea's global expansion has been mirrored by its interest and presence in Southeast Asia. From trade, investment, aid, tourism, to the cultural "Korean wave", its various roles have blossomed and its influence has grown. The ASEAN region has not only affected Korean foreign policy, but also many aspects of Korean life, from the migration of Southeast Asian industrial workers to marriages and the curricula of academic institutions. This volume explores various aspects of these new relationships and their importance to all concerned parties. It brings together a group of specialists who have documented the growing interlocking roles between Korea and ASEAN and its constituent states in detail. These developments have profound implications for relations in the East and Southeast Asian regions, and for the world as a whole.

The contributors analyse the subject of Asian pop culture arranged under three headings: 'Television Industry in East Asia', 'Transnational-Crosscultural Receptions of TV Dramas' and 'Nationalistic reactions'.

The first scholarly volume to investigate the impact of social media and other communication technologies on the global dissemination of the Korean Wave

This wide-ranging volume is the first to examine the characteristics, dynamics and wider implications of recently emerging regional production, dissemination, marketing and consumption systems of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia. Using tools based in a variety of disciplines - organizational analysis and sociology, cultural and media studies, and political science and history - it elucidates the underlying cultural economics and the processes of region-wide appropriation of cultural formulas and styles. Through discussions of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Philippine and Indonesian culture industries, the authors in the book describe a major shift in Asia's popular culture markets toward arrangements that transcend autonomous national economies by organizing and locating production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods on a regional scale. Specifically, the authors deal with patterns of co-production and collaboration in the making and marketing of cultural commodities such as movies, music, comics, and animation. The book uses case studies to explore the production and exploitation of cultural imaginaries within the context of intensive regional circulation of cultural commodities and images. Drawing on empirically-based accounts of co-production and collaboration in East and Southeast Asia's popular culture, it adopts a regional framework to analyze the complex interrelationships among cultural industries. This focus on a regional economy of transcultural production provides an important corrective to the limitations of previous studies that consider cultural products as text and use them to investigate the "meaning" of popular culture.