Final thoughts on Korean Popular Culture and Hallyu

My love for Korean dramas is what led me to take this class. However, before this class when I watched Kdramas, I watched them on a superficial level, looking only at the actors while not paying much attention to the plot and possible theoretical/historical/literary underpinnings. After reading John Storey's book, I was introduced to the many perspectives that I could view these primary texts from like postmodernism, marxism and post-marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, etc. Analyzing the primary texts from these perspectives made me think more about why these texts were made and what they were trying to convey.

For example, music especially is an interesting category because of all the foreign influences that Korean music possesses, from Japanese enka to British punk to American hiphop. Yet these products don't seem to be straight copies and instead includes Korean aspects like traditional instruments, references to folksongs like Arirang or the sadness evoking the feeling of "han". Thus it seems to be a negotiation process that falls into the category of postmarxism.

More interesting was the wider range of Korean popular culture products I was introduced to. Before this class I never really paid much attention to the Korean historical genre of dramas. However, after watching Yi sunsin and emperor of the sea, I was impressed the the amount of effort and skill that went into the production of these dramas, especially in technical direction of the boat fighting scenes. I feel that the Korean drama industry was able to use these dramas to tell a very compelling, albeit possibly fictionalized, story and stimulate the audience's interest in Korean history. Similarly, Jewel was able to do the same thing for Korean food. Feffer's article on food and globalization (or possibly glocalization) was one I found particular interesting as it mentioned the foreign influences on Korean food, and how the Koreans were able to adapt these foreign influences to create a unique Korean product.

Finally, our study of Hallyu was something I found especially interesting. Previously I had heard of the term from the Taiwan news media but I had never really knew what it meant and entailed. The class not only gave me a better understanding, but also helped make me think about why the Hallyu was able to sweep through Asia and if it could possibly endure. As we talked about in class last week, I feel that as long as the Korean culture industry churns out good products, the Korean wave will go on, though possibly not with the current intensity. If you think about the popularity of Japanese dramas in the late 1990s, I feel that the situation is quite similar. Kimura Takuya was as popular as Bae Yong Joon is in Asia (or at least in Taiwan) now and women literally cried when he got married. Tokyo Love Story is supposedly a romantic classic, while Hero and GTO were popular because of how wacky they were, yet the golden age of Jdramas seem to have passed, though there are still some decent offerings each season and thus I still watch it religiously.

Thus, though I learned from this class that Korean popular culture has much more breadth and depth that I had previously thought, the question of sustainability of the Hallyu is something left to be determined.