Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2022. xii, 152 pp. Free e-book. ISBN 9783030949648.
Examining different dimensions of cultural re-creation, re-negotiation, and re-signification, Kyong Yoon makes a niche addition to the literature that deals with global audiences’ re-constructive uses of South Korean popular culture. He investigates how young Korean diaspora audiences make uses and gratifications of the cultural commodities for their needs of ethnic/racial identity construction and negotiation in Canada, where there is an issue of representation in popular culture. Regarding Hallyu as a “cultural trend of grassroots transnationalism” fulfilled by technology-savvy fans (3), Yoon explores how Korean-Canadian audiences, who are neglected by researchers, have utilized and contributed to the counter-flow of global popular culture, which leads to “diasporic cultural flows” (5). Most interestingly, he claims Hallyu may help global fans radically question their national identities or sense of geographic belonging, which culminates in hybridity as a fundamental condition of subjectivity as well as cultural production.
In his five-chaptered book, Yoon reconsiders the significances and implications of Hallyu’s successes. With multi-year interview research, he justifies the theoretical benefits of deploying diasporic perspectives in the study (chapter 1). He surveys trajectories of Korean Canadians’ ethnic/ racial subjectification and Hallyu’s roles in their lived experiences of dealing with issues of their minority status and identity (chapter 2). He then examines how Korean diasporas navigate and negotiate different sets of meaning-making and identity-management practices by consuming Korean TV programs (chapter 3), and enjoy experiences of ethnic pride by listening to K-pop (chapter 4). In conclusion, Yoon offers some optimistic predictions about Hallyu’s diasporic dimension further enhancing its potential as an alternative method of de-Westernizing and de-nationalizing cultural practices (chapter 5). Overall, Yoon makes a rather ambitious claim that “Hallyu may potentially be counter-hegemonic against dominant structural forces that define the transnational Korean cultural wave from either a Western-centric or a nation-statist perspective” (vi, emphasis added).
Since this kind of celebration is prevalent in the literature, I hope this review helps reconsider a more critical, realistic examination of the already noteworthy phenomenon. In the light of scholarly sophistication, I would cautiously posit that mere cultural consumption for individualistic ethnic/racial identity construction does not easily translate into a serious challenge to the structural, material configuration of the status quo. While commending digital media’s potential for the marginalized’s alternative self-representation and narratives, Yoon does not substantiate a proactive power of diasporic Hallyu content consumption. Instead, he leaves it for future studies to “examine further how diasporic individuals obtain and maintain the power to tell their stories through digital media and how such self-representation and storytelling can contribute to enhancing Korean Canadians’ public engagement” (95).
The term, diaspora, needs elaboration. While it is loaded with constrains of different cultural, economic, geographical, political, racial, and social configurations, Yoon does not engage in the concept’s changing meanings and implications in today’s nomadic global populace who devour the benefits of online communication that provides unprecedented speed and pervasiveness in the realm of cultural consumption. Instead, he merely confirms his findings to those of the existing literature, while the book’s theoretical background is limited in its examination of diasporas’ diverse media uses and gratifications.
While the main task of audience/reception studies is to analyze how audiences make sense of the media texts in their specific, everyday consumption contexts, the book is not successful in examining how the audiences employ Hallyu materials for their varied needs. Yoon indicates three groups of audiences by categorizing the patterns and consistencies of their Hallyu consumption. However, he does not deploy analyses on detailed dynamics behind their disparate trajectories, which could have examined why certain audiences lost their interest in Hallyu over mainstream culture, while others kept or rekindled theirs. Furthermore, Yoon does not reveal details on various socio-economic and personal backgrounds behind the “loyal” audiences, despite his acknowledgment of “multifaceted audience practices” (139); rather, he ambiguously claims that Hallyu helps diasporic audiences “come out” with their ethnic identity.
Yoon attributes “cultural proximity” to Korean TV programs’ popularity amongst diasporic audiences in Canada. However, other than archaic Confucianism-related terms and imaginary pilgrimage to the “homeland,” he is not successful in scrutinizing what specific content, sentiment, or anything “authentic” they find resourceful and/or relatable as a source of their identity construction/ negotiation. Without explicating details that help them overcome the material reality of living in the “White-dominant society,” Yoon makes a tautological claim that “diasporic young Koreans who are equipped with bilingual and bicultural literacy may actively navigate different media forms across ‘here’ and ‘there’” (94). Furthermore, against his proclaimed research objectives, Yoon discusses Kim’s Convenience, a mainstream Canadian TV program that perpetuates stereotypical understandings and representations on Korean culture and people. As a culmination of unsubstantiated claims, Yoon argues that watching Korean TV programs enables diasporic Koreans to articulate their identities “without self-monitoring and feelings of marginalization” and “become gradually aware that they do not have to explain who they are any more” to the mainstream society (94). Lastly, his use of Korean TV as an all-encompassing term that covers any visually mediated contents in electric media is detrimental to making his arguments logically coherent and practically relevant.
As for K-pop, the book is filled with optimistic, hyperbolic claims, albeit with some critical caveats. Yoon indicates that audiences are dissatisfied with some K-pop practices (like its incoherent, over-use of English lyrics), listen to it without making nationalistic or ethnic celebration, and are weary of the industry’s conforming to the American popular culture hegemony. However, his argument is mainly geared toward celebrating the K-pop industry’s business strategy that markets its idols as “transcultural signifier[s]” (117). Yoon focuses more on how diasporic audiences appreciate K-pop’s consumerist promotional power—that is “the idols’ styles, fashion, and makeup were more applicable to their everyday contexts” (119)—than on how they dialectically utilize it to make sense of their ethnic identity. Furthermore, Yoon makes a logical leap in K-pop’s “counter-hegemonic” potential when stating that its audiences “question Western-centric and White dominant cultural production and consumption, while challenging the essentialization of ethnic cultures” (128).
Overall, Diasporic Hallyu falls short of presenting how diaspora audiences make specific, nuanced uses of Hallyu in their detailed trajectories of ethnic/racial identity construction and negotiation in Canada. Citing bilingual and bicultural literacy mainly exercised in cultural commodity consumption, Yoon treats the contingent diasporic/cultural capacity as a panacea to the extent that he essentializes it. Had it addressed these intricate dynamics, the book could have made important, well-substantiated claims on the topic.
Gooyong Kim
Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, Cheyney