Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. xviii, 303 pp. (B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781478013587.
Due to the rapid growth of South Korean popular culture, known as the Korean Wave or Hallyu, in global cultural markets in the early twenty-first century, media outlets in many countries and scholars in various academic fields have been highly interested in whether Korean popular culture and digital technologies are salient candidates to turn around the direction of cultural flows—not from the US to the Global South, but from South Korea to the Global North. Such parties are also interested in learning the ways in which Korea has developed local culture to achieve hegemonic power. Kyung Hyun Kim’s timely book discusses these significant concerns and provides several interesting perspectives.
Kim proposes the theoretical framework of “hegemonic mimicry” by applying postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry to analyze Korean popular cultural forms as “simulated and reinvented American cultural artifacts” (11). Through the framework of hegemonic mimicry, Kim attempts to explore ambivalently hegemonic moments of Korean popular culture in which the boundary between original and copy is blurred in cultural production. He especially analyzes Korean popular cultural texts in terms of the ways in which racial and national identities are represented.
Kim discusses his major themes and theories in seven chapters following an introduction. The Introduction sets out the primary conceptual and theoretical framework: race, which directs off-white and blackish over nationality and ethnicity; and mimicry, over innovation, as the major characteristics of contemporary Korean popular culture. He argues that Korean popular culture, on a large scale, has adapted Black culture in music, comedy, and film to reign supreme in global cultural markets. The subsequent chapters serve as case studies that make the connection between one of these overarching themes and specific fields, such as K-pop, K-cinema, K-television, and even electronics.
In chapter 1, Kim introduces the short history of the three major cultural industries. This first chapter also presents “how the act of mimicry passed from an initial colonial simulation of the dominant colonizer to an ambivalent and ironic one before assuming” a hegemonic form (30–31).
Chapter 2 discusses the history of rap in Korea in tandem with the rise of hip-hop. By focusing on race and authenticity in Korean music, including p’ansori in the film Sopyonje (1993) in comparison with the film Straight Outta Compton (2015)—portraying N.W.A., an African American hip-hop group—Kim provocatively claims that “the near impossibility of preventing the art of p’ansori from dying has partly contributed to the rise of hip-hop culture in Korea as the bona de expression of autobiographical storytelling and aesthetic expression” and hip-hop renews “a blackish and becoming-sense of Korean spirituality” (89).
Chapter 3 analyzes Korean cinema with two significant developments: digital-age surveillance and body-switch films, including Masquerade (2012) and Miss Granny (2014). Kim believes that the growth of digital technologies has enabled local directors to develop narratives that are no longer bound by specific metaphors.
Chapter 4 focuses on television, focusing on variety shows like Running Man rather than dramas. By emphasizing “the process of transcultural and transnational collaborative remakes of Korean entertainment TV programs” in China (142), Kim develops the notion of “affect Confucianism” to explain why Korean popular culture appeals across Asia. Chapter 5 discusses the nexus of recent films, food, and mukbang. By analyzing two films, Extreme Job (2019) and Parasite (2019), Kim discusses the role of food in popular culture. Chapter 6 juxtaposes conglomerate Samsung and K-pop to discuss how these two seemingly unrelated industries show similarities in their mimicry of Western electronics and Western pop culture to become their own hegemonic power. In the final chapter, Kim talks about the madangguk tradition of the 1970s to retrace the origins of satire in shows like Muhan Dojeon and the popular song “Gangnam Style” from the 2010s.
Hegemonic Mimicry has several primary merits, which ironically hinder the reader’s understanding. First, the book is textually rich and historically well-grounded as Kim aptly supports his arguments by utilizing works by established theoreticians with care. Given the potential readership of the book, including students and early career scholars in diverse areas, the seemingly innovative effort to apply various concepts and theories to the Hallyu phenomenon could be much further elaborated. In other words, the definitions and explanations of the theoretical framework should have been more robust.
The second primary merit of the book lies in its well-structured methodological framework. Kim utilizes important approaches such as textual analysis, historicization, semiotics, case studies, and comparative studies, which are well-executed. One of the most interesting approaches is his comparison of Korean cultural contents with primarily American ones and also sometimes Japanese and European ones. Yet such comparison of local and foreign cultural programs is troubling in many instances because the evidence of and rationale for such comparisons are under-explained and unreasonable. For example, Kim textually analyzes Extreme Jobs in relation to food culture. He claims that the movie portraying that “yangnyeom chicken” originated in the Southern part of America by African Americans symbolizes “off-White and blackish” trends as well as authenticity, although the book presents no compelling evidence to establish that the move is in fact an exemplar case of transculturally and transnationally race-overcoming cultural content.
Another prominent feature of the book is Kim’s emphasis on the significant role of mimicry. By articulating the de-Whiteness and de-Westernization of local cultural content in the digital age, he addresses the importance of hybridity and fake authenticity as essential elements of the current growth of Korean popular culture. He compares K-pop with Samsung to argue that Korean popular culture and digital technologies are “lacking in innovation” (199), as they are mainly developed through the copying of American culture and technology. As part of his argument, he claims that no K-pop idol members are known as innovators. His example of BTS’ song “Dynamite” being composed by foreign songwriters (36) is accurate; however, BTS have created many songs based on their own experiences that resonate with global youth.
Likewise, Kim’s understanding of Korea’s socio-cultural and economic perspectives as the ecology of popular culture needs to be recast. He emphasizes the massive role of the Korean government in the process of the rise of Korean cultural industries in comparison with “Korea’s miracle on the Han River” (35) and argues that K-pop is “born out of and driven by the interests of” the Korean government “through fiduciary subsidies,” (37) both of which are not only controversial but also unsubstantiated.
Having said that, through the hegemonic mimicry framework, Kim seeks to further articulate the existing discourse of Korean popular culture as a cultural hybrid phenomenon. He expands the understanding of transnational cultural flows of local culture and the reasons why and how Korea has advanced its cultural power on the global cultural scene. Since the book offers insight into Korean popular culture in the digital era by providing historical milieus in conjunction with his mastery of textual analysis, it will contribute to a growing body of literature on Korean popular culture.
Dal Yong Jin
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby