Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. viii, 261 pp. (B&W photos.) US$105.00, cloth. ISBN 9781793636300.
Ever since the notion of Hallyu, or Korean Wave, first emerged in the late 1990s, this phenomenon has continued to grow and generate massive cultural currency across the globe. Equally, the expanding academic focus on the transnational circulation of Korean popular culture and its widespread fandom has enlarged to include more scholars from diverse fields and disciplines. Notwithstanding this growth in academia, just as Korean popular culture continues to break records on a transnational scale, reflected in the colossal “armies” of fans that follow Blackpink and BTS and the remarkable popular and critical reception for the mega-hits Parasite (2019) and Squid Game (2021), we witness many voids to fill in Hallyu studies. Here Comes the Flood offers a timely response to such lacunae, shifting the focus of Hallyu research from “Why is Korean popular culture followed by non-Korean media fans?” to “How are Korean popular culture and its transnational fans jointly articulating and producing new cultural formations and paradigms?” The volume’s editors, Marcy L. Tanter and Moisés Park, explain in the introduction that Hallyu and its fans constantly “break against tropes of stereotype, sexuality, and gender norms and push the boundaries of inclusivity” (6). In this respect, the subsequent 10 chapters of the book delve into unique cases and demonstrate specific ways in which the various forms of Hallyu culture and its followers disturb heteropatriarchal mores and other types of archetypal expectations.
The scope of handled cases is extensive. In addition, the chapters offer a comprehensive understanding of the roles and impact of different media genres and platforms—from historical drama, jeonwon deurama (rural drama), Netflix shows, photography, popular music, historical literature like the Samguk sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms), trendy TV shows, webtoons (digital comics), and music videos to activist movements. In addition, the fictional and non-fictional identities covered by the case studies in this anthology are inclusive, something foreshadowed by the editors who claim cultural awareness and inclusivity as properties common to the Korean Wave. The book discusses Vietnamese women, North Korean women singers, diasporic Korean Canadian characters, marriage migrants from Southeast Asia, fictional queers in the dynastic era, Korean women farmers leaving city life behind (gwinongin), Korean male office workers, adoptee characters, and K-pop idols, along with Chilean fan activists and a drag queen. These subjects are examined through a thematic focus on what kinds of changes are manifested in the Korean popular cultural spaces they embody, based on textual and audiovisual analyses and interviews. Each chapter in this collection involves sophisticated theoretical analysis and articulates well-developed methodological approaches, helping the reader gain an in-depth knowledge of the cases discussed and understand the cultural and sociopolitical changes in multiple arenas in relation to South Korean popular culture.
However, despite the rigorous analysis offered within each chapter, readers who expect a wider elaboration of the importance of gender and sexuality in Korean popular culture and the background context of Korean society may desire further explanation than that which is offered in the introduction. In this regard, although the editors state that their goal to provide various diverse perspectives on gender, sexuality, and stereotypes in the Korean Wave, there is, unfortunately, insufficient discussion about why it is meaningful to examine these topics. The introduction would be better served by including an academically rigorous section that usefully historicizes, contextualizes, and complicates the issue of gender and sexuality in Korean popular culture/Korea. By so doing, it could justify why discussing the selected topics is significant today, and furnish the reader with a basic understanding that would serve to inform the subsequent case studies in the volume. Also, some readers may find the book not entirely consistent in relation to its chosen topical interest. The authors state that they solicited chapter contributors who were dedicated to the study of gender and sexuality in Korean popular culture; however, due to a wide variety of papers they received, they ended up including a few chapters that only tangentially reflect this focus, which somewhat weakens the volume’s overall thematic coherence. Finally, in comparison to the diversity of identities and media forms studied in this collection of essays, the range of geographical contexts included is less extensive, only involving East Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, and South America—omitting Oceania, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe—all regions where South Korean popular culture has a solid fanbase. This absence gives readers limited knowledge of from where “comes the flood.”
Notwithstanding these shortcomings, this anthology is a good follow-up and addition to preceding Hallyu collections. Here Comes the Flood offers well-documented information about existing scholarship and discussions as well as an intriguing range of down-to-earth perspectives on what the Korean Wave and its transnational fans are doing on multiple levels. Perhaps above all else, this book can function as a useful steppingstone that connects with other explorations into the nonconformist gender and sexual variances that are inspired by and interact with Korean popular culture. As such, Here Comes the Flood helps Hallyu fans and lay readers to obtain a comprehensive understanding of Hallyu’s background and current popular standing and equips Hallyu scholars with a wider range of theoretical and methodological tools to examine the field.
Portland State University, Portland