Cover; The Korean Wave; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; List of figures and tables; Notes on contributors; Acknowledgments; Foreword; Introduction: Korean media in a digital cosmopolitan world; Part I Power and politics of the global; 1 Soft power and the Korean Wave; 2 Korean Wave and inter-Asian referencing; 3 Reconfiguring media and empire; Part II Popular media and digital mobile culture; 4 Korean Wave pop culture in the global Internet age: why popular? Why now?; 5 For the eyes of North Koreans? Politics of money and class in Boys Over Flowers
6 K-pop female idols in the West: racial imaginations and erotic fantasies7 Negotiating identity and power in transnational cultural consumption: Korean American youths and the Korean Wave; 8 Digitization and online cultures of the Korean Wave: "East Asian" virtual community in Europe; 9 Hybridization of Korean popular culture: films and online gaming; 10 K-pop dance trackers and cover dancers: global cosmopolitanization and local spatialization; Part III Perspectives inside/outside; 11 Cultural policy and the Korean Wave: from national culture to transnational consumerism
12 Re-worlding culture?: YouTube as a K-pop interlocutor13 The Korean Wave as a cultural epistemic; 14 The Korean Wave and "global culture"; Index
Summary
Since the late 1990s South Korea has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational popular culture - the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history. Why popular (or not)? Why now? What does it mean socially, culturally and politically in a global context? This edited collection considers the Korean Wave in a global digital age and addresses the social, cultural and political implications in their complexity and paradox within the contexts of global inequalities and uneven power structures. The emerging consequences at multiple leve
