With no doubt, K-pop refers to Korean popular music. But what does the "K" mean in K-pop? With increasing numbers of non-Korean members in K-pop groups, K-pop as a music genre, cultural product and system has become increasingly more transnational and hybrid than ever before. Indeed, the recruitment of multinational trainees has been a proven strategy for K-pop entertainment agencies seeking to appeal to various regions within the global market, and K-pop idol groups with one non-Korean member or even a few are not novel. Notably, the non-Koreans in these groups have nearly all been Asian, while performers of other races/ethnicities have found little success in the K-pop genre. In this context, the introduction of some K-pop groups (such as EXP and KAACHI) composed largely of non-Korean/Asian roiled the K-pop fan communities. These groups have faced significant pushback from fan communities and generated heated controversy regarding the issue of how K-pop is defined. Engaging with the controversy over the aforementioned cases, this lecture questions what constitutes K-pop and discusses what is specifically Korean about K-pop. The lecture first introduces various ways in which we understand K-pop and then discusses K-pop's racial imagination by looking at fans' reactions to and discourse around K-pop groups without korean members. In doing so, the lecture addresses how the boundary of K-pop is made and re-made.
About the Speaker: Ji-Hyun Ahn is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington Tacoma. She specializes in media globalization, Korean television and popular culture, Asian multiculturalism, and critical mixed-race studies. She is particularly interested in examining how media practices have facilitated the re-imagination of national identity from a global media perspective. Her first book Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media (2018) studied how the increase of visual representation of mixed-race Koreans formulates a particular racial project in contemporary South Korean media. She won several Top Paper Awards for her work and has published numerous book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals including Media, Culture & Society, Cultural Studies, International Communication Gazette, and the Asian Journal of Social Science. This lecture is cosponsored by the Department of World Languages and Literatures and made possible through the AAS's Northeast Asia Council Distinguished Speakers Bureau funded by the Korea Foundation.