K-pop in the Diaspora, the Diaspora in K-pop

Date: 

Thursday, April 6, 2023, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

Virtual Symposium

Workshops and Conferences
Blenda

Organizer: Bo kyung Blenda Im, AY 2022-2023 & 2021-2022 Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellow, Korea Institute, Harvard University

Abstract:

How does K-pop facilitate new modes of self-fashioning and redefine social imaginaries amongst diasporic Koreans? On the other hand, in what ways have members of the Korean Diaspora shaped the Korean music industry? This virtual symposium invites participants into a focused conversation on popular music and the Korean Diaspora.

Asian Americans, differentially included under neoliberal racial social ordering (Espiritu, Lowe, Yoneyama 2017), regularly confront racialized and gendered tropes that circulate in the American public imaginary. Marginalized by the U.S. recording industry, Korean American coethnic return migrants have played pivotal roles as musicians, producers, lyricists, and composers in the Korean popular music scene. The sounds and ideas engendered in the Korean music industry, in turn, travel across the Pacific Basin to Korean diasporic communities. How are local ideas about gender, race, citizenship, and belonging reshaped through this circulatory process? Mobilizing a transpacific framework that clears space for new interpretive possibilities, this virtual roundtable attends to questions and narratives that have been occluded by landed, nationalist accounts of popular music on both “Korean” and “American” fronts. Potential topics for discussion include:

  • New opportunities and familiar problems associated with the rise of K-pop in America
  • Shifts in Asian American gender and ethnic construction
  • Foreign citizenship and the precarity of belonging in the Korean public imaginary
  • Inter-ethnic and inter-racial politics
  • Technology, social media, and virality

By focusing on the ways in which diasporic Koreans negotiate their place in the 21st century global recording industry, this roundtable provokes conversations that lead to a more inclusive and holistic account of transpacific cultural production.
 

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To attend this online event, please register here.

Generously supported by the Jeffrey D. and Jean K. Lee Fund at the Korea Institute, Harvard University