Monday, June 8th, 2015 Pop Cosmopolitics and Kpop Video Culture

Description

Since 2011, the genre of popular music called Kpop has established a visible presence on the web both as a corporate pop culture commodity and as a rich and complex participatory video culture that centers on the “reaction video.” The variety of video “reactions” display a common concern with consumption captured by video and, thus, with the indexicality of the reaction video as a transcultural spectacle that moves or affectively touches the viewer through its presentation of reception as corporeal event. Examining a spectrum of video reactions to Kpop, I question how reception is represented, why the re-presentability of reception is appealing, and what this may indicate about the circulation of encounters with difference on the web. Pairing the Kpop reaction video with a corollary fan-produced genre—the Kpop dance cover performance video—to compare multiple forms of video-making within the Kpop videosphere, I consider how these videos simultaneously commodify empathy, document the nature of spectator identification, and visualize Kpop commodities’ infectiousness. Against this fascination with generalized consumer affect, what also emerge are the contours of geopolitically differentiated and racialized consumption. I argue, therefore, that video of Kpop’s seemingly deterritorialized, global consumption underscore, instead, its context-specificity, belying the cosmopolitan fantasy reiterated in spectator reactions, and thus underscoring the need to address geopolitical and transcultural contexts to understand video’s subjectivating influence. Thus my talk analyzes Kpop’s video culture to consider the diagnostic function and the “cosmopolitical” potential of popular culture. Cosmopolitics more than cosmopolitanism refers to the continuing interdependence of the national and the global, and can elucidate the objects and practices that lead to the coalescence of something imagined as the global popular qua “pop cosmopolitanism.”

Michelle Cho is an Assistant Professor of Korean Studies and World Cinemas at McGill University. Her writing on gender, genre, celebrity culture, and self-reflexive media appears in Cinema Journal, Acta Koreana, Hallyu 2.0, and The Korean Popular Culture Reader. She is completing a book that analyzes the form and function of South Korean genre cinemas in the “Sunshine Policy” decade. Her new project examines the relationship between popular culture and the post-political in South Korea, with a focus on celebrity labor, minority representation, and media convergence.