Arts & International Affairs: Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2018 | Page 58

KOREAN POPULAR CULTURE AND HISTORICAL
SENSIBILITIES IN EAST ASIA
JOOYOUN LEE
ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS • VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1 • SPRING 2018
Associate Professor
Department of Global Studies and Political Science, School of
Behavioral and Social Sciences, St. Edward’s University, USA
ABSTRACT
This article draws on the 2016 “Tzuyu Incident” involving a K-pop girl band,
Twice, and its Taiwanese member, Chou Tzuyu, to examine the intensity of
political-cultural reactions to the incident in Taiwan and South Korea. It
aims to reassess the role of popular culture in International Relations (IR) by
exploring the way that popular culture makes, remakes, and dissolve borders.
I argue that popular culture entails contradictory processes of crossing and
delimiting borders, as a site where an individual’s world-historical sensibilities
are evoked in a way that makes borders not only dissolved, but also, at the
same time, demarcated by reinforcing nationalistic sentiments. These seeming
contradictions are not fixed, however. By demonstrating that popular culture
in East Asia flows multi-directionally and evokes local agency as a way to articulate
identity, this article highlights that popular culture generates political
processes of mixing and de-mixing subjectivities.
Introduction
Popular culture in International Relations (IR) has typically been analyzed as a tool
of the state to enhance its status in the international arena or as products of culture
industries to pursue their profits. This view is manifested in Joseph Nye’s notion of
soft power. He notes that popular culture, as an effective instrument of the state’s soft
power, establishes preferences in a way that influences international audiences (Nye
2004:12; Nye and Kim 2013:5). These understandings entail the idea that culture is the
sheer product intended for the interests of the state or business. From this perspective,
culture is located in a fixed binary relationship between the state and its audiences or
between business and its consumers. 1
On the other hand, popular culture has also been examined in the large framework of culture,
as a way to challenge a state-centric approach. In this view, as generators of “non-iso-
1 For limits of this view, see J. Lee (2017) and Ling (2017).
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doi: 10.18278/aia.3.1.5