51st Meeting - K-pop as a global cultural trend

Date: 27 August, 2021

Place: Zoom

Participants: Vivien, Faiz, Matthew, Aditi, Joshua, Rocky, & 100선생

Matthew, Aditi, and Faiz led today's discussion - thank you very much! We started with Faiz's questions about how K-Pop changes K-Pop fans' self awareness of their racial identities or the perceptions of others around them. While Vivien suggested that the K-Pop contents tend to reinforce or reiterate, instead of chaning, the fans' existing identities or perceptions on them, Rocky shared his experience that his Korean identity was defined (or imposed) by others who watched K-Pop or other 'K- ' contents. Joshua added to Rocky's point that there is a certain expectation on Korean people that Korean people should be supporting whatever 'K-contents' to raise their national pride.

Matthew took over the discussion and introduced the lecture on K-Pop and Blackness in the US. In comparison with the Australian public's unintended racism toward the refugees, Matthew presented the cases of 'innocent racism' embedded in the K-Pop contents. Joshua pointed out the deep-rooted racism in Korean society, and there is an irony in the K-Pop contents - the embedded racism and its hybridity from embracing diverse popular culture around the world.

The final session was facilitated by Aditi. Aditi opened several questions: How could K-Pop succeed?, Can there be K-Pop without Korean?, What is the 'K' in K-Pop. How to define the Koreaness is a big question to answer, but we how Koreaness is defined by various actors, such as the Korean government and the Korean entertainment industry, and how it is defined differently depending the target audience. For example, Matthew pointed out that the K-marketing by the Korean government for overseas audience tends to have different contents from those for domestic audience, which sometimes creats a sort of 'echo-chamber' by repeating what the Korean government thinks to be popular among foreign K-Pop fans.

Overall, it was a great session to deepen our understanding in K-Pop and other K-culture contents and critically examine the K-Pop phenomenon!