Download or read book Campus Cinephilia in Neoliberal South Korea written by Josie Jung Yeon Sohn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a transnational approach to the study of film culture, this book draws on ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean university film club to explore a cosmopolitan cinephile subculture that thrived in an ironic unevenness between the highly nationalistic mood of commercial film culture and the intense neoliberal milieu of the 2000s. As these time-poor students devoted themselves to the study of film that is unlikely to help them in the job market, they experienced what a student described as ‘a different kind of fun’, while they appreciated their voracious consumption of international art films as a very private matter at a time of unprecedented boom in the domestic film industry. This unexpectedly vibrant cosmopolitan subculture of student cinephiles in neoliberal South Korea makes the nation’s film culture more complex and interesting than a simple nationalistic affair.
Download or read book South Koreans in the Debt Crisis written by Jesook Song and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Koreans in the Debt Crisis is a detailed examination of the logic underlying the neoliberal welfare state that South Korea created in response to the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997–2001). Jesook Song argues that while the government proclaimed that it would guarantee all South Koreans a minimum standard of living, it prioritized assisting those citizens perceived as embodying the neoliberal ideals of employability, flexibility, and self-sufficiency. Song demonstrates that the government was not alone in drawing distinctions between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Progressive intellectuals, activists, and organizations also participated in the neoliberal reform project. Song traces the circulation of neoliberal concepts throughout South Korean society, among government officials, the media, intellectuals, NGO members, and educated underemployed people working in public works programs. She analyzes the embrace of partnerships between NGOs and the government, the frequent invocation of a pervasive decline in family values, the resurrection of conservative gender norms and practices, and the promotion of entrepreneurship as the key to survival. Drawing on her experience during the crisis as an employee in a public works program in Seoul, Song provides an ethnographic assessment of the efforts of the state and civilians to regulate social insecurity, instability, and inequality through assistance programs. She focuses specifically on efforts to help two populations deemed worthy of state subsidies: the “IMF homeless,” people temporarily homeless but considered employable, and the “new intellectuals,” young adults who had become professionally redundant during the crisis but had the high-tech skills necessary to lead a transformed post-crisis South Korea.
Download or read book Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea written by Namhee Lee and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Namhee Lee explores how social memory and neoliberal governance in post-1987 South Korea have disavowed the revolutionary politics of the past.
Download or read book In Pursuit of English written by Joseph Sung-Yul Park and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing how anxieties, insecurities, and moral desire about English instilled through South Korea's neoliberal transformation led to the country's heated pursuit of English in the 1990s and 2000s, this book presents subjectivity as a theoretical and analytical perspective for studying the intersection of language and political economy.
Download or read book Neoliberalism and Global Cinema written by Jyotsna Kapur and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this edited volume, an international ensemble of scholars looks at how the world’s various cinemas, including Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the U.S., have variously performed, contested, and reinforced the worldwide transition to neoliberalism. Grounded in Marxist theory, the volume considers how the contradictions of capital, both as culture and commerce, have played out globally in contemporary media culture.
Download or read book New Millennium South Korea written by Jesook Song and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the common held belief that Asian nations have displayed anti-market tendencies of under-consumption and export-oriented trade since the Asian financial crisis, in the 10 years since the crisis, South Korea has bucked this trend accruing a higher debt rate than the US. This groundbreaking collection of essays addresses questions such as how did the open market policies and restructuring processes implemented during the Asian financial crisis magnify the consumption and debt level in South Korea to such an extent? What is the impact of these financial changes on the daily lives of people in different cultural and socio-economic groups? In examining these questions the authors provide valuable insight into the rise of financial capitalism, transnational mobility and the implications of neoliberal governing tactics following the Asian Financial Crisis. Examining South Korea’s transformation during the early years of the 21st century, New Millenium South Korea will be of interest to anthropologists, economists and sociologists, as well as students and scholars of Korean Studies.
Download or read book Civic Activism in South Korea written by Seungsook Moon and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-16 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, neoliberalism has transformed South Korean society, going far beyond simply restructuring the economy. In response, a number of civic organizations that emerged from the democratization movement with a conscious emphasis on social change have sought to address socioeconomic and political problems caused or aggravated by the neoliberal transformation. Examining how “citizens’ organizations” in South Korea negotiate with the market and neoliberal governance, Seungsook Moon offers new ways to understand the intricate relationship between democracy and neoliberalism as modes of ruling. She provides in-depth qualitative studies of three different types of organizations: a large national advocacy organization run by professional staff activists, two medium-size local branches of a national feminist organization run by mostly volunteer activists, and a small local organization run by volunteer activists with a focus on foreign migrants. Bringing together these rich empirical cases with deft theoretical analysis, Moon argues that neoliberalism and democracy are entwined in complex ways. Although neoliberalism undermines democratic practices of social equality by shrinking or destroying public resources, institutions, and space, it also can facilitate participatory practices that arise to fill needs left by privatization and deregulation as long as those practices do not seriously challenge the workings of capitalism. Showing how neoliberalism simultaneously enables and constrains civic activism, this book illuminates the contradictions of social engagement today, with global implications.
Download or read book Mixed Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media written by Ji-Hyun Ahn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies how the increase of visual representation of mixed-race Koreans formulates a particular racial project in contemporary South Korean media. It explores the moments of ruptures and disjuncture that biracial bodies bring to the formation of neoliberal multiculturalism, a South Korean national racial project that re-aligns racial lines under the nation’s neoliberal transformation. Specifically, Ji-Hyun Ahn examines four televised racial moments that demonstrate particular aspects of neoliberal multiculturalism by demanding distinct ways of re-imagining what it means to be Korean in the contemporary era of globalization. Taking a critical media/cultural studies approach, Ahn engages with materials from archives, the popular press, policy documents, television commercials, and television programs as an inter-textual network that actively negotiates and formulates a new racialized national identity. In doing so, the book provides a rich analysis of the ongoing struggle over racial reconfiguration in South Korean popular media, advancing an emerging scholarly discussion on race as a leading factor of social change in South Korea.
Download or read book Pop Empires written by S. Heijin Lee and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the start of the twenty-first century challenges to the global hegemony of U.S. culture are more apparent than ever. Two of the contenders vying for the hearts, minds, bandwidths, and pocketbooks of the world’s consumers of culture (principally, popular culture) are India and South Korea. “Bollywood” and “Hallyu” are increasingly competing with “Hollywood”—either replacing it or filling a void in places where it never held sway. This critical multidisciplinary anthology places the mediascapes of India (the site of Bollywood), South Korea (fountainhead of Hallyu, aka the Korean Wave), and the United States (the site of Hollywood) in comparative dialogue to explore the transnational flows of technology, capital, and labor. It asks what sorts of political and economic shifts have occurred to make India and South Korea important alternative nodes of techno-cultural production, consumption, and contestation. By adopting comparative perspectives and mobile methodologies and linking popular culture to the industries that produce it as well as the industries it supports, Pop Empires connects films, music, television serials, stardom, and fandom to nation-building, diasporic identity formation, and transnational capital and labor. Additionally, via the juxtaposition of Bollywood and Hallyu, as not only synecdoches of national affiliation but also discursive case studies, the contributors examine how popular culture intersects with race, gender, and empire in relation to the global movement of peoples, goods, and ideas.
Download or read book South Korean Cinema and Hybridity of East Asian Identity written by Hector Kim and published by Hector Kim. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In attempts to identify the integral elements contributory to the recent success of South Korean films in East Asia, most existing researches maintain their wide focal length on either: underlying political conditions like South Korea's media liberalization, or the continually rising demand for non-Hollywood films in the region. This text, however, takes a different approach and looks more closely to the question of "South Korean cinema's place in (re)construction of East Asian identity" as it was found a significant yet underexplored area of research. The questioning is attempted by testing the hypothesis that the merit of South Korean films relies more on the cultural "similarity / proximity" based on "common experience of absorption of Western modern civilization" than the cultural "otherness / distance" based on "different experience of consumption of modern culture". The mode of production and the relationship between the global and South Korean film industry are contextually examined in order to identify and understand the invisible underpinnings, which otherwise would go unnoticed while spectators watch films. In doing so, the text analyzes the unique conditions that the South Korean film industry grew out of, and the effects such underlying conditions had on the contemporary "genre-bending" films, for which South Korean cinema is best known and favored nowadays. Furthermore, by placing hanryu (Korean Wave) phenomenon within the context of globalization discourse, the three main strands of globalization discourse - 1. Cultural imperialism, 2. Modernity project, 3. Hybridization of identity - are applied to the questioning of South Korean cinema's place in East Asia amid the changing trend of cultural flows in times of globalization.
Download or read book Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalization written by Kevin Gray and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most remarkable aspects of South Korea’s transition from impoverished post-colonial nation to fully-fledged industrialized democracy has been the growth of its independent and dynamic labour movement. Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation examines current trends and transformations within the Korean labour movement since the 1990s. It has been a common assumption that the ‘third wave’ of democratisation, the end of the Cold War, and the spread of neoliberal globalisation in the latter part of the 20th century have helped to create an environment in which organised labour is better placed to overcome bureaucratic national unionism and transform itself into a potential counter-globalisation movement. However, Kevin Gray argues that despite the apparent continued phenomena of labour militancy and the rhetoric of anti-neoliberalism, the mainstream independent labour movement in Korea has become increasingly institutionalised and bureaucratised into the new capitalist democracy. This process is demonstrated by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions’ experience of participation in various forms of policy making forums. Gray suggests that as a result, the KCTU has failed to mount an effective challenge against processes of neoliberal restructuring and concomitant social polarisation. The Korean experience provides an excellent case study for understanding the relationship between organised labour and globalisation. Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation will appeal to students and scholars of Korean studies and International Political Economy, as well as Asian politics and economics.
Download or read book The Korean Developmental State written by Iain Pirie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ian Pirie gives a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of state and economic restructuring in South Korea since the 1997 crisis.
Download or read book The South Korean Film Industry written by Sangjoon Lee and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multifaceted exploration of the South Korean film industry
Download or read book Exception Taken written by Jonathan Buchsbaum and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Exception Taken, Jonathan Buchsbaum examines the movements that have emerged in opposition to the homogenizing force of Hollywood in global filmmaking. While European cinema was entering a steady decline in the 1980s, France sought to strengthen support for its film industry under the new Mitterrand government. Over the following decades, the country lobbied partners in the European Economic Community to design strategies to protect the audiovisual industries and to resist cultural free-trade pressures in international trade agreements. These struggles to preserve the autonomy of national artistic prerogatives emboldened many countries to question the benefits of accelerated globalization. Led by the energetic minister of culture Jack Lang, France initiated a series of measures to support all sectors of the film industry. Lang introduced laws mandating that state and private television invest in the film industry, effectively replacing the revenue lost from a shrinking theatrical audience for French films. With the formation of the European Union in 1992, Europe passed a new treaty (Maastricht) that extended its legal purview to culture for the first time, setting up the dramatic confrontation over the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in 1993. Pushed by France, the EU fought the United States over the idea that countries should preserve their right to regulate cultural activity as they saw fit. France and Canada then initiated a campaign to protect cultural diversity within UNESCO that led to the passage of the Convention on Cultural Diversity in 2005. As France pursued these efforts to protect cultural diversity beyond its borders, it also articulated "a certain idea of cinema" that did not simply defend a narrow vision of national cinema. France promoted both commercial cinema and art cinema, disproving announcements of the death of cinema.
Download or read book Globalisation and Labour Struggle in Asia written by Phoebe Moore and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2007-06-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has South Korea's development influenced and been influenced by world events? The neo-Gramscian school theorises that world history reveals specific periods of hegemonic stability such as during the post World War II period of 'Pax Americana', but this new account of Korean development demonstrates that this speculation cannot be fully justified. Through making creative links between forms of state, education programmes, labour relations and the global climate throughout a series of 'historical blocs' such as the period of Japanese colonisation, Phoebe Moore covers the story of South Korean development. She observes that all economic development in South Korea has been carried out through 'passive revolution' driven by elite, frequently supported by external forces, against the will of a large part of the population, namely the working classes. In this original contribution Moore's critical International Political Economy approach sheds light on one of the fastest growing Asian economies and the 11th largest economy in the world. In doing so, she looks at the relationship between socio-economic change, passive revolution and its impact on the popular hegemony thesis.
Download or read book Mediating Gender in Post Authoritarian South Korea written by Jesook Song and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2024-04-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking to interrogate the role of popular media in establishing and shaping gendered common sense, this volume fosters cross-disciplinary conversations linked by the central thesis that gender discourse and representation are central to the politics, aesthetics, and economics of contemporary South Korea. In the post-authoritarian period (the late 1980s to the #MeToo present), media representation and popular discourse changed the gender conventions that are found at the core of civic, political, and cultural debates. Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea maps the ways in which popular media and public discourse make the social dynamics of gender visible and open them up for debate and dismantling. In presenting innovative new research on the ways in which popular ideas about gender gain concrete form and political substance through mass mediation, the book’s contributors investigate the discursive production of gender in contemporary South Korea through trends, tropes, and thematics, as popular media become the domain in which new gendered subjectivities and relations transpire. The essays in this volume present cases and media objects that span multiple media and platforms, introducing new ways of thinking about gender as a platform and a conceptual infrastructure in the post-authoritarian era.
Download or read book The Films of Bong Joon Ho written by Nam Lee and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bong Joon Ho won the Oscar® for Best Director for Parasite (2019), which also won Best Picture, the first foreign film to do so, and two other Academy Awards. Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. These achievements mark a new career peak for the director, who first achieved wide international acclaim with 2006’s monster movie The Host and whose forays into English-language film with Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) brought him further recognition. As this timely book reveals, even as Bong Joon Ho has emerged as an internationally known director, his films still engage with distinctly Korean social and political contexts that may elude many Western viewers. The Films of Bong Joon Ho demonstrates how he hybridizes Hollywood conventions with local realities in order to create a cinema that foregrounds the absurd cultural anomie Koreans have experienced in tandem with their rapid economic development. Film critic and scholar Nam Lee explores how Bong subverts the structures of the genres he works within, from the crime thriller to the sci-fi film, in order to be truthful to Korean realities that often deny the reassurances of the happy Hollywood ending. With detailed readings of Bong’s films from Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) through Parasite (2019), the book will give readers a new appreciation of this world-class cinematic talent.
