Research
My overarching research agenda examines racialization process that is structured by and articulated through media in once-racially homogeneous East Asian countries, particularly South Korea. Specifically, my scholarship has extensively focused on the issues of mixed-race politics in popular culture and the media discourse on multiculturalism in South Korea.
My first book Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) studied how the increase of visual representations of mixed-race Koreans formulates a particular national racial project in contemporary Korean media. I explored the moments of rupture and disjuncture that biracial bodies bring to the formation of neoliberal multiculturalism, a national racial project that re-aligns racial lines under Korea’s neoliberal transformation. I approached the mixed-race issue not simply as part of a postcolonial research program in East Asia but also as an analytical framework to investigate how the contemporary Korean racial project of neoliberal multiculturalism produces racialized discourses about various types of ethnic Koreans. The book brings together media/cultural studies with critical race studies to locate contemporary Korean media racialization within its global context.
Beyond book publication, I also published articles and book chapters that studied the cultural meanings of biraciality in South Korean popular media and beyond.
My earlier works mostly focused on media discourse analysis on Korean multiculturalism and investigated how it produces racial(ized) subjects and discourses.
Race and Nation in South Korean Media
I am currently working on a new research project, tentatively titled, Selling Aversion: Anti-Korean Sentiment and New Nationalism in Postcolonial East Asia. This project examines the rise of hate speech and racist discourse towards Korea(ns) across East Asia. While China, Japan, and Taiwan have been the largest markets for Korean media and popular culture, these nations are also home to emerging anti-Korean movements. More importantly, the recent rise of anti-Korean sentiment in greater East Asia has become a transnational phenomenon, reshaping regional geopolitics.
Whereas previous research examines regional audiences’ fascination with Korean media and popular culture as creating a shared cultural space to envision Asian modernity, my project disrupts this emphasis by examining rising anti-Korean movements that are re-shaping regional politics. In particular, I compare anti-Korean racism in Japan, Taiwan, and China to explain the rise of a new ethnic nationalism in contemporary postcolonial East Asia. By approaching anti-Korean racism in East Asia from a transnational perspective, this project answers fundamental questions about the relationship between global cultural flows and regional politics and advances our understanding of how a new affective mode, not fascination but aversion, dismantles and recreates racialized cultural imagination in East Asia.
The project was funded by the Royalty Research Fund (2016-2017), the University of Washington’s prestigious research fund offered through a tri-campus competition, and the Academy of Korean Studies (2017-2018), a highly competitive research grant offered to rigorous and innovative overseas research in Korean studies. Those external grants provided me with excellent support to conduct fieldwork in Taipei and Tokyo in the summers of 2016 and 2017.
I shared part of the research findings in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles. Please check out the articles below.
Anti-Korean Sentiment and New Nationalism in East Asia
A new line of my research explores transnational K-culture, broadly defined. I am especially interested in the contestation and reconfiguration of the notions of Koreanness and Korean nationalism in the context of contemporary globalization, cultural commercialization, and technological advancement. In a co-authored article, titled, "The Politics of Apology," I examined how transnational cultural flows of K-pop have intensified regional dynamics and conflicts. In a similar vein, my paper "K-Pop without Koreans" studies the making and remaking of the boundary of K-pop through an examination of the reception of K-pop groups made up of non-Koreans. Additionally, I published a book chapter on the "K-quarantine" discourse and the deployment of biopolitical nationalism in South Korea during the COVID-19 pandemic.