Этнический и расовый Другой в современных южнокорейских драмах

Abstract

Every year, the flow of migrants and foreign tourists arriving in South Korea is growing, and the proportion of foreigners appearing in the Korean media is increasing accordingly. However, the acceptance of multiculturalism in Korean society is dilatory since the country has long developed as a monoethnic state. The historical ethnic homogeneity of Korean society contributes to the distortion of how Koreans perceive migrants and foreigners, which is why the image of racial and ethnic minorities is often surrounded by a number of stereotypes that affect the way they are perceived in real life. Existing works on this topic are devoted to the representation of migrants, foreigners, and non-ethnic Koreans in various types of media content, but the ethnic scene of contemporary Korean dramas remains largely unexplored. At the same time, dramas occupy one of the most significant places in the cultural life of the Korean people: they serve as an agent of socialization and as a tool for the formation of values and stereotypes in Korean society. The otherness of ethnic and racial Others is constructed through various strategies of alienation, including depersonification, fragmentation, fetishization, exoticization, pathologization, and homogenization. In this study, we explore the ethnoscape of modern South Korean dramas, highlight such strategies, and identify the main features of the representation of racial and ethnic minorities in them. For these purposes, we analyze the two dramas—Descendants of the Sun (2016) and Itaewon Class (2020)—for the representation of the ethnic and racial Other, and identify the general representation strategies. This work also seeks to detect the dynamics of changes in the representation of ethnic minorities in South Korean media.