Guest Editors' Introduction

Abstract

Guest Editors' Introduction Min Wonjung (bio) and Dal Yong Jin (bio) In the 2020s, several elements from Korean culture, including the music of BTS, Bong Joon-ho's movie Parasite, and the TV drama Squid Game, penetrated both Western and non-Western cultural spheres. When the Korean Wave, referring to the rapid growth of Korean cultural industries and Korean cultural content's permeation of global cultural markets, started in the mid-1990s, the major target region was East Asia. Since the early 2010s, however, Korea has rapidly advanced into global cultural markets, including North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Korea has also expanded its cultural forms to be exported, from dramas, films, and K-pop to digital technologies and cultures, including digital games and webtoons (Longenecker and Lee 2018; Kim 2021; Yoon 2022). There have been several significant factors behind the recent growth of the Korean Wave in global cultural markets, including the increasing role of social media, the involvement of global capital in local cultural production, and shifts in people's cultural consumption habits in the OTT (over-the-top) platform era. While these elements playing essential roles in the Korean Wave are various, the concept of transnationalism allows for their understanding within a single theoretical framework. In other words, the Korean Wave in the global context since the 2010s is an example of the transnational circulation of popular culture [End Page 1] and digital media forms and practices, generating and deploying alternative media consumption and moving beyond conventional routes and infrastructures (Jin, Yoon, and Min 2021). Transnationality implies flows of people, culture, and information beyond national boundaries, and the Korean Wave has actualized flows of popular culture and digital technologies beyond national and regional boundaries. The Korean Wave is negotiated by different audiences and re-situated by different uses of cultural literacy for its translation and decoding. This special issue on Hallyu Storytelling in the Americas examines how the concepts of transnationalism, transnational proximity, and the universality of the Korean Wave have created a story encompassing an imaginary new continent that spans North and South America. The four articles included in this special issue were presented at the fourteenth Kyujanggak International Symposium on Korean Studies held via Zoom in Seoul, Korea on November 4–6, 2021. The panel examined how the Korean Wave is imagined and negotiated by different audiences and proposed new orientations for the Korean Wave in a post-pandemic world. This special issue discusses COVID-19's sociocultural impact on Korean Wave fandom and how that fandom has been strengthened in a pandemic environment. Specializing in the diverse sociocultural effects of the Korean Wave, the authors also address how different modes of storytelling and imagination have emerged and been negotiated by local audiences in North and South America. In the first article, "Transnational Proximity and Universality in Korean Culture: Analysis of Squid Game and BTS," Dal Yong Jin suggests a new approach to understanding the global popularity of the Korean Wave. Rather than traditional cultural proximity, he argues, transnational proximity based on similar sociocultural experiences in late capitalism—including social inequality, youth culture, beautiful storytelling, and fascinating choreography—can explain the Korean Wave's continuing prevalence. In his discussion, Jin investigates fan communities and several distinctive cultural programs in K-pop and Korean film and television, particularly BTS and Squid Game (2021). He concludes by assessing the prospects for the role of transnational proximity in the growth of local popular cultures in the global cultural sphere. In the second article, "Pandemic to "Fandomic:" The Revival of Fandom Publics in the Digital Space of Latin American K-pop Fandom," Hyunsuk Jang examines the ways in which individual fans coalesce into fandom publics, focusing on their affective intimacy. COVID-19 has dramatically changed our daily life. Fears about the virus inhibit face-to-face communication, leading people to spend more time in the digital world. Jang also examines how the [End Page 2] pandemic has impacted K-pop fandom in Latin America, which is characterized by cultural hybridity and bottom-up globalization. In the third article, "Reckoning with the World: Infrastructural Imaginaries of Cuba in Contemporary Korean Television," Benjamin Han examines how popular television...