“K-pop is Rupturing Chilean Society”: Fighting With Globalized Objects in Localized Conflicts

Abstract

Abstract Amid a rapidly growing wave of anti-neoliberal protest emerging in late 2019, Chile’s government scrambled to respond to the massive scale of this dissidence by attempting to find some external agent to pin the blame on. Initially seeking evidence of Venezuelan or Russian involvement, the state eventually pinned the blame on K-pop as an agent of “social rupture.” This article examines this framing of K-pop by Chilean authorities and what this says about the position of Korean media’s integration into a Latin American pop-culture landscape that is growing ever more globalized and non-Western. It likewise examines the contestatory embracing of K-pop by Chilean anti-neoliberal activists, their broader integration of globalized cultural objects, and how this reflects on wider current anti-neoliberal activist cultures operating in the Global South.