Negotiating identity and power in transnational cultural consumption: Korean American youths and the Korean Wave

Abstract

In the contemporary globalized world, transnational (im)migrants’ lives are imbued with many complexities, largely due to their multiple affiliations and constant border-crossing (Appadurai 1991, 1996; Basch et al. 1994; Gupta and Ferguson 1994; Hu-Dehart 1999; Kearney 1995; Ong 1999; Xavier and Rosaldo 2002).1 Located “in-between,” they are “fully encapsulated neither in the host society nor in their native land” but “nonetheless remain active participants in the social settings of both locations” (Glick-Schiller and Fouron 1990: 330).2 Thus, they often build their niches in the interstices among various social, cultural and political communities. While not enough scholarly attention has been given to the lives of a segment of transnational (im)migrant populations – youths – their experiences can shed light on many critical aspects of global transformation, as they are major consumers of various kinds of popular culture, among the most active voices in cyberspace, and one of the most mobile groups who frequently cross real and virtual borders. Among other groups, Asian-American youths have played a critical role in the transnational circulation of products, information and people. Their interest in and easy access to diverse popular cultures, especially U.S. and Asian pop cultures, enable them to become core consumers of multiple national, regional and global pop cultures. Through their frequent transpacific contacts, they disseminate and mediate cultural information across borders, sometimes far more effectively than the mainstream media does. They also participate in the construction of popular culture through their work in the media or entertainment industries on both sides of the Pacific. The multiple roles of Asian-American youths in transpacific flows of popularculture indicate changes in the global cultural landscape. The boundary-collapsing power of globalization has subverted our long-held notion of culture, which is generally understood as shared meanings, values and customs of a group of people who live within bounded territories, and “hybridization” and “creolization” have become typical characteristics of contemporary culture (Gupta and Ferguson 1994; Hannerz 1992, 1996). Moreover, advancements in technology, which have widened the scope and accelerated the speed of the circulation of information and products to an unprecedented degree, haveinduced contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, they strengthen the West’s, especially Hollywood’s, cultural hegemony as the global media industries are mostly controlled and owned by Western capital and as the content of popular culture is still largely of Western origin. On the other hand, they have expedited the regionalization of cultural flows, such as intraAsian cultural circulation, which challenges the unidirectional cultural flows from the West to the rest, partly because global media industries divide the world into regional markets and tend to regionally distribute programs, many of which are produced locally (Morley and Robins 1995; Iwabuchi 2002). In addition, some Asian countries, with the development of their economy and media industries, have produced marketable popular cultural products such as film, music and animation, which first circulated at the local and regional levels and then gradually expanded to the global market (Iwabuchi 2002; Park 2006; Yau 2001). Cultural influences from the “periphery” to the “center” are not uncommon nowadays, as illustrated by the noticeable African, Latin or Asian influences on contemporary U.S. pop culture (Hannerz 1992). AsianAmerican youths’multiple roles signify their critical involvement in this transpacific “cross-fertilization of culture” (Iwabuchi 2002). In addition, the consumption of “homeland” popular culture reconnects them to their “homelands” through images mediated by “electronic capitalism” such as television and cinema (Appadurai 1996), which potentially provide a ground on which to construct a new kind of transnational community based on shared imagination and consumption (Anderson 1983; Park 2004). Drawing on ethnographic accounts of Korean American youths’ consump-tion of South Korean popular culture (whose popularity is called Hallyu, or the Korean Wave) in Los Angeles and Chicago, this chapter explores the role of (im)migrant youths in the transnational flows of popular culture and its ramifications. It discusses: (1) how young Korean Americans consume, disseminate and construct popular culture across the Pacific; (2) how Korean American youths’ consumption of South Korean culture is interrelated with their search for identity and community; (3) how the transpacific cultural flows are affected by the interplay of various structural forces including the market and the state and how they signify the changing global cultural landscape and power relationships.