Koreanness Redefined, Cultural Hegemony Unchecked

From Menace to Mimicry

Instead of menace, Kim attributes ingenuity to Korean pop’s gimmick of mimicry, by arguing that “Korean cultural products of the past several decades became ambivalently hegemonic through their creative praxis of mimicry,” as K-pop equally emulates the U.S. capitalist hegemony of the past century and departs from the same hegemony due to its pronounced Koreanness (xi-xii). The book’s perceptive underscoring of Korea’s racial and cultural ambivalence, which is not a transient survival tactic but an underlying mechanism of nation-building, affords a widely applicable framework to understand the mushrooming K-pop culture that often functions to symbolize Korea’s political and economic advancements as well as the symptoms of its explosive growth. However, the very broad applicability also eclipses the need to acknowledge the unbridgeable gaps between the U.S. and Korean contexts of racial tension and colonialism and to recognize gender as an integral part of nation-building.

History bears out the inevitability of the tactic of “mimicry” that Koreans were forced to resort to. One of the book’s most innovative approaches to contemporary K-pop analysis is that it underscores sho-dan (Korean performance troupes for the U.S. Eighth Army) as a forerunner to today’s K-pop musicians, insofar as their presence bore a hallmark of the South Korean music scene’s active appropriation of American pop as its hegemonic sound and thereby manufacturing of “a musical mugukjŏk (nonnational) identity, or a pseudo-American one” (10). From the Korean War until the 1960s when the Vietnam War (1955–1975) was escalating, sho-dan, who thoroughly mastered American songs, started cropping up and set a precedent for the future K-pop singers whose music is an amalgam of various American music genres. These foundational South Korean artists include folk singer Cho Dong-jin (1947–2017), rock singer Cho Yong-pil (b. 1950), and many hip-hop-based idol musicians from the 1990s to the present, the latter of which started with the unlooked-for emergence of Seo Tae-ji (b. 1972) as a pop star for then-teens in Korea (3). Trained by and auditioned before American military judges, sho-dan performers were not only forced to work as a disposable labor catering to the U.S. military personnel but were also awkwardly sandwiched between the white and black soldiers. For Korean bar owners, entertainers like sho-dan performers and sex workers in camp towns had to cope with U.S.-imported domestic issues of racial tension and discrimination. Korean sex workers and performers were often segregated according to the race of the soldiers they were serving well until the mid 1970s, even though the Executive Order 9981 was issued in 1948 to abolish racial discrimination within U.S. armed forces (3–4). Being considered by their skin color as “sufficiently light by white Americans and simultaneously sufficiently dark by black Americans,” Koreans were stuck in the limbo of racial ambivalence and stood as “anxious bystander[s],” devoid of the agency to intervene in the U.S.’s racial hierarchy (4–5).

Kim then skips ahead half a century to stress the radically changed role Koreans take today as “active global leader[s] in health, tech innovation, and manufacturing ... [while] claiming a strong stake in global popular culture,” which draws a sharp contrast with Korea’s adverse post-war circumstances (5). Kim’s emphasis lies in Koreans’ continued harboring of the racial ambivalence for roughly the last one century, traced back to Japanese colonialism, which has fueled Korea’s de-colonial and de-racial drive to achieve today’s economically and culturally elevated global status. He then takes another leap to situate Korea’s ambivalent racial identity in relation to the “the renewal of a worldwide blackness that removes itself from a conventional link with a race-specific category into an economic and cultural alliance of twenty-first-century subjectivities sought by the underpriviledged class” (5). Unlike when discussing the history of sho-dan, here Kim connects Koreans and African Americans not so much through their geopolitically interconnected histories, but rather through their—I would add—“ambiguous” ontological and symbolic association imaginable in the postcolonial, neoliberal world despite their sociohistorical apartness. This association may appear to break fresh ground for the postcolonial cultural studies that seeks to straddle across national, ethnic, and disciplinary boundaries. However, the historical and theoretical leaps that Kim takes also reveals a risk of undercutting the significance of the cross-ethnic and cross-national solidarities that necessitate mutual historical understandings.

Racialization After Pax Americana

While the culturally and racially ambivalent positioning of Koreanness creates a through line in the book, such identifications seem to be too readily bracketed together. Although, as Kim points out, part of the racial tension within the U.S. migrated to its camp towns in South Korea and affected the lives of the locals, the histories of racial injustice in the U.S. and Korea can’t be easily comparable and Korean musicians’ adopting of African-American music genres as their own doesn’t necessarily mean that they share the same histories and the same understanding of colonial violence. Thus, I ask whether highlighting the Koreans’ racial and political identity as ambivalent can avoid overshadowing or appropriating the historical and cultural legacies of civil rights movements in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, which has kept up their momentum and developed into today’s ongoing movements against racial injustice, such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Kim’s argument doesn’t entirely disregard the complex problem of cultural appropriation:

There was probably no other place in the era of Pax America outside the United States where the learning of the American—the aesthetics, styles, and language—was as intense and durable as it was in Korea over the past three-quarters of a century. During this time, relearning the foreign culture meant not only recalibrating the Korean soul and the wounds of being a Korean but also forgetting the origins of black resentment that were deeply rooted in many music genres, such as jazz, blues, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, and hip-hop. Koreans learned to enact a two-step, double gesture of mimicking and innovating—which immersed its own miguk [Korean word for the U.S.] in the Korean movements, rhythm, and language (11–12).

While acknowledging K-pop’s facileness in its mimicking of popularized African American music genres, however, Kim’s analysis doesn’t complement Koreans’ one-sided cultural appropriation by identifying how differently Koreans and African Americans perceive Pax American white hegemony, or to what extent Koreans come to acknowledge the history of racial injustice in the U.S. over the course of developing their own hybrid music genres. The book addresses the political and cultural impact that U.S. soldiers’ racial tension in camp towns has made in the Korean peninsula as one of the primal factors for the construction of South Koreans’ racial positioning in the international context. But it doesn’t seem inevitable to bring in the racial tension within U.S. as a counterpart to define the Korean racial subjectivity. Even after the ruling of the United States Army Military Government (USAMG) (1945–1948) and the Korean War (1950–1953), the continued presence of the U.S army bases has often been regarded as the grounds for the U.S.’s control of South Korea up to this day. However, its influence on the lives of local Koreans has shifted radically, largely due to the rise of the Korean local governments and civil organizations since the 1990s as a counterbalance to the U.S. hegemony, which coincided with the waning of South Korea’s heavy economic dependence on the U.S. military bases.1 The U.S.’s neocolonial control over South Korea still holds true when it comes to U.S.’s prolonged sway over Korea’s military, economic, and political climates. However, it doesn’t necessarily warrant a reading of Korean subjectivity as a universal token of the colonized or the victim of Cold War politics, especially well into the early 2000s. Moreover, expanding the scope of cross-cultural and cross-ethnic studies is as important as examining to what extent such umbrella terms as ambivalence and mimicry can actually help explicate the complex relations between the two national communities.

Likewise, Kim’s comparative reading between the two films, Straight Outta Compton (dir. F. Gary Gray, 2015) and Sopyonje (dir. Im Kwon-taek, 1993), raises some fundamental questions about their relatability (86–89). Straight Outta Compton is a film about the emergence of a hip-hop subgenre “gangsta rap,” also known as “reality rap” that voices the lived experiences of African Americans in American “ghettos” as well as the police brutality against them in Compton, Los Angeles. Sopyonje is about a story of a roaming family that performs p’ansori, a Korea’s traditional genre of folk song for commoners. Why is it noteworthy to mark the link between hip-hop and p’ansori, when hip-hop has been a globally popular music genre that is shared and developed by musicians in and outside the U.S. regardless of their language, ethnicity, and race? Why not trace the root of Korean music to that of other ethnic groups in the U.S.? Why not music from other countries that have gone through U.S. imperialist occupation? Finally, how can their musical association directly speak to the political consciousness of the two groups? While Kim’s comparative reading of the U.S.-to-Korea cultural and historical relation gives a feeling of putting puzzle pieces together, the umbrella concept of ambivalence tends to leave geopolitically-situated subjects out of account.

Rather, Koreanness works as an unchecked sign of originality throughout the book. In chapter two, “The Souls of Korean Folk in the Era of Hip-Hop,” and chapter seven “Reading Muhan Dojeon and Madanggŭk” in particular, Kim calls attention to premodern Korean culture, whose legacy has endured to today and enables contemporary Korean performers to strive to secure their Korean originality for all their active mimicry of American culture. Besides, the colonial past rather helps Korean performers associate themselves with the radical African American culture that has already been flagrantly appropriated by white pop culture.2 In these chapters Kim draws parallels between premodern Korea’s improvisational street theater tradition and the twenty-first-century Korean popular media content. Chapter two ties premodern Korean culture, notably p’ansori and mandam (a Korean traditional standup satire), to hip-hop that landed in post-war Korea as a major pop music genre; chapter seven associates madanggŭk (open-air theater) and t’alch’um (mask dance) with Muhan Dojeon, a contemporary reality TV show. In chapter two, Kim argues that hip-hop doesn’t only blur the line between the authentic and the copy for the mimetic nature of its making (116), but it also disrupts the conventional ethnic lines between black and Asian and between American and Korean national identities (90). Therefore, Korean rappers, in line with the spirit of their precursor performers of p’ansory and mandam who were largely from the low social class, understand that regardless of the language difference, rap is at its core about sublimating personal experience and trauma and “posturing” the autobiographical story-teller self to solicit the audience’s impassioned reaction, be it sympathy or antipathy (95). Chapter seven addresses a similarly transgressive subjectivity formed by Muhan Dojeon members’ collaborative dance performance with Psy, a Korean singer known for his international hit song, “Gangnam Style,” at Time Square in 2012. Their performance created “a new postcolonial, opaquely racial, and ambivalently hegemonic moment through the double gesture of mimicking and transforming the widely ridiculed off-white and blackish ‘horse dance’” (234). Kim goes further and argues that their ambivalently hegemonic presentation to the world audience is resonant with the performances of the Korean satirist and dancer, Choe Sŭng-hŭi, in the 1930s, who is known for her mimicry of figures of different social classes, gender, and national identities (231–234). Similar to his comparison between Straight Outta Compton and Sopyonje, these restructured lineages of Korean culture sound intriguing but remain cursory in terms of their interrelation. At bottom, the radical leaps across temporalities and national and ethnic boundaries he makes boil down to the emphasis on the speculative notion of invariant Koreanness that runs through the different forms of cultural contents.

Replication / Creativity

Such Koreanness is showcased through Korean performers’ versatile presentation of their national, ethnic, gender, class, and authoritative subject positions. The book maintains that what constitutes such disposition is the profoundly ambivalent nature of Koreans’ mimicry engineered under and against the reigns of colonialism and neoliberalism. The very ambivalence engenders both Korean mimicry and the Koreanization of miguk, therein the simulation and authentication of postcolonial Korean subjectivity in unison (234). Accordingly, Hegemonic Mimicry’s analysis carries on with a series of different pairings of concepts. In chapter six, Kim introduces a pair of notions of replication and creativity along with an unusual pairing between K-pop and Samsung, the most powerful conglomerate, or chaebol, in Korea that has also grown up as a global company precisely due to its mimicking of Apple’s technologies to make smartphones and other electronic devices. After pointing out that, much like K-pop music, Samsung can’t dodge an ethical question about its creativity or originality, Kim resituates this very question in the era of digital technology and post-Fordism:

In my reading of K-pop through Samsung and vice versa, I consider how the meaning of creativity is embedded in these two prominent keywords that South Korea has to offer today: Samsung and K-pop are entangled in the dynamism and tension between industrialist forces and postindustrial identity, between intensive human labor and user-driven Information and Communications Technology (ICT) algorithm engines, and finally between reproductive innovation and reproductive counterfeit (199).

Delving into the structural reasons why the notion of creativity matters for the obviously replicated cultural (K-pop music) and technological products (Samsung electronic devices), Kim rather redefines creativity in K-pop and Samsung products as their keeping alive of the anachronistic mode of production under the guise of postindustrial cutting-edge aesthetics. By propounding the ambivalence in Koreanized “creativity” within the modes of production, labor structure, and technology, Kim shrewdly connects his earlier analysis of Korean history and culture to that of Korean media industry at large. However, this seemingly comprehensive view leaves some blind spots that are in effect pivotal for defining Korean national identity. One such area is gender.

The book introduces some cases of the afflictions that fell on women’s lives: the life story of Choe Sŭng-hŭi (231–234) as a female performer during the colonial period, Samsung’s exploitation of female workers (202), and the unfortunate losses of female idols, such as Sulli (1994–2019) and Goo Hara (1991–2019), by suicide (216). However, such a piecemeal discussion of gender issue is exactly what feminist scholars point out as a kind of “gender-blind studies of rapid industrialization in East Asia” (Moon, 6), not to mention the book’s absence of the study of female rappers except for a brief mentioning of Yoon Mirae (b. 1981) (98), and the meager discussion of the female camp town sex workers who often worked as performers themselves. Seungsook Moon argues that despite the quantitative expansion of women workers in manufacturing industries and their crucial role in the earlier phase of export-oriented economic growth by the state-control mobilization of Korean populations, their subjectivity as full-time, permanent workers has been overshadowed by the normative feminine subjectivity of the nonproductive housewife (76). If Korean women have been largely subject to sexual stereotyping, therein lies the continued dismissal of their economic and cultural contributions, the public recognition of LGBTQ+ subjects have been more severely oppressed, despite the significant presences of Harisu (b. 1975) and Hong Seok-cheon (b. 1971). The ellipsis of gender in the discussion of Korean industrial model, whether it be economic or cultural, is not only to perpetuate gender biases in area studies but also to reinforce the patriarchal nationalist ideology.

Hegemonic Mimicry provokes further inquiries because it touches upon one of the most difficult questions in Korean studies: how can one define the Korean subjectivity anew in the era of a neoliberal system of cultural exchange and global networking, while keeping ethnocentric, patriarchal, and nationalist ideals at bay? The book concludes on a rather emotive note: 

Strutting and wading through the off-white, blackish, and sometimes mottled ethnic upbringing as well as through a lengthy postwar tutelage under the American military occupation, Koreans had finally come of age. . . . Psy and the future generation of K-pop stars who would continue to grace the American cover for another decade fulfilled the very dream that Patty Kim and Shin Joong-hyung might have concocted long before these young stars were even born—to become the very origin of the cultural hegemony that they had grown up mimicking in the poverty-stricken, war-ridden camptowns (emphases are mine) (235).

Hegemonic Mimicry starts off by discussing the constant swaying between the notions of the real and simulacrum and authenticity and quotation within the K-pop cultural content production toward the global audience, regarding it as containing a colonial legacy as well as an inbuilt drive to challenge the existing cultural codes of hegemony (13). However, the book winds up saluting K-pop’s winning of the “origin of the cultural hegemony” within a war narrative, instead of overhauling the long-running Cold War ideologies. Arguing that “Koreans had finally come of age” works to forge another nationalist simulacrum of Korean subjectivity, which the book originally sought to locate and question as a product of neoliberal and neocolonial world system. Moreover, without discussing the regional issues, particularly regarding the gender and race differently situated in each country, such widely applicable terms as ambivalence and mimicry can rather shore up Korea’s patriarchal nationalism and the neocolonial ideal of cultural hegemony.

Author Profile

Soyi Kim is an LB Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow of the East Asian Program at Cornell University. Trained in cultural studies and art history, her research specializations include contemporary feminist art, media, and body politics of modern and contemporary South Korea and the Korean diaspora.

Notes

1. Kim addresses that the 2016 controversy over the U.S.’s installment of the missile system against the potential North Korean nuclear threat, called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), in Seongju-gun, South Korea challenges South Korea’s hegemony as a subempire and affirms the fragile status of its cultural and economic strength in the region which is highly sensitive to the new Cold War brewing between China and the United States (147). In another place, he brought up the THAAD controversy again to underscore that “no cultural exchange during the twenty-first century can be severed from the political and national security interests” (163). While these arguments hold true to a certain extent, his discussion of China’s deep involvement in the triangular relation around the THAAD (between the U.S., South Korea, and China) through different forms of economic retaliations, such as cancellations of Chinese package tour to Korea and bans on imports of Korean products (147), also upholds the fact that the Cold War tension has persisted yet the economic and political systems in which the tension arises has been greatly reshaped. To see further details of the changed relation between South Korea and the U.S. as they depart from the initially tight cold-war alliance and to critically revisit the political binary molded by the early cold-war system, see Katherine H. S. Moon’s “South Korea-U.S. Relations” (2004) and Gi-Wook Shin’s “South Korean Anti-Americanism: A Comparative Perspective” (1996).

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2. Kim mentions this in his book as well: “Well-known rock’n’roll ballads composed during the 1970s, including ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)’ by Pink Floyd, used this scale [minor pentatonic scale], simply because it was then fashionable for white American and British rock bands to appropriate the minor pentatonic blues scale from African American music of the South” (17). For a more extensive discussion of it, see E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003) as Kim addresses in the footnote 17 of the chapter two (252), and see bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992).

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Works Cited

1. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture, 85–92. London & New York, Routledge.

2. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2018. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books.

3. hooks, bell. 1992. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Ed. bell hooks, 21–39. Boston: South End Press.

4. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

5. Kim, Kyung Hyun. 2021. Hegemonic Mimicry: Korean Popular Culture of the Twenty-First Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

6. Moon, Katherine H. S. 2004. “South Korea-U.S. Relations.” Asian Perspective 28, no. 4:39–61.

7. Moon, Seungsook. 2005. Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

8. Shin, Gi-Wook. 1996. “South Korean Anti-Americanism: A Comparative Perspective.” Asian Survey 36, no. 8:787–803.