A Political Sound: K-Pop and the ‘Postcolonial Interruption’

In January 2022, American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel likened South Korean group BTS’ burgeoning popularity to the spread of an “Asian virus.” His comments stirred fleeting controversy, and were quickly forgotten once Kimmel apologised for his misplaced humour. Despite BTS’s immense global cultural capital, their musical prowess has outpaced cultural cognizance. BTS’ rise, and the growing acclaim of Korean popular music at large, is experienced as an anomaly by the crudely defined if still relevant category of ‘the West’.
Although South Korean popular culture (post-1987), characterised as a ‘postcolonial interruption’ (Yoon 2017), poses a significant challenge to Western dominion over the global cultural sphere, Korean and Western cultural actors do not meet as equals on the international stage. Contemporary geopolitical norms defined by past, unequal power relations (colonialism, conflict, trade, globalisation, etc.) and their resultant cumulative prejudice, still govern the terms of these encounters. Thus, the rising popularity of an increasingly commercial, predominantly apolitical popular music, has evinced fractures in historical systems of global governance. Using examples from South Korean popular music, this lecture will historicize the unfolding geopolitical crisis between ‘Global Easts’ (J-H. Lim) and ‘Global Wests’, and the often unremarked politicism that plays out in the cultural realm.

Dr. Paroma Ghose is a sociocultural historian, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher as part of the ‘Confronting Decline’ Project at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Germany. For her PhD, she used the lyrics of French rap songs to write a history of the ‘Other’ in France between 1981 and 2012. Her postdoctoral work has two different strains: the first concerns her work for the Leibniz Institute, where she uses popular music in France, Germany, and the USA to look at narratives of deindustrialization; the second is her work on Korean popular music, specifically K-pop, which she began during her time as an NRF Postdoctoral Fellow at Yonsei University, and on which she is currently writing a book with the same title as her talk today.