By Seo-Young Chu · Thursday, November 29, 2018 Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appears in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
Over the years the two Koreas have been repeatedly personified and anthropomorphized (in movies, journalism, and even nonfiction books) but never in a consistent manner. Are South Korea and North Korea twin siblings separated at birth? Are they fellow patients in a psychiatric ward? Are they doomed heterosexual lovers, each unaware that the other is a spy? Are they clones? Are they organ donor (South) and recipient (North)? If not separate human beings, then are the Koreas parts of what used to be a single body that was severed? Are they nation (limb) and phantomnation (phantom limb, as experienced by an amputee), as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha suggests in her 1982 work Dictee? The inconsistency of these and other characterizations ends up revealing the tragically illogical nature of the division that made such characterizations possible in the first place. The fact that the personification of the Koreas resists coherent formulation at once reflects and explains the inability of the “two Koreas” to relate to each other in a way that makes sense.
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By Dafna Zur · Friday, November 16, 2018 Dafna Zur’s “You Can’t Write ‘Pak’ on Television: Language as Power in Hebrew K-pop Fandom” appears in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
Korean popular culture first arrived in Israel with the airing of Sweet Samsoon in 2007. What began as a cable channel’s cautious experiment with the tastes of a fan base accustomed to South American telenovelas turned into an unpredictably successful venture. Korean dramas have since appeared regularly both on cable TV and through fansub sites, delivering romantic comedies, action-packed adventures, and historical dramas to their fans. The reception of Korean pop culture in Israel challenges a traditional understanding of its reception around the world since Israel falls neither within the region that has facilitated Korean pop culture’s transnational circulation, nor have Israel and Korea enjoyed an extended political or economic exchange that would facilitate the reception of Korean cultural products.
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By Peter Yoonsuk Paik · Tuesday, November 6, 2018 Peter Yoonsuk Paik’s “The Korean Wave and the Impasse of Theory” appears in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
South Korean popular culture has achieved startling success across much of the globe during the past decade. The first transnational form of popular culture that is not the legacy of an imperial project, the efforts to understand the significance of the “Korean wave” have been hampered by dominant scholarly approaches in the humanities that are not capable of grasping both its emergence and its appeal. This article argues that a key reason for the appeal of South Korean television and film is the fact that they explore the clash between tradition and modernity. South Korean media resonates with peoples across the world who are living out the conflicts between tradition and modernity and are thus eager for models for negotiating the competing demands of the two.
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By Haerin Shin · Monday, September 24, 2018 Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea, edited by Haerin Shin, is now available for purchase in our store.
 While Korea’s history as a modern nation-state has always been a tumultuous reel of socio-political unrest, never has it drawn the globe’s attention to the degree and extent to which the press coverage of the past two years attests. South Korea’s candlelight demonstrations in the fall of 2016 were widely regarded as a newly arisen form of celebratory civil protest culture, and news of the progressive party’s subsequent rise to power stood out amid the global turn toward conservative politics. Meanwhile, with North Korea’s nuclear threat becoming a palpable reality, media outlets began clamoring with predictions of a major military outbreak across the Pacific. (I remember being inundated by concerned emails from acquaintances abroad during my breaks in South Korea last year.) Then came the dramatic shift toward prospects of denuclearization and North–South collaboration this past summer. Millions watched in awe as Kim Jong Un took President Moon’s hand and walked over the Military Demarcation Line. The meeting in Singapore was viewed with skepticism in the United States, but more pertinently such attempts to reestablish channels of communication were greeted warmly in South Korea.
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By Telos Press · Monday, January 5, 2015 Telos seeks essays on the economic, political, cultural, literary, philosophical, and historical dimensions of Korea for a special issue. With its dramatic recovery from the devastating legacies of colonial rule and civil war, South Korea has emerged as one of the leading hubs of cutting-edge information technology and an epicenter of production in the realm of popular culture. Civil governance has taken bold steps forward over the past two decades, signaled by the advent of leaders who defy long-standing meritocratic and patriarchal conventions; meanwhile a multidimensional rethinking of the past is underway, ranging from ancient territorial boundaries to current disputes over national waters. In contrast, North Korea continues to enforce its lone doctrine of authoritarian rule, serving as a constant reminder of the precarious bind of ceasefire. Revenants of the past century’s ideological divide hang over the peninsula in the form of nuclear threat, while South Korea’s hasty march toward capitalist affluence has not benefited everyone equally. How can Critical Theory understand the South Korean path to modernization or the oppressiveness of the North Korean regime? How does Korea position itself as a nation, culture, and a system of values that inherit its past and inspire its future? How can we think South Korean economic dynamism together with/against its popular culture? Is there a (South) Korean model that can be evaluated in an international context and/or through the eyes of the Korean diaspora? This special issue invites critical analyses on these subjects from various disciplines, including but not limited to literature, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, cultural studies, economics, and history. Please direct inquiries to Haerin Shin by email at haerin.shin@vanderbilt.edu. Manuscripts (7500 words) due by December 1, 2015.
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