Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema
by Youngmin Choe
Duke University Press, 2016 eISBN: 978-0-8223-7434-3 | Cloth: 978-0-8223-6111-4 | Paper: 978-0-8223-6130-5 Library of Congress Classification PN1993.5.K6C4844 2016
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Tourist Distractions Youngmin Choe uses hallyu (Korean-wave) cinema as a lens to examine the relationships among tourism and travel, economics, politics, and history in contemporary East Asia. Focusing on films born of transnational collaboration and its networks, Choe shows how the integration of the tourist imaginary into hallyu cinema points to the region's evolving transnational politics and the ways Korea negotiates its colonial and Cold War past with East Asia's neoliberal present. Hallyu cinema's popularity has inspired scores of international tourists to visit hallyu movie sets, filming sites, and theme parks. This tourism helps ease regional political differences; reimagine South Korea's relationships with North Korea, China, and Japan; and blur the lines between history, memory, affect, and consumerism. It also provides distractions from state-sponsored narratives and forges new emotional and economic bonds that foster community and cooperation throughout East Asia. By attending to the tourist imaginary at work in hallyu cinema, Choe helps us to better understand the complexities, anxieties, and tensions of East Asia's new affective economy as well as Korea's shifting culture industry, its relation to its past, and its role in a rapidly changing region.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Youngmin Choe is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California and the coeditor of The Korean Popular Culture Reader, also published by Duke University Press.
REVIEWS
"Choe productively establishes a discussion that is relational rather than focused on bounded national contexts. She does terrific work in tying together solid and eminently useful historical context information and on-site research with close readings and more speculative, very insightful discussion. It is a balance that is difficult to achieve, but one that is especially rare in the study of popular culture from Korea."
-- Alexander Zahlten Journal of Asian Studies
"Choe’s work is highly readable, inspiring, and absorbing. Tourist Distractions also promises to be productive in the classroom. It will attract and distract hallyu fans in Korean studies and researchers with interests in tourism studies, visual and cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and film studies."
-- Barbara Wall Social History
"Although an impressive amount of scholarship on Hallyu cinema has been published in the last decade, the transnational affect of Hallyu cinema through re-contextualizing it as audience emotions, tensions, and transnational self-reflections has not been the focus of critical attention. Tourist Distractions fills this void in Korean film studies with a persuasive voice by establishing the transnational linkages of Hallyu to Japan, China, and North Korea since the early inception of the Hallyu boom."
-- Yongwoo Lee Pacific Affairs
“This is a multilayered and elegant model, albeit one still under construction, that certainly suggests a much more contextually rich way to interpret the significant works of the Korean Wave; for that contribution alone Choe’s book should be considered a must-read.”
-- Kyu Hyun Kim Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
"Enriching the oeuvre of Korean film scholarship with its theoretical rigor, Tourist Distractions fills a critical gap in Hallyu studies by placing it in productive dialogue with Korean studies, tourism studies, film studies, cultural studies, and visual/cultural anthropology."
-- Haerin Shin Journal of Korean Studies
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Distracted Attractions 1
Part I. Intimacy
1. Feeling Together: Pornography and Travel in Kazoku Cinema and Asako in Ruby Shoes 31
2. Affective Sites: Hur Jin-ho's April Snow and One Fine Spring Day 59
Part II. Amity
3. Provisional Feelings: The Making of Musa 89
4. Affective Palimpsests: Sudden Showers from Hwang Sun-won's "Sonagi" to Kwak Jae-yong and Andrew Lau's Daisy 112
Part III. Remembrance
5. Postmemory DMZ: Joint Security Area, Yesterday, and 2009 Lost Memories 143
6. Transient Monuments: Commemmorating and Memorializing in Taegukgi Korean War Film Tourism 166
Conclusion. K-hallyu: The Commodity Speaks in Kang Chul-woo's Romantic Island, Bae Yong-joon's A Journey in Search of Korea's Beauty, So Ji-sub's Road, and Choi Ji-woo's if 197
Notes 205
Bibliography 229
Index 241
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If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema
by Youngmin Choe
Duke University Press, 2016 eISBN: 978-0-8223-7434-3 Cloth: 978-0-8223-6111-4 Paper: 978-0-8223-6130-5
In Tourist Distractions Youngmin Choe uses hallyu (Korean-wave) cinema as a lens to examine the relationships among tourism and travel, economics, politics, and history in contemporary East Asia. Focusing on films born of transnational collaboration and its networks, Choe shows how the integration of the tourist imaginary into hallyu cinema points to the region's evolving transnational politics and the ways Korea negotiates its colonial and Cold War past with East Asia's neoliberal present. Hallyu cinema's popularity has inspired scores of international tourists to visit hallyu movie sets, filming sites, and theme parks. This tourism helps ease regional political differences; reimagine South Korea's relationships with North Korea, China, and Japan; and blur the lines between history, memory, affect, and consumerism. It also provides distractions from state-sponsored narratives and forges new emotional and economic bonds that foster community and cooperation throughout East Asia. By attending to the tourist imaginary at work in hallyu cinema, Choe helps us to better understand the complexities, anxieties, and tensions of East Asia's new affective economy as well as Korea's shifting culture industry, its relation to its past, and its role in a rapidly changing region.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Youngmin Choe is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California and the coeditor of The Korean Popular Culture Reader, also published by Duke University Press.
REVIEWS
"Choe productively establishes a discussion that is relational rather than focused on bounded national contexts. She does terrific work in tying together solid and eminently useful historical context information and on-site research with close readings and more speculative, very insightful discussion. It is a balance that is difficult to achieve, but one that is especially rare in the study of popular culture from Korea."
-- Alexander Zahlten Journal of Asian Studies
"Choe’s work is highly readable, inspiring, and absorbing. Tourist Distractions also promises to be productive in the classroom. It will attract and distract hallyu fans in Korean studies and researchers with interests in tourism studies, visual and cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and film studies."
-- Barbara Wall Social History
"Although an impressive amount of scholarship on Hallyu cinema has been published in the last decade, the transnational affect of Hallyu cinema through re-contextualizing it as audience emotions, tensions, and transnational self-reflections has not been the focus of critical attention. Tourist Distractions fills this void in Korean film studies with a persuasive voice by establishing the transnational linkages of Hallyu to Japan, China, and North Korea since the early inception of the Hallyu boom."
-- Yongwoo Lee Pacific Affairs
“This is a multilayered and elegant model, albeit one still under construction, that certainly suggests a much more contextually rich way to interpret the significant works of the Korean Wave; for that contribution alone Choe’s book should be considered a must-read.”
-- Kyu Hyun Kim Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
"Enriching the oeuvre of Korean film scholarship with its theoretical rigor, Tourist Distractions fills a critical gap in Hallyu studies by placing it in productive dialogue with Korean studies, tourism studies, film studies, cultural studies, and visual/cultural anthropology."
-- Haerin Shin Journal of Korean Studies
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Distracted Attractions 1
Part I. Intimacy
1. Feeling Together: Pornography and Travel in Kazoku Cinema and Asako in Ruby Shoes 31
2. Affective Sites: Hur Jin-ho's April Snow and One Fine Spring Day 59
Part II. Amity
3. Provisional Feelings: The Making of Musa 89
4. Affective Palimpsests: Sudden Showers from Hwang Sun-won's "Sonagi" to Kwak Jae-yong and Andrew Lau's Daisy 112
Part III. Remembrance
5. Postmemory DMZ: Joint Security Area, Yesterday, and 2009 Lost Memories 143
6. Transient Monuments: Commemmorating and Memorializing in Taegukgi Korean War Film Tourism 166
Conclusion. K-hallyu: The Commodity Speaks in Kang Chul-woo's Romantic Island, Bae Yong-joon's A Journey in Search of Korea's Beauty, So Ji-sub's Road, and Choi Ji-woo's if 197
Notes 205
Bibliography 229
Index 241
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE