Appropriating South Korean popular culture

The dynamic flow of South Korean popular cultural products has transformed the way “East Asia” is perceived in Indonesia. Consumption of these products greatly influences consumers’ imagination, as argued by Appadurai, which becomes an arena of negotiation as well as contestation in the sites of individual and communal agency. On the one hand, consumers in Indonesia perceive these products as a representation of “East Asia,” which is considered a well-known entity that is often used as a strategic defense mechanism (i.e., against Western cultural domination). On the other hand, consumers are seeking for more familiar goods in the form of mimicking products, such as I-pop’s boy/girl band or Indonesian television sinetron copying plots from K-dramas. This paper investigates how cultural borrowing and/or appropriating are strategically used in the meaning-making process of the new global and the modern portrayed by South Korean popular cultural products and their copycat versions. The author argues that, instead of focusing on the authentic and inauthentic cultural products that oversimplify the debate, this phenomenon should be analyzed as a form of pastiche, which reveals the repetitive nature of popular culture flows in Asia as well as of cultural borrowing and/or appropriating

Art · Drama · Literature · Media studies · Popular culture · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture

• Of Mimicry and Man

  Homi Bhabha, Homi Κ Bhabha•October•1984

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