The PSU Center for Japanese Studies presents
Professor Michelle Cho, Toronto University
K-pop, Race, and Platform Capitalism
When the Black Lives Matter movement gained renewed media attention and growing support after the police-perpetrated murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in the midst of pandemic lockdown, K-pop fans became a flashpoint in online, pro-BLM activism. In particular, K-pop-fan-identified accounts on Twitter used gifs and “fancams”—short video clips of K-pop performances—to hijack attention and disable hashtags like #whitelivesmatter. Fans also used fancam clips to spam snitch apps and hashtags organized by law enforcement agencies in Dallas and elsewhere, which were designed to encourage citizens to report supposed wrongdoing by protestors through privately recorded video. Calls to support BLM were not without controversy within K-pop fandoms, given their broad make-up of transnational fans. Many fans that reside outside of North America defended Korean artists and labels that did not address BLM, arguing that the groups and companies should not become embroiled in a political debate that, in their view, did not pertain to South Korea. However, several artists and agencies did eventually issue public statements of support for anti-racist action, mostly framing their advocacy as humanitarism rather than political activism. What are we to make of this? How might we view the intertwining of race, ideology, and technology in K-pop’s anti-racist turn as an index of demographic shifts and alliances in a post-postracial North American context, beyond existing frameworks of diversity, multiculturalism, or minority identity? This presentation aims to enrich our understanding of the political significance of emergent platform-mediated fan identities, while emphasizing the need for historical grounding in our discussions of race, racialization, and transnational pop cultural phenomena.
Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Cultures and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching areas are South Korean film and popular culture, transnational fandom, platforms, and global media. Her published work explores South Korean genre cinemas in the new millennium, the history of the Korean Wave, and K-pop's multi-sited fandoms. She is co-editing a volume on gender and popular media in South Korea after the #MeToo movement and a collection of academic and fan-authored analyses of the K-pop idol group BTS. Her public-facing writing on film, K-pop, fandom, and media convergence can be found at flowjournal.org, Even Magazine and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She also frequently contributes to media coverage on Korean film, television, and popular culture in outlets such as the CBC, NPR, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post.