150106 VU Mapping K-pop Around Eurasia: Transnational Cultural Flow, Promotion, and Reception (2015W)

The recent arrival of Korean popular music, known as K-pop, onto the global stage has expanded its fan base to many parts of the world: beginning within the East Asian region and spreading throughout many parts of the world including Europe and USA. This rise has attracted scholars’ attention because it reverses the earlier cultural flow, which had been from West to East or West to the rest of the world, and therefore raises new questions about topics such as regionalization, transnationalism, globalization, glocalism, de-westernization, and so on. These themes, which had once been approached mainly from a Western perspective, are only now beginning to be approached from an Eastern perspective. Therefore the study of K-pop is much more than just the success story of Korea’s cultural product: it provides a bigger picture regarding the transformation of the global music market. The study of K-pop and its reception signifies many important topics in contemporary East Asia and its presence in the global market. This course focuses on the mechanisms and factors by which the Korean government uses K-pop as a soft power to conquer new markets, as well as its successful marketing strategy, high quality of music production, and the reception and localizing process of K-pop in East Asia and Europe.
This class is pertinent in several scholarly fields, including ethnomusicology, cultural studies, East Asian studies, communication studies, fandom studies, and anthropology. It is an interdisciplinary approach on popular music and it will provide an important understanding of how K-pop has gained such global attention and how it has triggered growing cultural flow within the region and contributes to the understanding of emerging patterns of Asian popular-culture consumption in Europe. This course proposes to explore and discuss how K-pop has been distributed, promoted, received, and maintained, according to the local environments. By explicitly exploring few countries in East Asia and Europe, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and UK, Paris, Germany, Austria, Hungary as an example locations of East
Asia and Europe, this course provides insight into the local atmosphere and the role of fandom, institutions and local media influencing the localizing process of K-pop. It will cover the most important factors of K-pop: how the genre is produced and branded, how its regional connections are strengthened, and what potential it has in Europe.