Thursday, October 31, 2024 | 2:00PM-3:20PM | Zoom (meeting link will be emailed) | RSVP

EASC Guest Speaker Series: Talk by Dr. Tian Li (Yale University) with Faculty Moderator Prof. Raymond Tsang (EASC 150: East Asian Societies) 
 

The cultural phenomenon known as Korean Wave (Hallyu) has flourished on the Chinese mainland since the 1990s, both officially and unofficially, despite looming political conflicts and cultural boycotts. Although the term Hallyu was initially coined in the Chinese context and the phenomenon has reshaped the contours of Chinese pop culture, the Sino-Korean entanglements in screen media have received little attention in English-language scholarship. Tian Li’s research theories the (re)localization of Korean screen culture in China through the concept of what she terms screen capitalism—a system of audiovisual relations that foregrounds the negotiations of boundaries through affective and sensory co-experiences. Korean popular culture has been officially banished from Mainland China following the ban introduced by the Chinese government as a protest against the U.S.-built Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system, which has been under construction in Korea since 2016. This talk will show how Hallyu has already become an Amnyu (undercurrent) in the Chinese context, and so (re)shaped the contours of Chinese screen culture despite that it continues under different names. By demonstrating the compatibility of screen capitalism’s logic with both capitalist and (post)socialist societies, Tian Li contends that this audiovisual mechanism, insofar as it is fluidly transplantable, ideologically permeable, and transnationally gendered, circulates a shifting cultural paradigm both on and off the screen.