Description
Book SynopsisPop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culturefeatured place selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture.
By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culturemediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.
Trade ReviewPop City is a uniquely valuable text for celebrity and fan studies researchers... it distinguishes itself from mainstream scholarship on K-pop and the Korean Wave... Oh paints a compelling picture of the uneasy yet instrumental relationship of Korean popular culture to the municipalities—large and small—that gamble resources and political capital.
* Cultural Sociology *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. THE SPECULATIVE PRODUCTION OF DRAMAS AND DRAMA SITES
1. Speculative Producers: The Production of Korean Drama
2. Spectacular Places: Drama-Filming Sites
PART II. THE AFFECTIVE CONSUMPTION OF K-POP IDOLS AND PLACES
3. Image Producers: The (Re)Production of K-Pop Idols
4. K-Star Road: Making Gangnam into a K-Pop–Filled Place
5. Cosme Road: K-Beauty and the Globalization of Myeong-dong
Conclusion
Notes
Reference List
Index
