Third Space K-Drama: Netflix, Hallyu, and the Melodramatic Mundane
Forthcoming from the International Journal of Communication
This article examines alternative structures of feeling in K-dramas that challenge American narrative ideologies. I consider Netflix’s impact on South Korean television by contrasting Netflix Korean Originals, particularly Squid Game (2021), with K-dramas such as Liar Game (2014). The latter belongs to an emergent mode of Korean TV that I call the “melodramatic mundane,” which creates new forms of hybridized identity in the global arena.
The Melodramatic Mundane in South Korean Television
This article examines the growing popularity of the “slice-of-life” K-drama. Why have K-dramas since the mid-2010s become increasingly invested in mundane, everyday practices such as cleaning, cooking, and commuting? Theorizing this narrative mode as what I call the “melodramatic mundane,” I connect shows like Because This Is My First Life (2017) and My Mister (2018) to sociological analyses of precarity to explain how and why everyday life has emerged as a distinct problem in contemporary South Korea.
Woo Young-Woo’s Whale: A Response to K-Streams
This essay reads the special-effects whale in Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022) as an embodiment of what Kathleen Stewart calls “ordinary affects”--“the varied, surging, capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences.” Repeatedly in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, the animated whale emerges into being, drawing our attention to such moments when oppressive systems press in on ordinary lives but are nevertheless negotiated, if not subverted, by the emergence of alternative lines of potential.
“Woo Young-Woo’s Whale” is part of an essay cluster on the topic of the Korean Wave, which I edited for Post45 Contemporaries.
Spelling the Orient
A flash essay on how Romantic-era exotic consumerism exposed Orientalist discourse as words that made something out of nothing.
Thomas Moore’s Confectionary Orientalism
This article examines the curious tendency, among Thomas Moore’s nineteenth-century critics, to read Moore’s “Oriental tale” Lalla Rookh as sugar and sweetmeat.
Invasion and Retreat: Gothic Representations of the Oriental Other in Byron's The Giaour
By drawing on the gothic mode, Byron’s The Giaour diagnoses its own Orientalist narrative as a failed exercise of imperial power. Read the article here.