Asian Invasion? K-Pop Industry, Politics, Fandom

This event is organised in cooperation with the Division of Musicology and Intermedia Studies

The international rise of South Korean pop cultural (hallyu) products in the past decades has yielded a strong and constantly growing hallyu fan base in and out of South Korea. The popularity of K-Pop music in particular, along with PSY’s YouTube hit song “Gangnam Style” in 2012 and boy group BTS’ international breakthrough since 2017, is most significant for K-Pop’s transnational circulation. K-pop is closely tied to the ‘globalisation’ activities of music production companies in South Korea that started to expand their target markets beyond national borders in the mid-1990s. In this sense it mainly embraces phenomena that are teenager-oriented, idol-centered and mass-produced by multi-faceted entertainment conglomerates. In this talk, I will shed light on 30 years of K-Pop history and probe into the productive intersections of K-Pop industry, politics and fandom, in the context of shifting asymmetries and cultural flows between South Korea and the ‘West’. 

Biography
Michael Fuhr is director of the Center for World Music at University of Hildesheim and interim professor of Ethnomusicology at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. He received his PhD degree from University of Heidelberg with a thesis on globalisation processes of popular music in South Korea. He worked as lecturer and research assistant at the Berlin Phonogram-Archive and at universities in Berlin (Humboldt), Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Göttingen, and Hanover. In 2009 and 2010 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Sungkonghoe University, Seoul. His research interests relate to questions of identity, migration and globalisation of music, to cultural theory, aesthetics, traditional and popular music of Korea, sound archives and collections, as well as to theories, methods, and histories of ethnomusicology. He recently finished a cooperative research project on the K-Pop reception and fandom in Europe. His publications include Popular Music and Aesthetics. The Historic-philosophical Reconstruction of Disdain, Bielefeld: transcript (2007) [in German], Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding Out K-Pop. New York/London: Routledge (2015), and “K-Pop Music and Transnationalism”, in: Youna Kim (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society, London/ New York: Routledge (2017), ‘Diggin‘ Up Music‘: Ethnomusicology as Building Site/Musikethnologie als Baustelle. Festschrift für Raimund Vogels zum 65. Geburtstag (co-edited with K. Klenke and J. Mendívil), Hildesheim: Olms (2021), and Music, Remembering and Cultural Memory (co-edited with C. Gruber), Hildesheim University Press (forthc.).