K. Iwabuchi’s scientific contributions

Using Korean TV dramas as an analytic vehicle, the essays in this volume collectively provide a multi-layered analysis of the emerging East Asian pop culture space in terms of intensifying production, marketing, circulation and consumption. By closely examining the political economy of the TV industry, audiences of the regional media flows in terms of gender subjectivity constructions, perceptions of colonial-postcolonial relationships and, nationalist responses to trans-national media culture exchanges, the essays highlight the multiple connectivities and socio-political implications of popular cultural flows and exchanges in East Asia. This series of contextually grounded analyses of the actual pop cultural circulation across national, cultural and geopolitical boundaries demonstrates the effects pop culture has on the imagination, meaning-making and meaning-changing and negotiation of difference-audience and their imagined regional counterparts, transnational fans and their 'idols' and even, postcolonial relations between the colonizer and colonized-on their consumers. This volume, along with already published works of its contributors, demonstrates the presence of an East Asian pop culture that co-exists side by side with US domination in the global media industry. We hope that it offers to readers further empirical and conceptual insights into cultural globalization, which cannot be ascertained in existing US-centric analyses.

This volume provides, collectively, a multi-layered analysis of the emerging East Asian media culture, using the Korean TV drama as its analytic vehicle.