Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema - Hardcover

Choe, Youngmin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822361116 ISBN 13: 9780822361114

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

In Tourist Distractions Youngmin Choe uses hallyu (Korean-wave) cinema as a lens to examine the relationships among tourism and travel, economics, politics, and history in contemporary East Asia. Focusing on films born of transnational collaboration and its networks, Choe shows how the integration of the tourist imaginary into hallyu cinema points to the region's evolving transnational politics and the ways Korea negotiates its colonial and Cold War past with East Asia's neoliberal present. Hallyu cinema's popularity has inspired scores of international tourists to visit hallyu movie sets, filming sites, and theme parks. This tourism helps ease regional political differences; reimagine South Korea's relationships with North Korea, China, and Japan; and blur the lines between history, memory, affect, and consumerism. It also provides distractions from state-sponsored narratives and forges new emotional and economic bonds that foster community and cooperation throughout East Asia. By attending to the tourist imaginary at work in hallyu cinema, Choe helps us to better understand the complexities, anxieties, and tensions of East Asia's new affective economy as well as Korea's shifting culture industry, its relation to its past, and its role in a rapidly changing region.  

About this title

About the Author:

Youngmin Choe is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California and the coeditor of The Korean Popular Culture Reader, also published by Duke University Press.

Review:

"Hallyu-lujah! This latest milestone raises the bar for hallyu studies both by cautiously analyzing several key texts of the recent renaissance of Korean films and by boldly tying it to the nationalist desires embedded in tourism. This pioneering book considers hallyu not as a commercial or artistic commodity, but as a regime of affective value. Tourist Distractions is an indispensable guide for anyone willing to enlarge their vision of not only Korea, but also of East Asia."   (Kyung Hyun Kim, author of Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era and In Search of Lost G)

"This is a wonderful book—one of the most deftly written, soundly argued, and genuinely interesting monographs on Korean cinema and hallyu. Drawing from a number of disciplines, yet never forgetting the centrality of the filmic text through astute visual analysis, Youngmin Choe has produced a book for anyone and everyone at all interested in Korean cinema and culture."  (David Desser, coeditor of The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0822361116
• ISBN 13: 9780822361114
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264