“K-pop is Rupturing Chilean Society”: Fighting With Globalized Objects in Localized Conflicts

Abstract

Amid a rapidly growing wave of anti-neoliberal protest emerging in late 2019, Chile’s government scrambled to respond to the massive scale of this dissidence by attempting to find some external agent to pin the blame on. Initially seeking evidence of Venezuelan or Russian involvement, the state eventually pinned the blame on K-pop as an agent of “social rupture.” This article examines this framing of K-pop by Chilean authorities and what this says about the position of Korean media’s integration into a Latin American pop-culture landscape that is growing ever more globalized and non-Western. It likewise examines the contestatory embracing of K-pop by Chilean anti-neoliberal activists, their broader integration of globalized cultural objects, and how this reflects on wider current anti-neoliberal activist cultures operating in the Global South.

Desbordando hashtags de Twitter: La protesta digital k-pop en el Paro Nacional de 2021 en Colombia

“…Las fancams generadas por los fans del k-pop, aunque inicialmente se usaban para promocionar y visibilizar a ídolos y artistas, se ha transformado en uno de los principales contenidos reutilizados para desplegar tácticas de activismo político digital como el spam y el secuestro de hashtags. En el caso de los recientes estallidos sociales de Latinoamérica, por ejemplo, la comunidad k-pop de Chile, Perú y Colombia, con el apoyo de otras comunidades regionales y globales, utilizaron fancams para inundar los hashtags de grupos de derecha y partidarios del gobierno que estigmatizaban la protesta social y apoyaban la represión policial (Rivero, 2022;Díaz Pino, 2021). para la Libertad de Prensa, 2022; Gaitán, 2021).…”

K-Pop Fandoms Loyalist Phenomenon: Fans Participatory Branding on Social Media Content Practices Distribution in Indonesia

“…K-pop's profitability and global marketability have brought capitalistic success to the country. This fact has led to many studies on K-pop's global expansion industry strategy more specifically (Kim et al, 2021); Seo and Kim, 2019;(Kim and park, 2020) and studies of cultural globalization from the periphery more broadly (Pino, 2021) have focused their analysis on how local consumers appropriate and hybridize the meanings of Korean cultural products through their consumption practices to increasingly global audiences (Yoon, 2022). However, the emergence of K-pop in the worldwide market as of yet needs to determine its sustainability success factors linked to fans' loyalism.…”