Our next Open Doors segment is where we want to slow down and ask some honest questions.
K-POP attracts a lot of readers, from fans, from critics, from academics. But certain narratives stick more than others, and they tend to centre around the language of cultural appropriation, Orientalism, or manufactured artificiality.
Who is deciding what the story is, and from where? Who is shaping the global conversation around K-POP, and whose context is being centred?
We'll have a conversation about what K-POP actually is as music: its relationship to US pop influence, but also its grounding in Korean pop history, cultural development, and musical hybridity. Frameworks like post-colonialism, internal colonialism, and racism not as conclusions, but as tools.
Open talk given by Park Ji Yun, moderated by tracy september, will be held in English.
