EALC 398 Hanguk Hip Hop: Global Rap in South Korea
Tuesdays & Thursdays 8:00-9:20 pm
This course looks at the birth, growth, and rise of Hanguk hip hop—Korean hip hop—by locating the local, national, and global flows of cultural and musical exchange between America and South Korea. By doing so, it outlines the sociocultural, economic, and historical conditions that underlie the production, circulation, and consumption of Korean hip hop. How did hip hop travel from America to root itself in Korean society? How did Korean hip hop develop over the last three decades as a cultural and artistic entity? How is hip hop represented in Korean media and popular culture? In considering these questions, we will pay close attention to how Korean hip hop artists— particularly rappers—(re)imagine their identities through music in various sociocultural, economic, and political contexts that oftentimes flow outside of Korea and extend to not just East Asia but across America and other parts of the world. With the help of scholarly readings, our study will question several intersections including cultural appropriation and appreciation; authenticity and identity; and youth subcultures, community, and technology.
This course will be taught by Prof. Myoung-Sun Song, who has just joined the Department of EALC as an assistant professor of Modern and Contemporary Korean Culture this fall. She is an author of Hanguk Hip Hop: Global Rap in South Korea (2019) and her research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and (national) identity in Korean media and popular culture.