Soyoung Kimincidents offer significant contexts for the manifestation of Korean global blockbusters. The
first incident is the June Democratic Uprising in 1987, and the second is the IMF crisis that
devastated the economy in 1997. In tandem with these two events is the influence of the polit-
ical disorder endured from 1948 to 1991. In fact, the lasting effects from the legal and political
measures undertaken during this time become crucial for locating South Korea’s post-colonial
cinema in a critical context. During this period the South Korean government proclaimed a
state of emergency nineteen times, and the security status of martial law was employed nine
times. Propelled by the establishment of the military demarcation line and the Cold War, the
highly mobilized political activities were carried out with the promise of a prosperous post-
colonial capitalist modern-state that would replace the impoverished former colony. The state
of emergency not only affected the legal and the political sphere, but also the suspension of the
rule of law. During the period of capitalism and ensuing modernization, the suspended rulings
were sustained by people’s desultory aspiration mixed with terror, fear, and anxiety. The unease
wrought incredible tension due to the torturous complicity people were compelled to endure.
It is within this political milieu and “emergency culture” as it were, that the Korean Wave
exploded creating an “entertainment republic.” It might be odd to see the overdetermined leap
of this kind from emergency to entertainment, but the critical inquiry of South Korean cinema^1
requires an understanding of this seemingly incongruous trajectory. It presents a new kind of
state of emergency, one articulated with states of fantasy.
While the political and legal states of emergency have now been lifted, an “affective state
of emergency” continues to operate in South Korea. In effect, it’s a way of processing the new
phase of capitalism that Koreans are experiencing today; a postmodern “cognitive capitalism”
(Hardt and Negri 2004; Boutang 2007) characterized by its installation across a highly virtu-
alized network society (Cho 2011). A composite state of urgency and criticality operating at
a vertiginous pace drives South Korean society into a condition of perpetual “dromology” or
“logic of speed” in Paul Virilio’s (1986, 47) terms. This condition has produced a distinct “state
of fantasy” (Rose 1996) that imbues the Korean mode of blockbuster cinema as well as, more
widely, the Korean Wave—within which K-pop is known for its dynamic girl and boy groups’
song and dance acts. The Korean Wave has brought unprecedented regional and global exposure
to popular Korean culture. Following the IMF crisis, with its attendant panic and suspicion
about the global regulation of financial power and capital, South Korea experienced the transna-
tional success of a Korean popular culture previously considered esoteric. This surprising shift—
from the status of an impenetrable (hopelessly local) cultural formation to that of a “wave” with
an immense regional and global circulation—begs for a range of analyses. However, this shift
appears to have fundamentally begun with an experience of shock and an incorporation of
“otherness” that worked on at least two registers. One of these involved the invasion of a threat-
ening other, demanding, in the name of globalization, transparency in the flow of capital and its
organization under the gaze of the IMF in particular. The other was the increasing presence of
migrant workers in South Korea. On the one hand there was the gaze of the other empowered
by global capital, while on the other hand there was Asian migrant labor (along with female
marriage migrants) requiring a politics of empowerment (Benhabib 1986) creating a shift from
an allegedly homogeneous nation to a “multicultural” one.
The Korean Wave, including its strong K-pop component, is at least in part an aggressive
response to, and also a constituent of, a newly multicultural, globalized nation (Chua and
Iwabuchi 2008; Mori 2006). “I’m gonna make history” is a line from “The Boys,” a Girl’s
Generation song that continues: “History will be written anew and the world is noticing us.”
This representative K-pop group incorporates the gaze of the global other in their formation
of identity. Reciprocally, the Korean Wave claims to be located in a multitude of regions across