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Korean Music and Asian Sympathy: Post-Nationalist Musical Discourse and ‘Asia as Method’

CHOI YUJUN 1

1전남대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

Since the end of the World War 2, Koreans have long neglected their Asian neighboring countries. They concentrated their attention to America or Western developed countries as their model for modernization. Due to the historical memories of Japanese colonial rule, Koreans never wanted to have amicable relationship with Japan. This collective antipathy of Koreans toward Japan made Korean government have long maintained the policy forbidding the import of Japanese popular culture. As for China, its communist political system made most Koreans think that China is no less antagonistic country than North Korea. However, the world situation since the 1990s has gradually changed Koreans’ points of view on Asia. ‘The fall of the Berlin Wall” and deconstruction of the Cold War system was a major motive for this change. Since then so called ‘globalization’ has come into realization on its two axes of transnational electronic media and migration, as Arjun Appadurai(1996) suggested. In this trend of world historical change, Korea established new diplomatic relations with China in 1992, and opened a door to Japanese popular culture in 1998. In short, it was not until the political, economical, and cultural barriers were demolished that ‘Asia’ started to be reexamined as a World historical block by Koreans. ‘Asia’ could not be understood just as a geographical area. Now what can be called ‘Asian sympathy’ is being emerging on the cultural levels of Korea and Asian countries. In this context, however, it is necessary that we consider ‘Asia’ not as a geographical area nor as a conceptual entity, but as method in which we can see the world differently. In order to take a closer look at this topic, I suggest, in this paper, a level of identity politics focusing on Korean musicologists.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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