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Globalization and Nationalism in Korean Popular Music

Abstract:

Globalization and identity are two most vigorously debated terms in the modern critical

studies. In order to look at the ways in which politics of identity is involved in

globalization and localization, this paper discusses about the recent scene of Korean

popular music focusing on the concept of mobility. More specific consideration will be

given to the recent controversy about so-called ‘a group of salmon,’ referring to those

musicians who revisit their mother country after growing up in countries outside Korea.

These second generations of Korean immigrants have flowed into Korea since the early

90s, and have been forming a big power group in Korean music industry. This paper

discusses about cultural and political discourses surrounding a teen idol who decided to

choose U.S. citizenship over Korean citizenship, and explores on the ways in which

popular music evokes a sense of material politics of identity. Throughout the discussion, I

will argue that nationalism is not a simple reactionary localism against globalization, but

an aggressive negotiation among economic, cultural and political powers.

A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot
improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him. He may
become British; he can never become English.
--- George Mikes, How to be an Alien (1946)

The movement of people is linked with movement of culture, and the movement

of culture is linked with movement of ‘who we are’—our identity. Since globalization

has been the dominant word of the 20

century, everything ‘moves’ as Appadurai

categorizes the fluid disjuctures with five frameworks—ethnoscapes, mediascapes,

technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai, 1990). In this era of mobility,

nothing seems to be really fixed and so does identity. While I could not agree more with

Stuart Hall’s idea that identity is not ‘being’ but ‘becoming’, I would like to argue that a

very traditional values and ideas of nation-states still have a huge impact on the

configuration of globalization. In any discussion of globalization and identity, the

migrant experience is often at the center of the attention because the diasporic figure

symbolizes both the mobility and an inherent homelessness that comes with globality

(Shome and Hegde, 2002). How then do identities matter in the dynamics of

globalization where the role of nation-states has been changed? In order to highlight the

dialectics, I will explore cultural and political discourses surrounding a Korean

singer/entertainer who once was an idol and then suddenly became a national traitor and

even a criminal due to his positioning identities. This case study will provide a very

unique example of immigrants, which I will call Yoen-uh-jok, a group of salmon. These

are the people who have a double experience of diaspora--returning to their ‘origin’ after

a period of displacement from it. In this paper I will discuss on the ways in which the

double diaspora exemplifies dynamic relationships between media industry, media

representations, and immigrant lives in the era of globalization. Throughout a discussion

about a popular singer in Korea, I will argue that the unique diasporic experience in

popular music evokes a certain poetic sense as well as a material politics of identity

positioning—in this case, nationalism. Also the nationalism is evoked not as a

reactionary localism against globalization, but as an aggressive negotiation among

economic, cultural and political interests. I will open my discussion with a theoretical

review on the relationship between globalization/localization, identity and popular music.

A case study with a close consideration of the concept ‘mobility’ will be followed to

conclude this paper.

GLOBALIZATION AND LOCALIZATION

The term “globalization” has been popular since the approach of cultural

imperialism started to lose its explanatory power in some cultural areas. Globalization

has been defined in contradictory manners, sometimes as the opposite concept of cultural

imperialism and sometimes as an extension of imperialism. For example, Tomlinson

(1991: 175) suggests that the age of imperialism has been superseded by the age of

globalization, which is "less coherent or culturally directed" than the former. On the other

hand, Wallerstein sees globalization as "a capitalist mode of production to incorporate all

areas of the globe within its economic boundaries" (Han, 1997).

Criticizing both extremes, scholars from a variety of academic traditions have

argued that global cultural discourses are mitigated by symbolic local practices, and the

dynamics between global and local are not simple reflections of the power relationship

between the so-called West and East. Thus, their formulations have shed light on hybrid

intersections of the local with the global, theorized in terms of mestizaje (Martin-

Barbero,1993, cited in Kraidy, 1999), hybridity (Garcia-Canclini, 1990, 1995; Hall, 1991;

Kraidy, 2002), creolisation (Hannerz, 1992; 1996), and transculturation (coined by F.

Ortiz, cited in Pratt, 1992; Wallis and Malm, 1992). These critics have noted that the

process of globalization is not a unitary process tending in a single direction but a

complex set of changes with mixed and quite often contradictory outcomes. Giddens, for

example, defines globalization as "the intensification of world-wide relations which link

distinct localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events many miles

away, and vice versa (Giddens, 1990)." In fact, globalization spreads the Western

cultures into non-Western worlds by means of technological innovation of mass media,

but at the same time facilitates renewal of local traditions and identities. The recent

revival of nationalism and ethnic movements in various parts of the world shows some

examples of the multi-directional consequences of globalization. Therefore, as Han

suggests, the impact of globalization should be examined not only from the revised

perspective of cultural imperialism but also as the process that is "intrinsically leading to

a polycentric pluralism or diversity, particularly at the level of cultures and social

movements" (Han, 1997: 3). Yet, the question is to what extent the analysis of the local is

relevant in a world where globalization processes bypass the nation-state level. A

recognition that all contemporary cultures are to some extent hybrid often misses the

issue of power and overemphasizes the placeless-ness and spaceless-ness of the

globalization process. It might be true that it is really hard to define the local at the level

of nation-state in the highly standardized popular culture area. However, the hyper-

globalization thesis, which predicts the rapid irrelevance and decline of the nation-state,

is profoundly misleading. Rather, we would say that the boundary of "local" is defined in

a loose way in which cultural proximity is as important as the globalized cultural taste.

Clearly, it would not be helpful to regard the global and local as dichotomies separated in

space or time. The processes of globalization and localization are inextricably bound

together in the current phase.

GLOBALIZARION, IDENTITY AND POPULAR MUSIC

Along with globalization, the question of identity is without doubt one of the most

vigorously debated terms in the late 20

century social theory. Identity and globalization

are often paired together as twin organizing poles of the dialectics of the local and the

global in contemporary social theories (Giddens, 1990; Castells 1997; Bendle, 2002).

Many scholars pose identity in the center of their analyses of globalization because

identity has become problematic under the influence of globalization, and as a result,

cultural landscapes of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and nationality that gave us

firm points of identities are also fragmented. For example, the category ‘man’, ‘black’,

‘nation’ or ‘community’ are regarded as being more contingent and fragile and thus more

amenable to reconstitution than was previously thought possible. Identity becomes an

issue when it is in crisis, as Mercer puts, “when something assumed to be fixed, coherent

and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty” (Mercer, 1990: 43).

Hall (1996a) conceptualizes this ‘crisis of identity’ as the “set of double

displacements”—de-centering individuals both from their place in the social and cultural

world, and from themselves.

The crisis of identity is speed up in the process of globalization, which integrate

and connect communities and nations in new space-time compression. However, this

does not mean that identity is always floating. As Castelles (1997) puts, “our world, and

our lives are being shaped by the conflicting trends of globalization and identity” but

“when the world becomes too large to be controlled, social actors aim at shrinking it back

to their size and reach.” Robinson (1991: 41) also argues that wherever globalizing forces

lead people to seek ‘protective strategies’ involving the attempt to ‘salvage centered,

bounded identities for placeless times’ we are likely to find the revival of ‘patriotism and

jingoism.’ Not only national and individual identities face a condition of acute anxiety

and crisis, but also there is a growing desire to re-establish traditional identities as a

bulwark against the forces of globalization. For instance, Hall (1991) argued that the

identity of Englishness has been constructed through the globalization process, the

process of defining Otherness as marginality. In other words, the process of constructing

Englishness contains both “exclusion” (of others from us) and “absorbing” (of others into

us). Global and local, according to Hall, are the "two faces of the same movement from

one epoch of globalization, the one that has been dominated by the nation-state, the

national economies, the national-cultural identities, to something new" (Hall, 1991,

p.178). The problem is that the huge power of nation-states is often overshadowed by

those visible cross-border movements of people, goods, and commodities.

Globalization in a word is about growing mobility across borderlines—mobility

of goods and commodities, mobility of information and communications, and mobility of

people. Two fundamental conditions are crucial in globalization of popular music;

popular music should be commodified and it should have mobility. Because of its

commodified form and its mobility, popular music in the era of globalization is often

becomes an easy target for homogenization of culture throughout the world. However,

popular music on a global scale also has possibilities of networking alliances across

political, geographical, cultural, and economic boundaries. Interestingly, the global space

often provides opportunities for one local to meet another. Globalized cultural

technologies and networks of production and distribution have generated more and more

locally produced and consumed works in a very global context. As Dayan (1998) points

out, the scope of the research of fragile communities such as diaspora and immigrants

should not be limited to a specific geographic location. Rather we need to look at a

communication device that links peripheries to centers. Around such a communication

device, globalization happens in multifaceted processes of territorialization, de-

territorialization, and re-territorialization that different versions of the identity of the

same group are contesting. Drawing a boundary around a particular space is a relational

act that depends upon the figuration of significant other localities. Studying local music

therefore is rather based on “process geographies” (Appadurai, 2000) that sees significant

human activities and interactions—migrants, media, travel, exile, colonization, and so

forth. Indeed, recognizing and imagining regions and the world itself is a globalized

phenomenon, and musical space is not tightly bound; rather, the geographies of music are

varied, uneven, and changing.

Music is often perceived as the most internationalized form of culture because

people in many different countries, speaking different languages, often relate to the same

kinds of music. Because the drivers behind globalization are economies of scale

(providing standardized products to as many customers as possible), the transferability of

a competitive advantage from one country to another is very crucial. It is in the economic

logic of globalization that it pushes towards standardization and homogenization of

markets, products and tastes, seeking a "one size fits all" approach to cultural production

and consumption. By the capacity of sounds and images to communicate across linguistic

frontiers and cultural boundaries, globalization of music makes it possible for a lot of

cultural differences to mingle together at ease. At the same time, however, the

localization of music is also possible ironically by the transferability of globalization.

Music is perhaps the most expressive medium for appropriations and re-elaboration,

which opens up a high level of flexibility in different localities. The dynamic

relationship between localization and globalization of music comes partly from the

internal characteristics of popular music, in which time and space are the basic

coordinates of systems of representation. Of course every medium of representation is

based on time and space and must translate its subject into spatial and temporal

dimensions. The significance of popular music though is that it resonated with anxieties

about the loss of a secure local identity in an era of transnational flows of cultures and

people. The mobility of musical commodities, the tendency of musicians to borrow from

each other, and the fragmented nature of music consumption make it difficult to identify

popular music as characteristic of a particular place. Identity is deeply implicated in

representations of music in contexts where global mobility and local appropriation are

always in tension.

Some theorists argue that the general effect of globalization has been to weaken

or undermine national forms of cultural identity. Because ‘nation’ as a term is connected

with ‘native’, we were believed to be born into relationships, which are typically settled

in place. However, Benedict Anderson introduced us an idea that nation is in fact an

imagined community because it provides a quasi-religious sense of belonging and

fellowship which is attached to those who are taken to share a particular symbolic place.

Anderson believed that the availability of print culture was crucial factor in the

construction of nationalism (Anderson, 1983). If the print culture was a traditional

vehicle to connect people to an imagined place called ‘nation,’ media products, especially

in visual and audio forms, are conduits in the era of globalization. These media forms,

thanks to the power of capital and technology, have been spread out on the earth with

unprecedented speed. The interesting point of these media products, however, is that they

involve multiple points of identification. For example, in music video, you can identify

yourself with the lyrics, melodies, rhythms, visual images or any combination of these.

Also with films, you can identify yourself with narratives, visuals, music, ethnicity of

characters, language, or any combination of these. While these multiple points of

identification may be the consequences of cultural economies, intentionally multicultural

or multinational, a sense of nation is still strong in crucial moments. The following case I

will be discussing is just one example that shows how critical the power of nation is in

politics of identities.

SEUNG-JUN YOO: A KIND OF SALMON

Yoen-uh-jok (a group of salmon) is one of the newly created words in the 90s in

Korea, referring to those people who revisit their mother country after growing up in

countries outside Korea. Just like salmon embark their journeys of hundreds of miles to

their headwater breeding grounds, these second or third generations of Korean

immigrants have flowed into Korea particularly since the early 90s. If flows of people

from the ex-colonial countries to the Western metropolitan centers in the postwar era has

made us increasingly conscious of the colonial aspect of the development of modernity

and the question of cultural identity (Featherstone, 1996), flows of those ‘salmon’ made

us realize that the colonial aspects have produced unintended consequences. People move

to the Western centers mostly for economic and political reasons, whereas people move

back from the centers to their ‘origin’ for cultural reasons. In fact, nothing in Korea

attracts more salmons than entertainment business does, and popular music has been the

biggest habitat for the salmons. With their cosmopolitan sensibility and linguistic and

musical versatilities, those salmon have successfully positioned themselves in the center

of Korean popular music. These musicians, singers, composers, dancers, and even

entertainment businessmen who are armored with commercially profitable weapons have

been highly successful in spite of criticisms regarding their America-oriented styles—

until one unusual story hit strong the geographies of popular music.

On January 18, 2002, media reported that a popular teen idol, Seung-jun Yoo,

obtained a waiver for Korean military duty with his choice of a citizenship of the United

States, resulting a renounce of his Korean citizenship. He had been scheduled for

conscription by the Korean military for a period of 28 months, but his foreign citizenship

automatically exempted him from his obligation. Criticisms of his decisions appeared on

chat boards throughout the Internet and mainstream media as soon as news regarding the

pop star’s military exemption became public. The public anger towards him was so huge

that even his record company, Seoul Record, had fallen into a dilemma whether or not it

would continue to produce his albums. Yoo was also hosting a show on a national TV

network, KBS, but the network decided to replace him with another personality after his

decision with American citizenship. Hanaro Telecom, which had featured Yoo as its top

model and spokeperson, had to abandon its ads after being stormed with protests from the

public and demands that the company replace its model. Even the Ministry of Health and

Welfare, which had featured Yoo as the goodwill ambassador in public service

advertisements against smoking among minors, had to consider taking the position back

from him. After several weeks the debate over Yoo’s decision to become a U.S. citizen

reached its zenith when he was denied entry into Korea. The Justice Ministry did not

allow Yoo to enter his motherland, forcing him to turn back to his newly adopted

country. This was based on the request of Military Manpower Administration to ban the

singer from entering Korea, citing “as a public personality, his irresponsible and

inappropriate behavior might have a bad influence on society, especially youngsters.”

The Justice Ministry defined him as a person “capable of action that may harm the

public’s interests or safety.” The singer claimed that he did not renounce Korean

citizenship deliberately in order to avoid the military duty, and said that he thought it

would be better to have U.S. citizenship to achieve his goal of advancing to the

international music market. In spite of public anger and disappointment, and even a legal

action, he expressed his intention to continue his activities in Korea after a period of

hiatus. But his wish to perform in Korea has not yet happened since then. From a surface,

this controversy about Yoo is no more than a typical gossip in entertainment business.

But the impact of this incident was not limited in music business, but reached to the

extent that new law has passed to ensure the celebrities fulfill their military duties, and

the political and legal debates on whether or not Korea should allow dual citizenship

captured national attention. Before discussing about the processes of identity politics

around this case, it may be the order to take a look at Yoo’s personal background.

Born in Seoul, Korea, Seung-jun Yoo moved to the U.S. at the age of 14 with his

parents. As a son of immigrant family, Yoo experienced difficulties adjusting to his new

life and felt marginalized. Between his Korean parents and American surroundings, he

faced a diverse cultural struggles and confusions including, of course, racism. Having

experienced somewhat troublesome years in Los Angeles area and realized that his dream

as a singer may be impossible to achieve in the U.S., he returned to Korea to pursue a

career in music. When he appeared in Korean music scene in 1997, he was more than

welcomed by the Korean music industry because he had abilities to speak, sing, dance

and rap in both Korean and English. Since the late 1980s, Korean media industry had

undergone a significant restructuring under the influence of globalization, and in the

process of the expansion of media outlets new inputs were highly demanded. For the

music industry, the American flavor Yoo and other returned entertainers deliver was a

huge advantage to compete against the global music repertoires. Taking stock of the

English ability of those salmons, Korea has even emerged as a new powerhouse of the

entertainment industry in Asia in the 1990s. Yoo was successfully anchored in the

powerhouse, thanks to his bilingual communication abilities and globally marketable

music and dancing. However what really made him stood out among many other salmons

were his outspoken attitudes and charity activities. He appeared on anti-tobacco

commercials aimed at young people and set up scholarships for poor students. Unlike

other salmons, he had a wide range of following fans thanks to his positive image as a

‘beautiful Korean youth.’ For teenagers he was an absolute idol; for older generations he

was seen as a good role model for the future of Korea. In a short period of time, he

emerged as one of the most socially conscious and respected role models.

The fact that he and his family resided in the U.S. was not at all a problem on

defining his image as a beautiful Korean during his heydays. It was only after his official

decision on American citizenship when his cultural and political identities captured

public attention. Mainstream media began to refer him by his American name, Steven,

rather than his well-known Korean name, Seung-jun, as a sarcastic response of the public

regarding Yoo’s new identity. The public was particularly upset when he decided to be an

American citizen, because they felt that he was not only a singer but also a role model. In

fact it was not rare for entertainers in Korea to try to dodge the draft, out of the apparent

fear of vanishing from their fans’ memory during the service period. However, because

Yoo had openly said that he would be willing to contribute to national defense as a

Korean citizen, the public felt that he lied and betrayed his country. At the beginning the

public anger towards him was mostly based on ethical standards. As an entertainer who

was often praised as a beautiful youth, he was suspected of trying to dodge military

service, compulsory for all healthy Korean men, by obtaining American citizenship.

Koreans possessing dual citizenship must renounce their Korean citizenship by the time

they are seventeen with regard to fulfilling or be exempted from military service.

However, Koreans living in foreign countries who work in Korea for less than a year had

no military obligations. If they leave Korea for at least six months, they could return later

with another short-term residence permit and pursue their career. It has been widely

believed that a lot of salmon celebrities have taken advantage of the loopholes of the law;

they came to Korea, and after one year of fame and fortune, returned overseas.

While Yoo’s action was criticizes as unpatriotic, there was another growing group

of voices who argue that the government had no right to deny entry to a foreign civilian

with legitimate documentation. Some even look at the issue from the perspective of basic

human rights, because by denying Yoo’s entry into Korea the Korean government was

also denying Yoo the opportunity to a fair trial. The government decision in this sense

was criticized as emotional and unprecedented, and yet supported by emotional Korean

public in general. What lies behind this complex politics of identity is an equally complex

understanding of ‘mobility’ in globalization. Some celebrate and others lament; but most

people are perplexed and confused by different dimensions of mobility in specific

contexts. What is in mobile and what is not, and why and how? And how does the

mobility matter in identity politics in popular music?

HOW MOBILITY MATTERS IN IDENTITY POLITICS?

Appadurai states that media and immigration are two central analytical points in

the discussion of globalization. The totally contradictory images of Yoo, as a

cosmopolitan entertainer and a national criminal, represent the complex mechanisms of

mobility in which identities are negotiated with the media and immigration under the

condition of globalization. ‘Mobility’ means having the agency to move across different

spatial registers of power. Mobility is not only physical but also symbolic (Morley, 2001;

Shome and Hegde, 2002). Mobility is the staple of modernity, as Bauman puts it, which

the impossibility of staying put and the possibility of always on the move. The question

though is who moves and why. Garcia Canclini (1995) claims that people from the West

are moving to the rest of the world to develop new markets, the rest are moving legally

and illegally to the west in pursuit of an (imagined) good living, thereby imploding and

hybridizing cultural patterns along their paths. Ma (2001) identifies ‘satellite

modernities,’ which functions as magnetic sites between centers of high-modernity and

developing modernities in the rest of the world. Newly modernizied cities in developing

countries, such as Hong Kong and Seoul, can be categorized as ‘satellite modernities’.

Ma argues that as people migrate to these satellite cities, they are consuming western

modernity within the boundaries of their own nation or sister nations. A recent flow of

Korean Americans from the U.S. to their mother country can be explained from Ma’s

understanding of satellite modernities. Once moved to the center of the Western country,

overseas Koreans flow to Seoul (city of satellite modernity) to consume and produce

western modernity in secure without being marginalized. Therefore this ‘boundary-

crossing’ represents a mixture of the nomadic freedom and stressful discipline of

modernity. Throughout the symbolic and material production and consumption of

popular music, cultural identities are articulated by bodily senses of sight, sound and

touch. The construction of identity becomes powerful when ‘bodies’ (immigrants)

actually come to the sites and take part in cultural rituals, which is often a mixture of

translation and assimilation (Ma, 2001).

If the cultural discourse of Yoo in his earlier years is based on the mobility of

media representation in globalization, the one in his later years is based on the mobility of

people and power of politics. In the beginning Yoo was welcomed as a salmon returned

home after a long-term absence; he was welcomed culturally, economically, and

politically. During the period, his song and image were believed to represent globally

competitive cultural economic products and yet carry some local flavor. Considering

boundary-crossing media exchanges, the successful production and consumption of his

music and image as cultural products was not a striking result. So-called global

repertories (or international repertoires) no longer represent the culture of a certain

country but are fed by different sources. To gain support from international departments,

local repertoires (or domestic repertoires) also have to fit their standards, which include a

recognizably melodic structure, the ballad form, a voice without accent and a globally

comprehensive image. In this sense, local repertoire does not necessarily mean that this

music sounds unlike global repertoire (Gebesmair, 1992).

The popularity and success of diasporic musicians such as Yoo represent the

collapse of space and time, which captures the core characteristic of globalization. When

I showed a clip of Yoo’s music video to my American students who were in their juniors

and seniors in college, they were just amazed how much the video looked ‘globalized,’ or

in their words, ‘Americanized.’ Maybe those reactions were based on the essentialist

concept of ‘Korean-ness,’ which my students had difficulties to find out from the music

video. However, for majority of youth in Korea nowadays would not necessarily consider

Yoo’s image as Westernized or non-Korean. American students see English rap, hip-hop

fashion, and the entire image of music video as non-Korean, which for them is American.

The same representations, however, do not necessarily mean ‘American’ for many young

Korean audiences who can easily identify with the music and visual representations. It

may sound ironical, but because those young people did not pay attention to the political

and cultural identities of Yoo from his music and image, they were even more upset when

Yoo officially announced his choice of American citizenship. In the beginning these

confusions, debates and angers were spread out just like other entertainment buzzes. But

after the Korean government officially banned his entry to Korea, Yoo became not only

ugly American, but also dangerous enemy. Nothing from Yoo’s visual and musical

representations defined him as American; only the government action did. Why do

Korean people and the government care about the nationality of a singer? Why is Korea

so strict about defining ‘true’ Koreans, whereas few people questioned on the Korean-

ness of Yoo’s music and himself before the incident? The answer should be found from

the historical relationship among global city, youth culture, and popular music.

Throughout the mechanisms of colonialism, Third World cities were postmodern

and multicultural long before migrations to the First World brought forth similar cultural

differences there (Sassen, 1996; Saldanha, 2002). Due to the colonial history of Korea,

from mediascape to econoscape, the omnipresent Western or American culture has been

staple since the very first establishment of media and popular culture. Because youth are

the ones most involved in translating tradition, and translating tradition in the Third

World means coming to terms with the presence of the West, Yoo’s multicultural image

is accepted without much resistance by youth in Korea. His culturally and economically

versatile abilities, however, were suddenly transformed when the power of nation-state

intervened in the politics of identity. Once praised his combination of global

competencies and traditional values was even more criticized as a pre-planned strategy to

dodge his duty of military service. This criticism is based on what Bendle (2002) defines

as ‘politics of victimhood,’ a phenomenon in which one’s hidden injury becomes the

ground for a claim of valued identity. It is based on the idea that experience is embedded

within our sense of belonging, i.e., identity. This victimhood is represented through an

odd form of ritual, as Durkheim (1995) puts it, in which the use of commemorative

ceremonies act like batteries which store and recharge the sense of community. Only by

going through common passage of rites that are sometimes painful, individuals are

identified as members of a certain community. Yoo was reportedly trying to escape from

the communal pain—military service—by utilizing his ability to mobile between two

countries. What the public wanted him to become, however, was a pilgrimage, not a

tourist.

REBORN NATIONALISM: WHO’S AFRAID OF OTHERS?

National cultures are a distinctively modern form. National cultures are composed

not only of cultural institutions, but also of symbols and representations. A national

culture is a discourse—a way of constructing meanings which influences and organized

both our actions and our conceptions (Hall, 1996b). Then how is modern nation

imagined? What representational strategies are deployed to construct our views of

national belonging or identity? Hall (1996a: 613) provides us with five common

strategies adopted by modern nation-states in defining national identity: 1) narrative of

the nation, 2) emphasis on origins, continuity, tradition, and timelessness, 3) the

invention of tradition, 4) foundational myth, and 5) idea of a pure, original people or folk.

Ironically, these strategies are strengthened because of the globalization and resulting

crisis of identity. The possible consequences of globalization on identity, according to

Hall, are discussed from three different perspectives: 1) national identities are being

eroded as a result of the growth of cultural homogenization and the global post-modern,

2) national and other local or particularistic identities are being strengthened by the

resistance to globalization, and 3) national identities are declining but new identities of

hybridity are taking their place. In this way, identities move contradictorily between

‘tradition’ and ‘translation.’ Yoo was once considered to be a “translator”, but he was

eventually “translated” by a bigger power force—the government and nationalism.

Cultural mobility seems very plural thanks to globalization, but political mobility is still

heavily limited.

Regulating and controlling mobility is a crucial element in maintaining national

culture, because modern nation states are established on their abilities to define

themselves against ‘Others.’ Defining ‘otherness’ is not just about control over the

formulation of representations: the ability to determine differences of identity between

people also resides in power over military, economic and legal sources, for example, in

the case of laws and rights pertaining to immigrants (Kennedy, 2001). Because identity

involves a common history, not a common origin, there always is one and another

translation within identity, and the translation makes a certain difference stand out in a

certain historical and cultural condition. Therefore, the scene of difference is not pure

‘otherness’, but a discursive power or knowledge that anchors a certain difference as

otherness. Depending on how these different power centers have their dynamics with

each other, construction of identity (points of identification) can be won or lost (Hall,

1996b). This point of identification, therefore, becomes politicized. In the case of Yoo, he

won his culturally multiple identities with a help of national cultural industry, but lost his

political identity by national political power. It was not a battle between global media

industry and local political powers, and yet it was not a simple domestic affair either. The

cultural and political power games around Yoo exemplify the ways in which ‘otherness’

is even constructed from inside under the influence of globalization. The consequence of

this politics of identity is well captured in an article from a Korean newspaper, which

read “some day, Yoo might be able to come back to the Korean stage with a work visa,

presenting unchanged singing and dancing talent. Even so, many Koreans are not likely

to be fascinated by his masculine and candid attitudes any more” (Korea Times, February

3, 2002)

CONCLUSION

With his multicultural background, which was sought more than ever in Korean

entertainment industry, Yoo not only enjoyed popular success, but also provided a new

sense of identity. At a glance he epitomized a newly celebrated identity in the

globalization era until a critical moment suddenly intervened and things became different

stories. Despite the globalization of media and cultural products, communication systems

and political systems are still national in many significant respects. National boundaries

collapse on one front only to be built stronger in another, reconfiguring modernist

expression of power.

Then, why is the nationality of a singer so important in defining what Korean

music is? Appadurai (1991) points out that “the locality becomes a fetish which disguises

the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process.” In popular

music, this fetishism on locality comes as a process that involves all musical styles and

genres that are anchored to a place of origin. Indeed there is no ‘fixed locality’, but

fetishism of locality (Mitchell, 1996). This fetishism on locality is represented as an odd

form and style in Korean popular music. Because almost every element of music and

visual is dependent upon global trends, it is often emphasized that the unique structure of

Korean feeling makes Korean popular music different from other global repertoires.

Regardless how much material and symbolic resources come from outside Korea, if

Korean singer vocalizes the music then it is believed to deliver some intangible Korean-

ness. Vocal, apprehended through Korean body, is the biggest element defining what

Korean popular music is, and the vocalization is believed to carry unique Korean

feelings. Therefore, being and maintaining Korean identity is very important to Korean

singers and performers, because their identities are supposed to be recognized as truly

Korean. Yoo said “I’m still Korean even though my nationality is American,” whereas

the public said “you are not Korean although you speak and sing in Korean.” Culturally

he was and still might be Korean; politically he used to be but not any more.

Feathersone (1996) argued that if ‘localism’ means the desire to return home, the

question is whether the home is real, imaginary, temporary, or simulated. One of the

biggest reasons that the salmons have returned to their origin, ‘cultural home,’ is to

escape from their marginalized life and to capitalize their multicultural identities. They

are marginalized in their exiles, and they are marginalized even more in their origin. They

can negotiate their identities until a critical moment require them to choose only one

home. Although Yoo looked like enjoying his mobility as a tourist, he was never a simple

tourist; he is a tourist who is supposed to carry his passport and visa. His seemingly

‘Americanized’ music representation was not asked whether it was real Korean or not. It

was only after he decided his political identity when he was asked about his real Korean-

ness. In spite of a massive scale of cultural mobility, political and economic institutions

still have bigger power to limit the mobility even in the era of globalization. Lash (1992)

argues that people must live with the risk, ambivalence and contingency, and identities

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