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The Asia-Latin America Reading Group is excited to announce our next session: “Hallyu (the Korean wave) in Latin America.”

The event will take place over Zoom on Thursday, December 1st, at 12 PM PT. It will feature Dr. Moisés Park (Baylor University) and Dr. Minsuk Kim (UT Austin), authors of Here Comes the Flood: Perspectives of Gender, Sexuality, and Stereotype in the Korean Wave.

Here Comes the Flood breaks down the stereotypes often expected of Korean popular culture, specifically examining issues of gender, sexuality, and stereotype in a variety of cultural products including K-pop, K-drama, and cover dancing through the lens of how “Koreanness” can be defined. A diverse range of contributors showcase how Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, began as a wave rolling across Asia and morphed into a tsunami that has impacted every continent, making Korean popular culture an industry that draws in fans on a global scale. The stereotypes and issues being explored in this collection, contributors argue, are intertwined with how Koreans both at home and in the diaspora portray themselves publicly and consider themselves privately. In tandem with this, international fans of Hallyu take part in the conversation through performance and imitation, either reinforcing or breaking away from these stereotypes. Contributors examine a wide variety of settings to connect the concepts of traditional Korean values to modern Korean society in a symbiotic relationship between these values and cultural content creators. Scholars of media studies, pop culture, gender studies, Asian studies, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

Moisés Park is an Associate Professor of Spanish and has taught literature, cinema, and culture in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Baylor University since 2016. He holds a PhD from UC Davis (2010). His research interests are literature, film, masculinity, Otherness, Orientalism and popular culture. He is author of twenty articles and book chapters, as well as the monograph Desire and Generational in Chilean literature and film (2014). He co-edited Here Comes the Flood: Perspectives of Gender, Sexuality, and Stereotype in the Korean Wave (2022). He is currently working on a second monograph examining representations of Korea(s) in the Americas. His first poetry book, El verso cae al aula, was published in 2017. His second poetry book, Poemas marciales, was published in Spanish and English in 2019.

Min Suk Kim is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation “Hallyu Fandom in Latin America: New Media Self-Fashioning of Transcultural Metropolitan Youth Beyond the Nation-State” analyzes the consumption and reception of Korean popular culture by contemporary, digital-literate youth in Latin America. Her research focuses on the ways in which young adults (mostly first-generation female college students and/or sexual minorities) utilize Korean popular culture into their local contexts in order to (re)imagine and fashion their identities beyond social constraints of the nation-state.

. A DoorDash gift card will be provided to the first 15 confirmed registrants, as lunch will not be available.

We are grateful for the co-sponsorship of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, the Center for East Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Chicana-o/Latina-o Studies for making this event possible.

Organized by:  Yurim Kim (ILAC) and Michelle Ha (MTL) of the Asia-Latin America Reading Group