WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

In January 2022, American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel likened South Korean group BTS’ burgeoning popularity to the spread of an “Asian virus.” His comments stirred fleeting controversy, and were quickly forgotten once Kimmel apologised for his misplaced humour. Despite BTS’s immense global cultural capital therefore, their musical prowess seems to have outpaced cultural cognizance, and the growing acclaim of Korean popular music at large is experienced as an anomaly by the crudely defined if still relevant category of ‘the West’. Although South Korean popular culture (post-1987) poses a real challenge to western dominion over the global cultural sphere, Korean and western cultural actors do not meet as equals on the international stage. Contemporary geopolitical norms defined by past, unequal power relations (colonialism, conflict, trade, globalisation, etc.) and their resultant cumulative prejudice, still govern the terms of these encounters. Meanwhile, many postcolonial states – from India to Kazakhstan and Peru – are turning their cultural gaze to South Korea as the new frontier, seeing forms of representation in Korea’s cultural output, as well as its own postcolonial history, that were absent in Western media. In short, contemporary popular music captures the historical sounds (literally and figuratively) of a shifting political world order. Using examples from South Korean popular music and analysing the many different global cultural influences replete in its sounds and images, this paper will provide a cultural history that led to the current geopolitical turn, and will demonstrate the shift from dominance through political salience, to power through cultural sonority.