Fangirling While Black: K-pop, Affect, and the Reproduction/Rejection of Blackness

By analyzing the K-POP industry, K-POP fandom, and Korea itself as complexly racialized spaces, I argue that the images of idols, constructed in part through their military-precise African-American-inspired performances and music, work as a form of national branding, framing South Korea as aligned with American pop cultural modernity while globally exporting examples of the South Korean state’s supposedly successful production of disciplined bodies. In this complex and ultimately affective process, Black fans find themselves freed from domestic cultural expectations while paradoxically trapped by legacies of racism that haunt them overseas, suggesting the tenuous and contradictory construction of Korea’s hegemonic social politics.