Twitter is a battleground for Black and non-Black KPop fans alike to engage in debate about idol hairstylists’ choice to appropriate traditionally Black hairstyles as performative aesthetic. EXO’s Kai, for example, has a history of wearing dreadlocks in ‘Wolf’ and “Ko Ko Bop”. While the style was likely handed to Kai for EXO’s early “Wolf” comeback, it has been alleged that he specifically asked for the dreadlocks for their summer 2018 comeback, “Ko Ko Bop”, a time during which reggae aesthetics and musical styles became a trend in KPop.

This tweet that had me cackling:

Black and non-black fans online argued that Black folk in America face racial and economic exclusions due to their natural hair and yet, Korean idols are able to temporarily use the styles for the opposite effect of capital gain and popular success both trans-nationally and locally. This is a situation that reads much like American celebrity, Marc Jacobs, as Pham exemplified in Racial Plagarism and Fashion.

Black KPop fans arguing from an American political perspective about Korean socio-politics is a complex case in and of itself. Joel Lee articulated my exact thoughts before I could, so I’m just going to refer to his article, Qipaos, Hip-Hop, & Hybridity. Lee says, “At the same time, Anderson’s argument hybridity allows for the K-pop to exist without the binary of what is authentic and what is not based on U.S. racial politics. K-pop use of black aesthetics, especially with Big Mama, show the transnational capabilities of music. As Anderson argues, the music is created in context to its absorption of outside material and create new material. Therefore this allows for K-pop to have an authenticity without being strictly defined by the U.S.A.”

In these debates, fans arguing against the appropriation of Black hairstyles on idols labeled the situation a case of “cultural appropriation”. I believe those in favor of, or indifferent to, idols wearing Black hairstyles used the inarticulate language of appropriation in turn, and labeling it “cultural appreciation”, to avoid addressing the political and social ramifications that are at the heart of the former fans’ arguments.

Pham points out that the appropriation/appreciation emphasizes “individual feelings, intentions, and uses rather than structurally contextualized practices”. Pham says, “Cultural appropriation/appreciation blurs crucial dynamics of power that, though they may be linked, are the not the same, particularly the difference between the impositions and negotiation of power and the difference between racist representations and racial capitialism.”

What Pham says about the linked, but non-similar dynamics of power in racial plagarism reminds me of when Jay Park equated non-Blacks wearing dreadlocks to non-Asians listening to K-pop music.

This is another tweet about the incident that also had me cackling:

Jay Park did admit in his Instagram rant that he was unclear on what qualified and disqualified as cultural appropriation, given its vagueness. Moving forward, I believe using Pham’s “racial plagiarism” as a more accurate framework in cultural discourse online will prove to be much more productive.

When EXO’s Suho, SHINEE’s Minho, Super Junior’s Kyuhyun, CNBLUE’s Jonghyun, and Infinite’s Sunggyu were hired to travel to Mumbai in 2015 as per request by KBS World TV, a South Korean television channel operated by the Korean Broadcasting System aimed at international audiences, they discovered just a single fan, Babu, who recognized them during their weeklong trip.

In 2018, however, the national popularity of K-Pop in Mumbai had increased from Babu to the thousands, as evidenced by the 24,000 followers of the largest Indian fan club of BTS on Twitter, @BangtanINDIA. The rise of K-Pop in Western countries could be one reason for its cultural expansion to India, given the fact that BTS topped the Billboard 200 twice which then attracted fans of Western popular music in India. This is the soft power of Hallyu, the high tide of Korean culture in non-Korean territories.

Interestingly though, India’s initial engagements with Hallyu in 2000 had more to do with local politics than it did with soft power diplomacy. The National reports, in 2000, the Manipur Revolutionary People’s Front, an armed secessionist group, issued a notice banning Hindi films and TV shows – as well as the use of Hindi – in an effort to fight the ‘Indianisation’ of the north-eastern state of Manipur. This political supression in cultural policy is reminiscent of Korea’s tight regulations concerning popular music censorship under the military and authoritarian Park Chung Hee government of 1961-79, which the process of Westernization and industrialization was thought to be a threat to the country’s national culture.

In Manipur, theatres and cable operators quickly agreed to the demand, and people started looking further east for entertainment. Korean TV channels like Airarang TV and KBS World started being broadcast in Manipur and other north-eastern states, and soon the region was awash with cheap pirated Korean CDs.

If KBS World found success with Indian audiences from Manipur as the most watched Korean television channel in the early 2000’s, it is no coincidence that when troubled by the lack of K-Pop’s reach in India, KBS World sent five of the industry’s top male idols to the country and thus created ‘Exciting India’ to be aired for their Indian and international audiences to view on their television and YouTube channels in the 2010s.

Minho, Suho, Kyuhyun, Jonghyun, and Sunggyu were trained to have mobility across the creative industry’s interdependent sectors (talk shows, dramas, music) in appeal to the industry’s larger efforts to streamline the nation’s human/creative resources, a concept JungBung Choi calls intermedia or intergenre pollination, which in itself resembles the unique social formation of such small nations as Korea.

As Choi states:

“Hallyu is not an organic manifestation of rational market exchange in a cultural economy, nor is it an upshot of the fortuitous crossing of cultural supply and demand…certain aspects of Hallyu can be seen as a bureaucrtic program operated from the stage of preproduction through the stage of marketing (Hallyu v. Hallyu-hwa, 44).”

Although Hallyu involves the exportation of culture as commodity, it is a national-institutional campaign as much as it is a transnational cultural phenomenon, a concept Choi calls the duplex governance system.

Discovering and reporting overseas fans’ engagement with K-Pop and TV drama has become routine of the government agencies involved. Because of this, casual viewers and commentators of KBS World in Manipur act unknowingly as cultural arbiters who heavily affect the government and mainstream media’s view of popular culture as well as the nation branding of South Korea.