Tourist Distractions

Youngmin Choe is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California and the coeditor of The Korean Popular Culture Reader, also published by Duke University Press.

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. Distracted Attractions  1Part I. Intimacy1. Feeling Together: Pornography and Travel in Kazoku Cinema and Asako in Ruby Shoes  312. Affective Sites: Hur Jin-ho's April Snow and One Fine Spring Day  59Part II. Amity3. Provisional Feelings: The Making of Musa  894. Affective Palimpsests: Sudden Showers from Hwang Sun-won's "Sonagi" to Kwak Jae-yong and Andrew Lau's Daisy  112Part III. Remembrance5. Postmemory DMZ: Joint Security Area, Yesterday, and 2009 Lost Memories  1436. Transient Monuments: Commemmorating and Memorializing in Taegukgi Korean War Film Tourism  166Conclusion. K-hallyu: The Commodity Speaks in Kang Chul-woo's Romantic Island, Bae Yong-joon's A Journey in Search of Korea's Beauty, So Ji-sub's Road, and Choi Ji-woo's if  197Notes  205Bibliography  229Index  241

"Choe productively establishes a discussion that is relational rather than focused on bounded national contexts. She does terrific work in tying together solid and eminently useful historical context information and on-site research with close readings and more speculative, very insightful discussion. It is a balance that is difficult to achieve, but one that is especially rare in the study of popular culture from Korea." - Alexander Zahlten (Journal of Asian Studies) "Choe’s work is highly readable, inspiring, and absorbing. Tourist Distractions also promises to be productive in the classroom. It will attract and distract hallyu fans in Korean studies and researchers with interests in tourism studies, visual and cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and film studies." - Barbara Wall (Social History) "Although an impressive amount of scholarship on Hallyu cinema has been published in the last decade, the transnational affect of Hallyu cinema through re-contextualizing it as audience emotions, tensions, and transnational self-reflections has not been the focus of critical attention. Tourist Distractions fills this void in Korean film studies with a persuasive voice by establishing the transnational linkages of Hallyu to Japan, China, and North Korea since the early inception of the Hallyu boom." - Yongwoo Lee (Pacific Affairs) “This is a multilayered and elegant model, albeit one still under construction, that certainly suggests a much more contextually rich way to interpret the significant works of the Korean Wave; for that contribution alone Choe’s book should be considered a must-read.” - Kyu Hyun Kim (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies) "Enriching the oeuvre of Korean film scholarship with its theoretical rigor, Tourist Distractions fills a critical gap in Hallyu studies by placing it in productive dialogue with Korean studies, tourism studies, film studies, cultural studies, and visual/cultural anthropology." - Haerin Shin (Journal of Korean Studies)