Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema, Youngmin Choe

In Tourist Distractions Youngmin Choe uses hallyu (Korean-wave) cinema as a lens to examine the relationships among tourism and travel, economics, politics, and history in contemporary East Asia. Focusing on films born of transnational collaboration and its networks, Choe shows how the integration of the tourist imaginary into hallyu cinema points to the regions evolving transnational politics and the ways Korea negotiates its colonial and Cold War past with East Asias neoliberal present. Hallyu cinemas popularity has inspired scores of international tourists to visit hallyu movie sets, filming sites, and theme parks. This tourism helps ease regional political differences; reimagine South Koreas relationships with North Korea, China, and Japan; and blur the lines between history, memory, affect, and consumerism. It also provides distractions from state-sponsored narratives and forges new emotional and economic bonds that foster community and cooperation throughout East Asia. By attending to the tourist imaginary at work in hallyu cinema, Choe helps us to better understand the complexities, anxieties, and tensions of East Asias new affective economy as well as Koreas shifting culture industry, its relation to its past, and its role in a rapidly changing region.