The Korean wave and “global culture”

This chapter explores how the Korean Wave phenomenon illustrates trends and raises issues of a general nature framed in the perspective of a sociology of culture on a worldwide canvas that is also infom1ed by economic geography. The trends and issues discussed are all directly linked to the tropes of the "global" which are de rigueu.r nowadays (and indeed that term anchors the present volume's subtitle) and which for that very reason require unpacking. They revolve notably around the anxieties, perceptions and expectations generated by the processes of contemporary accelerated globalization (rather than globalization tout court, as will be explained below) that appear to have transformed the cultural world and have also come to dominate our analytical discourse. The experience of the Korean Wave relates to all these questions in a variety of ways. Some of these will be explored below, in the light of the author's experience in co-editing Sage's Cultures and Globalization Series, notably the second and third· volumes, entitled respectively The Cultural Economy and Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation (Anheier and lsar 2008 and 2010). But first it would be useful to unpack both the "global" and "globalization."