Dr. Michelle Cho, Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and World Cinemas at McGill University, will present on the male idol group BTS, which has seized the American pop music industry’s attention after winning the 2017 Billboard Music Award for “Top Social Artist,” a fan-voted category that recognizes social media impact through Twitter. Her talk will approach BTS’s crossover success by way of a discussion of Kpop reaction videos, online vlogs that record people viewing Kpop videos, either for new viewers or for fans to react to their favorite artists for the vicarious pleasure of fellow fans. In BTS’s case, unofficial fan promotion plays a central role in translating the group’s appeal to American audiences. This analysis will consider the form and content of these video reactions, to think about what the Kpop phenomenon can tell us about fan production, popular representations of Asians in North American media, and what “global” pop cultures like Kpop signify in the contemporary moment. Dr. Cho has published essays on Asian cinemas in The Korean Popular Culture Reader, Cinema Journal, and Acta Koreana, and on television, video, and pop music in Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, the International Journal of Communication, and Asian Video Cultures. She’s currently at work on a book about gender, media, and fandom in Korean-wave popular cultures.

This program was supported by the Byucksan Foundation.