• Contents and Abstracts1Historicizing K-pop chapter abstract
• Chapter 1 explores K-pop as an ideological and technological playing field where the forces of a rapidly changing media environment, a neoliberal marketplace, and the consequent desires to make and break various social networks interact. As K-pop has become increasingly visible around the world in the past ten years or so, the South Korean government has been trying to forge a meaningful partnership with the K-pop industry. By situating such a move in its historical trajectory, this chapter shows K-pop as a dynamic force that has been shaped equally by top-down and bottom-up movements, namely industry-led paradigm shifts in media technology and users' creative ways of employing that technology.
• 2K-pop from Live Television to Social Media chapter abstract
• Chapter 2 presents the unique production and consumption modes of K-pop in relation to the medium of television. The history of television reveals this platform's inherent link to the format of live theater, especially the live broadcasting model. Two examples of K-pop-related TV shows explored in this chapter-the top-of-the-chart show Music Core and an English-language live chat show, After School Club-encourage real-time participation by viewers that opens a new dimension of TV liveness in the digital era. Defining this dimension as simultaneous production and consumption of music rather than improvised and unrehearsed performance, this chapter challenges the purist notion of "live." The two case studies present contrapuntal visions of how domestic and foreign fans exercise ownership over K-pop by using various digital platforms and show how TV channels optimize their visibility by transposing TV media content onto social networks.
• 3Simulating Liveness in K-pop Music Videos chapter abstract
• Chapter 3 examines K-pop music videos as a central medium articulating the dynamics between liveness and mediatization. Music videos' primary platforms, YouTube and Vevo, generally replay recorded performances and are not conceived as primary venues for live performances. At most, music videos can only simulate the vestiges of live performances that have already happened. A comparative analysis of two examples of K-pop music videos-"Twinkle" by TaeTiSeo, a subunit of the representative K-pop girl group Girls' Generation, and "Who You?" by G-Dragon, leader of the boy band BIGBANG-shows the tremendous investment in the notion of live performance in K-pop as a way of forging the genre's artistic authenticity. Also illuminated is the significance of invoking various performing arts traditions, such as revues, Broadway-style musicals, Hollywood musicals, and performance art, to make K-pop music videos more approachable for a global audience.
• 4Hologram Stars Greet Live Audiences chapter abstract
• Chapter 4 explores the emerging interface between digital technology and live performances. Two key players in the K-pop industry, YG Entertainment and SM Entertainment, have invested heavily in creating infinitely reproducible and exportable K-pop shows featuring their top stars in holographic form. With a subsidy from and in partnership with the South Korean Ministry of Science, ICT (Information and Communications Technology), and Future Planning (Mirae changjo gwahakpu), a government unit deeply committed to Korea's national branding campaign, both companies have actively sought opportunities to present their hologram works in foreign markets that the actual stars have difficulty reaching through traditional live tours. By comparing YG Entertainment's hologram concert with SM Entertainment's hologram musical, the
• chapter investigates how live performance can be realized without live performers but only with live spectators.
• 5Live K-pop Concerts and Their Digital Doubles chapter abstract
• Chapter 5 looks into live K-pop tours overseas, an increasingly common mode of global circulation. While the case studies in this chapter exhibit the most conventional and purest notion of liveness (copresence of performer and spectator), they nonetheless provide examples of how live concerts cannot exist without digitally augmented audiovisual effects. The chapter also explores how live K-pop tours are promoted by digital campaigns carried out on social media and in online music stores, making it impossible to separate the live event from its digital counterpart. By comparing and contrasting BIGBANG's Made tour in seventy cities across four continents with CJ Entertainment and Music's KCON, a multiday K-pop festival and convention hosted in Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and the United States, I analyze these events' different strategies to attract Korean and global audiences while incidentally participating in a campaign to enhance the nation's soft power.
• Conclusion chapter abstractBy showcasing my ethnographic fieldwork at KCON Paris 2016, the Conclusion reiterates how K-pop is a kaleidoscopic cultural scene whose ongoing popularity is sustained not only by the calculating forces of neoliberalism but also by the sincere desire to build a global community through shared interest. It also points to the affective power of K-pop that transcends the genre's commercialization.
• Introduction chapter abstractThe introduction presents multifaceted definitions of K-pop and raises the question of why it is significant to investigate the liveness of K-pop. As a multimedia performance, K-pop's authentic liveness emanates not only from the performance of live music but also from the impactful bodily presentation of its performers. The notion of liveness is explored from technological, ideological, and affective angles with an eye toward bringing out the uniquely Korean dimension of liveness-heung. Liveness here is not limited to real-time broadcasting or the copresence of performers and spectators-- more profoundly, it is about the authentic rapport built around various actors involved in the making of the K-pop scene.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

1990s South Korea saw the transition from a military dictatorship to a civilian government, from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial hub, and from a cloistered society to a more dynamic transnational juncture. These seismic shifts had a profound impact on the media industry and the rise of K-pop. In K-pop Live, Suk-Young Kim investigates the meteoric ascent of Korean popular music in relation to the rise of personal technology and social media, situating a feverish cross-media partnership within the Korean historical context and broader questions about what it means to be "live" and "alive." Based on in-depth interviews with K-pop industry personnel, media experts, critics, and fans, as well as archival research, K-pop Live explores how the industry has managed the tough sell of live music in a marketplace in which virtually everything is available online. Teasing out digital media's courtship of "liveness" in the production and consumption of K-pop, Kim investigates the nuances of the affective mode in which human subjects interact with one another in the digital age. Observing performances online, in concert, and even through the use of holographic performers, Kim offers readers a step-by-step guide through the K-pop industry's variegated efforts to diversify media platforms as a way of reaching a wider global network of music consumers. In an era when digital technology inserts itself into nearly all social relationships, Kim reveals how "what is live" becomes a question of how we exist as increasingly mediated subjects, fragmented and isolated by technological wonders while also longing for a sense of belonging and being alive through an interactive mode of exchange we often call "live.".
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: Contesting the Border
• 1. Imagined Border Crossers on Stage
• 2. Divided Screen, Divided Paths
• 3. Twice Crossing and the Price of Emotional Citizenship
• 4. Borders on Display: Museum Exhibitions
• 5. Nation and Nature Beyond the Borderland Notes Works Cited Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Korean demilitarized zone might be among the most heavily guarded places on earth, but it also provides passage for thousands of defectors, spies, political emissaries, war prisoners, activists, tourists, and others testing the limits of Korean division. This book focuses on a diverse selection of inter-Korean border crossers and the citizenship they acquire based on emotional affiliation rather than constitutional delineation. Using their physical bodies and emotions as optimal frontiers, these individuals resist the state's right to draw geopolitical borders and define their national identity. Drawing on sources that range from North Korean documentary films, museum exhibitions, and theater productions to protester perspectives and interviews with South Korean officials and activists, this volume recasts the history of Korean division and draws a much more nuanced portrait of the region's Cold War legacies. The book ultimately helps readers conceive of the DMZ as a dynamic summation of personalized experiences rather than as a fixed site of historical significance.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: Contesting the Border
• 1. Imagined Border Crossers on Stage
• 2. Divided Screen, Divided Paths
• 3. Twice Crossing and the Price of Emotional Citizenship
• 4. Borders on Display: Museum Exhibitions
• 5. Nation and Nature Beyond the Borderland Notes Works Cited Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Korean demilitarized zone might be among the most heavily guarded places on earth, but it also provides passage for thousands of defectors, spies, political emissaries, war prisoners, activists, tourists, and others testing the limits of Korean division. This book focuses on a diverse selection of inter-Korean border crossers and the citizenship they acquire based on emotional affiliation rather than constitutional delineation. Using their physical bodies and emotions as optimal frontiers, these individuals resist the state's right to draw geopolitical borders and define their national identity. Drawing on sources that range from North Korean documentary films, museum exhibitions, and theater productions to protester perspectives and interviews with South Korean officials and activists, this volume recasts the history of Korean division and draws a much more nuanced portrait of the region's Cold War legacies. The book ultimately helps readers conceive of the DMZ as a dynamic summation of personalized experiences rather than as a fixed site of historical significance.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Hybridization of performance genres
• Time and space in North Korean performance
• Revival of the state patriarchs
• Model citizens of the family-nation
• Acting like women in North Korea
• Performing paradoxes : staging utopia, upstaging dystopia
• Conclusion: Looking back, moving forward.

This is a rare glimpse into North Korean propaganda - in parades, posters, murals, theater, and films. No nation stages massive parades and collective performances better than North Korea. Amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, North Korea has continued to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can involve hundreds of thousands of performers. "Illusive Utopia" explores how state-sponsored propaganda performances - including public spectacles, theater, film, and other visual media including posters - shape everyday practice in a country where the performing arts are not only a means of entertainment but also a forceful institution used to regulate, educate, and mobilize people. "Illusive Utopia" examines sixty years of propaganda performances and how they have intersected with everyday practices such as education, the mobilization of labor, the gendering of social interactions, the organization of national space, tourism, and transnational human rights. It is the first English-language study of visual culture and performing arts as they relate to the formation of North Korean national identity.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface Introduction Translator's Note
• 1. Coming of Age
• 2. Living for the Great Leader
• 3. Downfall of a Model Citizen
• 4. In the Mouth of Death
• 5. Escape
• 6. Across the Continent Afterword: Unfinished Story Notes.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Kim Yong shares a brutal account of life in a labor camp& mdash; a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although gulags are known to exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, since prisoners rarely escape both the camps and the country alive. "Long Road Home" shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a hellish coal camp and witnessed firsthand the activities of Kim Jong-il's unconscionable regime. Kim Yong enjoyed a career as a lieutenant colonel before accusations of treason condemned him to gulag No. 14 in Hamkyeong province. He drove an imported car and traveled freely throughout Korea-unimaginable luxuries in a country that closely monitored the movement of its citizens. As a decorated official, Kim encountered corrupt party officials and Japanese trade partners and witnessed both the illicit benefits of privilege and the monumental suffering of North Koreans. As a condemned prisoner, Kim descended into a world of terror, working in a coal mine 2,400 feet underground and becoming intimately acquainted with political prisoners, subhuman camp guards, and an apocalyptic famine that killed millions. After years of meticulous planning and with the help of old friends, Kim fled the camp and found refuge in China. His experience not only testify to the atrocities being committed behind North Korea's wall of silence-they illuminate the daily struggle to maintain dignity and integrity in the face of unbelievable odds.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp& mdash; a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime. As a lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, Kim Yong enjoyed unprecedented privilege in a society that closely monitored its citizens. He owned an imported car and drove it freely throughout the country. He also encountered corruption at all levels, whether among party officials or Japanese trade partners, and took note of the illicit benefits that were awarded to some and cruelly denied to others. When accusations of treason stripped Kim Yong of his position, the loose distinction between those who prosper and those who suffer under Kim Jong-il became painfully clear. Kim Yong was thrown into a world of violence and terror, condemned to camp No. 14 in Hamkyeong province, North Korea's most notorious labor camp. As he worked a constant shift 2,400 feet underground, daylight became Kim's new luxury; as the months wore on, he became intimately acquainted with political prisoners, subhuman camp guards, and an apocalyptic famine that killed millions. After years of meticulous planning, and with the help of old friends, Kim escaped and came to the United States via China, Mongolia, and South Korea. Presented here for the first time in its entirety, his story not only testifies to the atrocities being committed behind North Korea's wall of silence, but it also illuminates the daily struggle to maintain dignity and integrity in the face of unbelievable odds. Like the work of Solzhenitsyn, this rare portrait tells a story of resilience as it reveals the dark forms of oppression, torture, and ideological terror at work in our world today.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This dissertation construes cosmetic surgery as a mode of performing oneself in contemporary South Korea. Reimagining beauty as an incessant doing, partaking, and embodying oneself that is more "becoming" than "being, " I use cosmetic surgery as its performative measure to discuss the political economy of neoliberal self-management within the Korean media, popular culture, and everyday life. With case studies from reality television, performance art, photography, and K-pop, I locate the representational discourse of beauty as precariously imbricated within the social fabric interwoven by neoliberal, patriarchal, and heteronormative systems of power. Interdisciplinary in nature, this project renders the performance of beauty as an ever-shifting construct of subjectivity determined by race, gender, and sexuality. In the process of interrogating what lies at stake for not only the individual subject but for all parties partaking in the Korean cosmetic surgery industry, I hope to destabilize the rhetorical devices that choreograph, construct, and negotiate a particular image of Koreanness.