Abstract
I present a critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) (Brock, 2018) of English-language kimchi recipe and cooking show videos on YouTube to interrogate the interplay of technological, cultural, and economic flows in online discourses around kimchi preparation, or kimjang. My objective is to better understand how kimjang presentations construct imaginaries of Koreanness on the YouTube platform, building on Robert Ji-sung Ku’s (2015) arguments about the ambiguous relationship between Korean diaspora and kimchi’s semiotic significance. The distribution of cultural food practices via blogs and videos has become commonplace, and the ways that these media artifacts make forms of Koreanness knowable asks us to consider how kimjang – a touchstone of Koreanness (Ku, 2018, p. 131) – moves through the Internet’s webs of cultural production and labor. From a media studies angle, addressing kimjang’s intersection with digital media means confronting processes of platformization (Nieborg & Poell, 2018) and audience constitution (Smythe, 1981; Bratich, 2005) in Korean racializations. My argument is that English-language digital kimjang content re-presents the historical Western ideal of forcing Asian cultures and economies open to imperial adoption, appropriation, and exploitation by making foods like kimchi accessible, easy, modular, and knowable if removed from the Koreanness that makes that cultural artifact intimidating or difficult to approach. Further, YouTube’s role indicates that platform imperialism does not only push outward into the world (Jin, 2013). It also falls back onto the people in the imperial center via U.S. multiculturalism’s appropriation & dehistoricization that constructs a discrete archive of globalized Koreanness in North America.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Platformization, Platform Imperialism, Racialization, Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, Diaspora, Globalization
