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Benjamin M Han

The University of Georgia, Entertainment and Media Studies, Faculty Member

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Benjamin M. Han is an associate professor in the Department of Entertainment and Media Studies in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2020). He is currently completing his second book titled Reckoning with the World: South Korean Television and the Latin American Imaginary. His work has been published in the International Journal of Communication, Television & New Media, Media, Culture & Society, Pacific Historical Review, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. His research focuses on global media, Korean popular culture, and the cultural intersections between Korea and Latin America.

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Papers by Benjamin M Han

The Lure of Cultural Authenticity: Netflix and Speculative Koreanness in the Global Media Market

by Benjamin M Han, Dal Yong Jin, and Kyong Yoon

Television and New Media, 2024

Netflix Korea and Platform Creativity

International Journal of Communication, 2023

This article examines how creativity is regarded as a significant corporate asset to Netflix's ri... more This article examines how creativity is regarded as a significant corporate asset to Netflix's rise as a dominant global streaming platform. Using Netflix Korea as an empirical case study, the article problematizes the institutionalization of Netflix creativity to construct the streaming platform as a peculiar cultural space for creativity and lure ethnic content creators while capitalizing on the particularities of Korean television production norms and practices. Drawing on critical media industry studies and analysis of journalistic interviews with Hwang Dong-hyuk, the creator of the global hit series Squid Game, this article examines the politics shaping Netflix creativity in terms of authorial value, labor, and intellectual property. The article moves away from a Western-centric study of creativity rooted in romanticism, inspiration, and neoliberalism to explore how creativity as a resource to Netflix shapes the interactions between the Korean television industry and the subjectivities of Korean creative laborers.

Platformization of the Korean Wave: A Critical Perspective

by Dal Yong Jin, Kyong Yoon, and Benjamin M Han

Communication Research and Practice, 2023

By employing the platformization of cultural production from a critical political economy approac... more By employing the platformization of cultural production from a critical political economy approach, this article analyzes the transition of the Korean cultural industries to the platform-driven phase of Hallyu. By discussing the highly transnationalized and platformized Korean Wave in the shifting global media environment, it examines how Netflix platformizes and appropriates the Korean broadcasting industry through various strategies, such as investing in original content creation, licensing Korean content, and subcontractualization of Korean production. These strategies reveal that Korean cultural industry firms have become subordinated to, and rely on, global OTT platforms. In light of the growing influences of Netflix and other global platforms, the article explores the implications of the platformization of cultural production for the transnational cultural flows of Hallyu.

Cultural Specificity, Hybridity, and Transnationality in Squid Game

Post45, 2023

02.23.23 etflix's original series Squid Game emerged as one of the most discussed TV series in 20... more 02.23.23 etflix's original series Squid Game emerged as one of the most discussed TV series in 2021, generating 1.65 billion hours of viewing in 28 days after its release on September 17 while becoming the number one streaming show around the world. 1 After the global success of Squid Game, many meme videos circulated on the Internet, legitimating the transnational appeal of the South Korean (hereafter Korean) TV series. For example, Saturday Night Live did a comedy sketch featuring Rami Malek and Pete Davidson with selective scenes from the series, which generated more than thirteen million views on YouTube. What is particularly striking about this video is not its use of satire and parody but its attempt to recreate the series as a Western with cowboys and country music. Additionally, the substitution of Korean characters with primarily white actors prompts us to consider whether the series with white characters would have enjoyed the same Cultural Specificity, Hybridity, and Transnationality in Squid Game-Post45 https://post45.org/2023/02/cultural-specificity-hybridity-and-transnation..

Melodramatizing Racialized Korea: The Impasse of Black Representation in Itaewon Class

Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2022

This article examines how Itaewon Class (Itaewon Keullasseu, JTBC, 2020) employs melodrama as a m... more This article examines how Itaewon Class (Itaewon Keullasseu, JTBC, 2020) employs melodrama as a mode to recognize racial injury in the form of cathartic pathos on the character of Toni. This representational strategy renders Toni's Blackness less legible to construct the series as quality, diverse, and progressive while failing to tackle the cultural specificity of the Black Korean experience. Despite the growing visibility of Black entertainers and the use of Blackface in Korean popular culture, which have been the subject of controversy and scrutiny, there is a dearth of scholarship that analyses the representation of Blackness in contemporary Korean media. Drawing on industrial and textual analysis, this article explores how the illegibility of Toni's Blackness is used to obfuscate dominant representations of Blacks in the past with ties to U.S. military occupation. The cultural specificity and legibility of Blackness as a signifier of racial difference is disguised under the exploited melodramatic narrative of mixed-race children's search for their biological father. The article also argues that Itaewon Class aims to obscure antiblackness embedded firmly in Korea's racialized past involving Black Korean children, while calling forth racial incidents and Black victimization to envision a new modern Korea.

Strategic Blackness in South Korean Television

Mediating the South Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State, 2022

Reckoning with the World: Infrastructural Imaginaries of Cuba in Contemporary Korean Television

Seoul Journal of Korean Studies , 2022

"Millennials as Working Class": El Rey Network and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2021

This article examines how the El Rey Network departs distinctively from other competing Latinx te... more This article examines how the El Rey Network departs distinctively from other competing Latinx television channels catered to the young bicultural and bilingual millennials. The cable network's emphasis on working-class masculinity aims to appeal to the Latino millennials who increasingly identify themselves as the new working class. The deployment of a working-class perspective into its original programing, branding, and aesthetics aspires to offer a televisual space where Latinos can redefine the boundaries of their masculinity stemming from the feminization of labor and economic inequalities under the forces of capitalism. Despite El Rey's desire to provide more visibility and presence of Latino male bodies on television, it adheres to narrow conceptions of machismo that do not speak to the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and generational differences that shape the millennial Latinx identity formation. Therefore, the case study of El Rey illustrates how the Latinx television industry has not evolved much as it presents to be. The article also contributes to the ongoing discussion about Latinx television's efforts to construct a cohesive discourse of Latinidad and the complex meanings of race, class, and gender informing the politics of Latino representation.

Fantasies of Modernity: Korean TV Dramas in Latin America

Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2019

Transcultural fandom of the Korean Wave in Latin America: through the lens of cultural intimacy and affinity space

Media, Culture & Society, 2018

This article has examined how the Hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a transnational global cul... more This article has examined how the Hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a transnational global cultural landscape, focusing on Chilean reception of K-pop. It analyzed how Hallyu fans engage with a social media-saturated environment in Chile, mapping out transnational pop cultural flows within the digital media environment through which the participatory culture of media users is spread. What is interesting is that Chilean society, in general, shows negative attitudes toward K-pop fans. More importantly, while many Chileans consider K-pop fans weird and strange, often disparaging their family members and friends for liking such music, the marginalization of K-pop fans in Chile promotes a greater sense of bonding among them through the affinity spaces of social media. Under this circumstance, most of our interviewees explained that digital media plays a vital role in the dissemination of K-pop in Chile and Latin America. Unlike Hallyu fans in other regions, K-pop fans in Chile have developed cultural intimacy specific to digital site-media, primarily in the realm of social media, and K-pop generates the creation of affinity spaces via different social media platforms.

Transpacific Talent: The Kim Sisters in Cold War America

Pacific Historical Review , 2018

This article examines the Kim Sisters, a trio of female performers from South Korea, as a case st... more This article examines the Kim Sisters, a trio of female performers from South Korea, as a case study to explore the transpacific exchange of ethnic talent between the United States and Korea during the Cold War. It illustrates how U.S. military occupation, popular music, and Cold War diplomacy were visibly intertwined in entertainment television programming. The performances of the Kim Sisters in variety shows as a display of ethnic spectacle under the mask of internationalism constructed a false projection of race relations while the United States sought to win the cultural Cold War. The Kim Sisters navigated the complex structures of American Orientalism that television ascribed to them.

Ethnic/Diasporic/Transnational: The Rise and Fall of ImaginAsian TV

Television & New Media , 2018

K-Pop in Latin America: Transcultural Fandom and Digital Mediation

International Journal of Communication, 2017

This article examines the transnational popularity of K-pop in Latin America. It argues Kpop as a... more This article examines the transnational popularity of K-pop in Latin America. It argues Kpop as a subculture that transforms into transcultural fandom via digital mediation, further resulting in its accommodation into Latin American mass culture. The article further engages in a critical analysis of K-pop fan activism in Latin America to explore the transcultural dynamics of K-pop fandom. In doing so, the article provides a more holistic approach to the study of the Korean Wave in Latin America within the different "scapes" of globalization.

“Before K-pop, there were the Kim Sisters,” KoreAm magazine, June issue, 2014

Reliving Winter Sonata: Memory, Nostalgia, and Identity

Books by Benjamin M Han

Korean Pop Culture beyond Asia: Race and Reception

Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America

Rutgers University Press, 2020

The Lure of Cultural Authenticity: Netflix and Speculative Koreanness in the Global Media Market

by Benjamin M Han, Dal Yong Jin, and Kyong Yoon

Television and New Media, 2024

Netflix Korea and Platform Creativity

International Journal of Communication, 2023

This article examines how creativity is regarded as a significant corporate asset to Netflix's ri... more This article examines how creativity is regarded as a significant corporate asset to Netflix's rise as a dominant global streaming platform. Using Netflix Korea as an empirical case study, the article problematizes the institutionalization of Netflix creativity to construct the streaming platform as a peculiar cultural space for creativity and lure ethnic content creators while capitalizing on the particularities of Korean television production norms and practices. Drawing on critical media industry studies and analysis of journalistic interviews with Hwang Dong-hyuk, the creator of the global hit series Squid Game, this article examines the politics shaping Netflix creativity in terms of authorial value, labor, and intellectual property. The article moves away from a Western-centric study of creativity rooted in romanticism, inspiration, and neoliberalism to explore how creativity as a resource to Netflix shapes the interactions between the Korean television industry and the subjectivities of Korean creative laborers.

Platformization of the Korean Wave: A Critical Perspective

by Dal Yong Jin, Kyong Yoon, and Benjamin M Han

Communication Research and Practice, 2023

By employing the platformization of cultural production from a critical political economy approac... more By employing the platformization of cultural production from a critical political economy approach, this article analyzes the transition of the Korean cultural industries to the platform-driven phase of Hallyu. By discussing the highly transnationalized and platformized Korean Wave in the shifting global media environment, it examines how Netflix platformizes and appropriates the Korean broadcasting industry through various strategies, such as investing in original content creation, licensing Korean content, and subcontractualization of Korean production. These strategies reveal that Korean cultural industry firms have become subordinated to, and rely on, global OTT platforms. In light of the growing influences of Netflix and other global platforms, the article explores the implications of the platformization of cultural production for the transnational cultural flows of Hallyu.

Cultural Specificity, Hybridity, and Transnationality in Squid Game

Post45, 2023

02.23.23 etflix's original series Squid Game emerged as one of the most discussed TV series in 20... more 02.23.23 etflix's original series Squid Game emerged as one of the most discussed TV series in 2021, generating 1.65 billion hours of viewing in 28 days after its release on September 17 while becoming the number one streaming show around the world. 1 After the global success of Squid Game, many meme videos circulated on the Internet, legitimating the transnational appeal of the South Korean (hereafter Korean) TV series. For example, Saturday Night Live did a comedy sketch featuring Rami Malek and Pete Davidson with selective scenes from the series, which generated more than thirteen million views on YouTube. What is particularly striking about this video is not its use of satire and parody but its attempt to recreate the series as a Western with cowboys and country music. Additionally, the substitution of Korean characters with primarily white actors prompts us to consider whether the series with white characters would have enjoyed the same Cultural Specificity, Hybridity, and Transnationality in Squid Game-Post45 https://post45.org/2023/02/cultural-specificity-hybridity-and-transnation..

Melodramatizing Racialized Korea: The Impasse of Black Representation in Itaewon Class

Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2022

This article examines how Itaewon Class (Itaewon Keullasseu, JTBC, 2020) employs melodrama as a m... more This article examines how Itaewon Class (Itaewon Keullasseu, JTBC, 2020) employs melodrama as a mode to recognize racial injury in the form of cathartic pathos on the character of Toni. This representational strategy renders Toni's Blackness less legible to construct the series as quality, diverse, and progressive while failing to tackle the cultural specificity of the Black Korean experience. Despite the growing visibility of Black entertainers and the use of Blackface in Korean popular culture, which have been the subject of controversy and scrutiny, there is a dearth of scholarship that analyses the representation of Blackness in contemporary Korean media. Drawing on industrial and textual analysis, this article explores how the illegibility of Toni's Blackness is used to obfuscate dominant representations of Blacks in the past with ties to U.S. military occupation. The cultural specificity and legibility of Blackness as a signifier of racial difference is disguised under the exploited melodramatic narrative of mixed-race children's search for their biological father. The article also argues that Itaewon Class aims to obscure antiblackness embedded firmly in Korea's racialized past involving Black Korean children, while calling forth racial incidents and Black victimization to envision a new modern Korea.

Strategic Blackness in South Korean Television

Mediating the South Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State, 2022

Reckoning with the World: Infrastructural Imaginaries of Cuba in Contemporary Korean Television

Seoul Journal of Korean Studies , 2022

"Millennials as Working Class": El Rey Network and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2021

This article examines how the El Rey Network departs distinctively from other competing Latinx te... more This article examines how the El Rey Network departs distinctively from other competing Latinx television channels catered to the young bicultural and bilingual millennials. The cable network's emphasis on working-class masculinity aims to appeal to the Latino millennials who increasingly identify themselves as the new working class. The deployment of a working-class perspective into its original programing, branding, and aesthetics aspires to offer a televisual space where Latinos can redefine the boundaries of their masculinity stemming from the feminization of labor and economic inequalities under the forces of capitalism. Despite El Rey's desire to provide more visibility and presence of Latino male bodies on television, it adheres to narrow conceptions of machismo that do not speak to the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and generational differences that shape the millennial Latinx identity formation. Therefore, the case study of El Rey illustrates how the Latinx television industry has not evolved much as it presents to be. The article also contributes to the ongoing discussion about Latinx television's efforts to construct a cohesive discourse of Latinidad and the complex meanings of race, class, and gender informing the politics of Latino representation.

Fantasies of Modernity: Korean TV Dramas in Latin America

Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2019

Transcultural fandom of the Korean Wave in Latin America: through the lens of cultural intimacy and affinity space

Media, Culture & Society, 2018

This article has examined how the Hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a transnational global cul... more This article has examined how the Hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a transnational global cultural landscape, focusing on Chilean reception of K-pop. It analyzed how Hallyu fans engage with a social media-saturated environment in Chile, mapping out transnational pop cultural flows within the digital media environment through which the participatory culture of media users is spread. What is interesting is that Chilean society, in general, shows negative attitudes toward K-pop fans. More importantly, while many Chileans consider K-pop fans weird and strange, often disparaging their family members and friends for liking such music, the marginalization of K-pop fans in Chile promotes a greater sense of bonding among them through the affinity spaces of social media. Under this circumstance, most of our interviewees explained that digital media plays a vital role in the dissemination of K-pop in Chile and Latin America. Unlike Hallyu fans in other regions, K-pop fans in Chile have developed cultural intimacy specific to digital site-media, primarily in the realm of social media, and K-pop generates the creation of affinity spaces via different social media platforms.

Transpacific Talent: The Kim Sisters in Cold War America

Pacific Historical Review , 2018

This article examines the Kim Sisters, a trio of female performers from South Korea, as a case st... more This article examines the Kim Sisters, a trio of female performers from South Korea, as a case study to explore the transpacific exchange of ethnic talent between the United States and Korea during the Cold War. It illustrates how U.S. military occupation, popular music, and Cold War diplomacy were visibly intertwined in entertainment television programming. The performances of the Kim Sisters in variety shows as a display of ethnic spectacle under the mask of internationalism constructed a false projection of race relations while the United States sought to win the cultural Cold War. The Kim Sisters navigated the complex structures of American Orientalism that television ascribed to them.

Ethnic/Diasporic/Transnational: The Rise and Fall of ImaginAsian TV

Television & New Media , 2018

K-Pop in Latin America: Transcultural Fandom and Digital Mediation

International Journal of Communication, 2017

This article examines the transnational popularity of K-pop in Latin America. It argues Kpop as a... more This article examines the transnational popularity of K-pop in Latin America. It argues Kpop as a subculture that transforms into transcultural fandom via digital mediation, further resulting in its accommodation into Latin American mass culture. The article further engages in a critical analysis of K-pop fan activism in Latin America to explore the transcultural dynamics of K-pop fandom. In doing so, the article provides a more holistic approach to the study of the Korean Wave in Latin America within the different "scapes" of globalization.

“Before K-pop, there were the Kim Sisters,” KoreAm magazine, June issue, 2014

Reliving Winter Sonata: Memory, Nostalgia, and Identity

Korean Pop Culture beyond Asia: Race and Reception

Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America

Rutgers University Press, 2020