South Korea
"Locating South Korea’s Generation X"
"We admit to initially struggling with how to fit South Korea into the larger framework of this volume, not because the borrowed term “Generation X” (X sedae) has been absent from Korean discourse, but because the group to which this term has been applied is overshadowed in the Korean popular imagination by a different series of age sets that overlap temporally with Generation X as generally understood in the West. Arguably, the most influential generation in Korean society in the last half century has been the so-called “386 Generation” (sampallyuk sedae). The term, coined in the mid-1990s, plays on the Intel 386 computer chip that dominated the personal computer market at the time, and is used to describe those who were in their 30s in the 1990s (the 3), attended university in the 1980s (the 8) and were born in the 1960s (the 6). This generation came of age in a Korea that was experiencing rapid economic growth and for whom the grinding poverty of the post-Korean War years was largely being consigned to a memory of the nation’s past. As young men and women, they were instrumental in the democracy movement that brought about an end to authoritarian military dictatorship in South Korea in 1987 and forced Chun Doo Hwan to agree to democratic elections. With the passage of time and their metamorphosis into “486ers”, they became ever more dominant within Korea’s political circles." ~ Stephen Epstein and Timothy Tangherlini, Excerpt from Generation X Goes Global "'Youth' Culture in Motion? Korean Indie Goes Global" "While punk and indie music came onto the local South Korean music scene in a concerted way in the mid-1990s, greatly influenced by the culturally acquisitive nature of the young men and women born in the 1970s, the continued development of the scene over the last decade has offered numerous surprises. Early on in the scene, many bands, composed in most cases of young men, broke up when members departed for Korea’s two-year compulsory military service. As time went on, however, an increasing number of groups survived this long and generally unwelcomed interruption. In the latter part of the first decade of the new millennium, many of the groups that had formed in the late 1990s were still performing, albeit with varying levels of local popularity." ~ Stephen Epstein and Timothy Tangherlini Excerpt from Generation X Goes Global
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Stephen Epstein. Associate Professor and Director of the Asian Studies Program at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He has published widely on contemporary Korean society and literature and has translated numerous works of Korean and Indonesian fiction. Recent publications include "The Axis of Vaudeville: Images of North Korea in South Korean Popular Culture" and "Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia" (co-edited with Daniel Black and Alison Tokita Monash University Publications). His most recent novel translations are The Long Road by Kim In-suk" (MerwinAsia, 2010) and Telegram by Putu Wijaya (Lontar Foundation, 2011). He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Korea and its Neighbors: Popular Media and National Identity in the 21st Century.
Timothy R. Tangherlini. Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, where he focuses on Korean folk and popular culture. He has worked collaboratively with Stephen Epstein for over a decade on aspects of contemporary Korean urban youth culture, including the documentary "Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community." |