In 1990, Appadurai(1990: 1) wrote that the world has been a congeries of large-scale interactions for many centuries, yet `today`s world involved interactions of a new order and intensity.` Cultural transactions between social groups in the past have generally been restricted, but now, as Asian are experiencing in everyday life, fundamental changes are taking place in the cultural topography due to the globalization of the market, high technology, and various cultural flows. Koichi(2000: 63) took the issue of the increasing intra-regional flows of popular culture in East Asian context and argued that `the experience of the forced appropriation of Western modernities in the non-West has produces various by Western influence, are never replica of Western modernity through an ongoing act of cultural mixing and hybridization.` Recent global cultural economy have definitely encouraged an intra-regional cultural flow and apparently weakened the direct dominance of Western (American) culture. Have the non-Western societies finally achieved their own brand of modernities through accumulated modren experiences? In this paper, I explore this question through a discourse analysis of the Korean Wave. As South Korean popular music, movies, and television dramas acquired ardent fans across Asia, the term Hanryu (Korean Wave) has coined. the fact that the Korean Culture has become popular came as a shock to the older generation who grew up under the influence of Hollywood movies and Billboard chart songs. Just like the South Korean society was able to develop a new outlook on the world with the financial bailout by the IMF, the news of the Korean Wave gave a rise to a heated discourse on modernity and identity. I have taken the numerous writings that started overflowing from the experts in the field with the boom in the Korean Wave. The diverse pieces of writing and interviews reveal both the vivid thoughts of the writers as well as their unconscious desires. The writings were grouped into 3 category, namely, nationalists, neo-liberalists and post-colonialists, and the 3 positions seemed hardly reconciliatory. However, the rupture itself revealed a possibility of the creation of a new cultural space in the global shift. This new space is not something distinctively Asia, but an `Asian` context which enables the reexamination of the Western-centered modernity. The popular cultural flow and increased cultural interactions provided an opportunity for residents of non-Western societies to entered a phase in which they measure their modernities based on their shared and similar experiences.
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