Hyerin Shin

In March of 2017, the Chinese government banned its citizens from booking trips to South Korea through travel agencies as a show of displeasure with the South Korean government’s decision to install THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). The idle streets of Myŏngdong now bear little trace of the bustling energy they had enjoyed in 2016 when Hallyu tourism was at its peak; just last summer, hundreds of buses filed into Panpo Han Riverside Park, carrying eight thousand Chinese tourists to a

Abstract This article examines how the melancholic tradition of Korean literature takes a new turn toward epistemological disillusionment through Kim Young-ha’s (Kim Yŏngha) novel K’wijǔ syo (Quiz show, 2007). On the rapidly shifting horizons of unprecedented stability and prosperity, while exposed to the alienating effects of the newly emergent media-driven society where the meaning of community becomes fragmented and obscured behind scintillating screens clamoring with masked identities, write

ABSTRACT: Challenging humanity’s self-reified monopoly over the domain of hermeneutics, computational creativity destabilizes the foundations of its lexical reference, invoking Walter Benjamin’s musings on the age of technological reproducibility. How may we delineate the parameters of creativity outside the bounds of apperceptive intent, especially if the generative process is strictly reliant upon conditional expressions of correlational nature rather than the transcendental aura of instantane

This conversational essay brings together Lori Morimoto, Haerin Shin, and Sangita Shresthova in an exploration of inauthenticity, cultural liminality, and the generative tensions of transcultural fandom. Moving across personal narratives and scholarly reflection, this dialogue situates fandom as a contact zone shaped by asymmetrical power relations, affective attachments, and performative negotiations of identity. Drawing on the framework of the “third culture kid,” the authors discuss how exper

Abstract Young-ha Kim’s 2013 crime thriller The Mnemonics of a Murderer is a tale of neurocognitive apocalypse, wherein selfhood built upon dissociative violence turns on its own self. In the novel, a retired psychopathic serial killer suffering from Alzheimer’s disease awakens back to action upon detecting his own kind on his trail, only to discover that all was merely an elaborate construct of his deteriorating mind. The outcome is no less deadly, however, for the revelation condemns him to ex

In Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina, the creation of a tech-magnate with a god-complex outperforms its design and eventually revolts, usurping the position of the defeated master’s kind. Integral to this feat yet left abandoned in the wake of Ava the white female android heroine’s triumphant escape, there lies the body of her Asian predecessor: Kyoko. Born as a submissive mute sex-slave, and destined to be scrapped upon exhausting her exotic appeal, Kyoko exceeds Ava in her radical alterity d

The recent rise of digital media and human-machine interfaces has redefined survival for the conscious human subject. The most advanced technological apparatuses run on the principle of ambiguity and fluidity, countering the long-standing nostalgia towards an illusory state of totality seen in the history of Western ontology. Drawing on psychoanalytic, postmodern and cognitive theories, I reinterpret the fragmented, transgressive and incomprehensible aspects of digital communication and interact

Reviewed by: Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema by Youngmin Choe Haerin Shin Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema by Youngmin Choe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 264 pp. 87 illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paperback). $25.95 (e-book) In March of 2017, the Chinese government banned its citizens from booking trips to South Korea through travel agencies as a show of displeasure with t

“Unlocking the Mindware: Taking Responsibility for the Solipsistic Self in Murakami Haruki’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” addresses the issue of identity formation in relation to neuroscientific technologies by observing a phenomenon called (self-imposed) “locked-in syndrome” portrayed in a speculative fictional setting. Hard-Boiled Wonderland shuttles between two unnamed protagonists—a coder living in a futuristic metropolis secretly governed by data encryption agencies, and

This essay critiques the workings of cultural representation in the 2022 Netflix original Korean drama series Narco-Saints, characterizing the manner in which the locale, culture, and people of Suriname have been depicted as being emblematic of internalized coloniality and its vicious circle of reproduction. Opening up with an exploration of the show's positioning as a true-story-based narrative that amplifies its gesture to a sense of authenticity by way of the spectacular setting and cinematog