The paper explores ways in which the contemporary refunctioning of classical literary and cinematic genres might continue to provide vitality and relevance in building multi-faceted border-crossing societies such as multicultural communities. In the case of Korean hallyu cinema, Punch, the sleeper-hit film of 2011 about a Korean-Filipino character ("Kopino"), the "coming-of-age" genre is located at the nexus between the key features of the Bildungsroman and the project of multiculturalism in dominantly monocultural Korea. In the process of refunctioning, the aesthetics of the film is reworked from a narrative structured by the integrative logic of an individual's development (Bildungsroman) into a political site for negotiation of contentious tensions (multiculturalism). As a "hybrid" Korean film characteristic of many products of the hallyu culture industry, at its contact zone is the Kopino (Korean-Filipino), the main protagonist, Wan-deuk, at which the structure of the Bildungsroman, the Korean han and the Filipino affect sana become resilient and dynamic if not always visible features that textually coalesce and collide in the process of "generic translocality, " multiplying the tensions and reframing the narrative structure. The result is the emergence of a refunctioned hybrid genre toward what might be called the "multicultural Bildungsroman" in Punch.
The papers in this special section at once undertake and undermine the discourse of hybridity, at once to recognize the strength of its rhetorical force and critique the limits of its explanatory power. Rather than viewing hybridity as a kind of floating signifier in all its ambivalence as many postcolonial studies have been noted to have undertaken, the papers explore its conditions of possibility in the context of the materiality of the historical situation and specifically in the concreteness of the authors' inscription in history and the worldly particularity of literature, literary form, and criticism. As a category, for a number of years now, hybridity has seemed indispensable for the renewed examination of the formation of the canon, the development of forms, modes of writing, or adaptation of texts in the exploration of its "subversive" possibilities. Apart from its literary inflection, hybridity studies have dealt with the transcultural amalgamation of diverse dimensions focusing variously from the racial to the religious, often interrogating cultural dynamics. But both as a literary trope and discursive category, among the issues that might bear emphasizing is that hybridity as a post-colonial condition has been so often decontextualized as if the experience were homogenous in its assumed universality, rather than heterogeneous in its particularity.
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