Banal Koreanness: National imagery in multicultural-themed television shows

Abstract

This article analyses how three South Korean multicultural-themed reality television programmes discursively produce Koreanness. We ground our study in scholarship on ‘othering’ and the notion of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) and conduct a thematic analysis of the shows. Our findings show that the programmes adopt a Korea-foreign dichotomy that becomes a lens through which viewers can vicariously experience the existence of a unified South Korean culture. We argue that the juxtaposition of a Korean ‘us’ against a foreign ‘them’ precludes imagining a more pluralistic South Korea – even as the programmes ostensibly celebrate South Korea’s increasing diversity.

Learning with the stars: A cross‐national approach to media literacy and reality television

“…(WKFT; also featured in our analysis below), in which a group of tourists from abroad experiences Korean culture with a Korean‐speaking non‐native host, providing viewers with a view of their own country from the tourists' point of view. The worst charge leveled against the program was that it gave viewers a “banal” view of Korea—that is, a stereotypical vision of Korean life—and that it emphasized the differences between the tourists and Koreans (Istad et al, 2022a). A second publication, however, emphasized important exchanges of knowledge between Koreans and, especially, Latin Americans, through reality travel programs, especially WKFT, in which “the Korean audience is forced to face the Self—how Korea is seen and how it is understood (by outsiders)” (Kim, 2020, p. 174).…”