Once considered a dubious cuisine relegated to the "ethnic food" category, Korean food is now hotter than ever in the United States and beyond. Ingredients like gochugaru and gochujang show up on menus of American fast food chains and local grocery aisles, while Korean cooking shows and meokbang videos have become a genre of their own on streaming platforms and social media, such as Netflix and YouTube. Today, KFC also stands for Korean Fried Chicken and the noodle dish jjapaguri from the Oscar-winning movie Parasite has its own Wikipedia entry.
Professor Robert Ji-Song Ku explores the rising popularity, appreciation, and appropriation of Korean food around the world and particularly in the United States, and its relationship to the global proliferation of Korean popular culture, a phenomenon commonly known as hallyu, the Korean Wave.
Hot! Hot! Hot! Korean Food in the Age of Kpop
Thursday, April 8, 2021 | 6 PM (EDT)
The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Robert Ji-Song Ku is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University of the State University of New York. His research and teaching interests include Asian American studies, food studies, and transnational and diasporic Korean popular culture. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: Eating Asian in the USA (University of Hawaii Press, 2014) and co-editor of Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming 2021), Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), and Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York University Press, 2013).
