Reception of Stuart Hall in the Korean intellectual field
Yung-Ho IM
ABSTRACT After Hall’s death in 2014, Korean newspapers ran detailed obituaries praising him as an influential British intellectual figure. The broad media attention appearsto be unusual, given that he maintained a relatively unknown presence in the Korean cultural fieldscomparedwith other theorists. This workexamines howand in which context Hall’s writings have been cited, or not cited, and emphasized in the Korean cultural studies. The incorporation of Hall’s writings into the resources of the academic field entangledhim in scholarly rituals of parochial citations and applications, resulting in the fragmentation and de-contextualization of Hall’s overall problem. The selective focus on and occasional absence of certain aspects among his intellectual and political legacies may demonstrate how imported British cultural studies have, or not yet, been indigenized and localized in Korean cultural and political contexts.
KEYWORDS: receptionstudies, Stuart Hall, Korean cultural studies, academic conventions
Note on the contributor
Yung-Ho Im received a BA and an MA degree in Communication from Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea, and then a PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Iowa in the United States. He is currently a professor of Communication and Director of the Institute for Social Science Research at Pusan National University in Busan, Korea. His research interests include a broadrange of subjects on journalism and cultural studies. He translated into Korean a compiled anthology of important articles by Stuart Hall andThe Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left.