Cultural Policy in South Korea

This book is a captivating and greatly needed addition to cultural policy studies. As the first English-language book on Korean cultural policy, it aptly historicizes the evolution of Korean cultural policy since the early 20th century and clearly articulates diverse perspectives embedded in the national cultural policy. By rendering the tensions and negotiations among various theoretical and practical frameworks, in particular between state-developmentalists and neoliberal globalists, surrounding major cultural policy issues, it clarifies the reasons why media scholars, cultural producers, and policy makers refocus on cultural policy in the ever-growing Korean cultural industries and the Korean Wave contexts. Without a doubt, this is timely and an indispensable chaperon for researchers and students who are interested in cultural policy studies, globalization studies, media studies, and Korean studies. - Dal Yong Jin, Simon Fraser University

For those of us less familiar with Korean history, Hye-Kyung Lee gives us a richly contextualised and accessible account of cultural policies since the era of Japanese colonial rule, explaining their evolution both in terms of South Korea’s own political dynamics since the 1940s and the nationally diffracted effects of globalization. At the same time, Lee has extensive familiarity with Anglophone discussions of cultural policy, and the book represents an incisive and original intervention in those discussions. In particular, it recasts or ‘provincializes’ prevailing conceptions of state-culture-economy relations, and shows an admirable awareness of the broad range of fronts on which cultural policies have operated. - Jeremy Ahearne, University of Warwick

In this timely book Hye-Kyung Lee examines the history of state patronage in South Korea during the twentieth century, culminating in the current era sometimes described as the Korean Wave. She considers trajectories of cultur