Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema by Youngmin Choe (review)

In March of 2017, the Chinese government banned its citizens from booking trips to South Korea through travel agencies as a show of displeasure with the South Korean government's decision to install THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). The idle streets of Myŏngdong now bear little trace of the bustling energy they had enjoyed in 2016 when Hallyu tourism was at its peak; just last summer, hundreds of buses filed into Panpo Han Riverside Park, carrying eight thousand Chinese tourists to a city-sponsored samgyet' ang (ginseng chicken soup) feast and a miniconcert featuring original soundtracks from the popular television serial Descendants of the Sun (2016). Meanwhile, the flow of Japanese tourists has palpably thinned over the past decade as Korea-Japan relations have grown sour over territorial disputes and postcolonial reconciliation issues, such as the Japanese Comfort Woman Agreement of 2015. With rumors of FTA and defense-budget renegotiations hanging heavily over the horizon, South Korea-United States relations are also under strain even as North Korea threatens to take its militant isolationist policy to the extreme, the uninhibitedly public nature of Kim Jongnam's recent assassination being a prime example. Youngmin Choe's Tourist Distractions arrives at this timely juncture, when South Korea's tourism industry is suffering a major setback as a result of the roiling vicissitudes of international affairs across Asia proper, addressing the incipient moments of Hallyu in its capacity to mobilize affective networks beyond cultural, historical, and political delineations. The soft-power discourse behind the "third wave" of Hallyu as a state-sponsored branding mechanism has ironically rendered not only the Hallyu market but also its aesthetic integrity vulnerable to nationalist pressures, as seen in the current downturn of Hallyu tourism/export, the casting controversy surrounding Bridal Mask (2012), or recent failures of major television productions―such as Uncontrollably Fond (2016) or Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo (2016)―that naïvely relied on overseas Hallyu celebrity fandom without ensuring diegetic cogency.

The spatial and temporal trajectories of Tourist Distractions operate along three vectors, respectively: South Korea's relationships with Japan, China, and North Korea (three countries), etched across colonial and postwar legacies that lead up to East Asia's neoliberal present (three temporal indices). With the spatial dynamic directing the course of intercultural mobility and the historical arch providing causal grounds, the three-pronged dual layers undergird the kinetics of affective engagement, situating human travel as "flows of capital, material goods, and cultural productions that epitomize the Hallyu phenomenon, and vice versa" (p. 6). The sense of fluidity Choe emphasizes with the word flow is of particular import not only because it captures the critical focus of Tourist Distractions but also because it enacts the affective nature of the exchanges, developments, and relations Hallyu cinema facilitates in, first, representations and practices of travel, and second, the mode through which they occur: namely, in a state of distraction. Affect is "synonymous with force or forces of encounter" (p. 2), Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg note; force here means movement without the kind of forcefulness we associate with soft power, the manipulative connotation of which belies the modifier soft. Transpiring "within and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities," affect includes and arises from "all the minuscule or molecular events of the unnoticed" (p. 2).¹ The "unnoticed" intensities of shuttling forces map onto the sociopolitical landscape of Hallyu tourism and the human bodies they carry across both physical and conceptual borders, riding the nascent wave of newly forged cultural alliances that snuck up on East Asia around the turn of the millennium. Moreover, the optics of Hallyu tourism is one of distraction via attraction, whereby the actuality of the site elides one's sight in its referential gesture to virtual narratives and figures that inhabit the locale in their potentiality rather than immediate presence. Inverting this logic of projective appreciation...