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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Areum Jeong, "K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
Description: K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today (U Michigan Press, 2026) insists that K-pop fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity, but also K-pop’s cultural impacts, politics, and horizons of possibility. Over the past three decades, the K-pop fandom and its activities have expanded, intensified, and diversified along myriad dimensions, assuming novel social, technological, and economic forms, some of which are unique to K-pop, and some of which reflect broader cultural and industrial logics of globalized mass entertainment culture. Areum Jeong argues that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—...