The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

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Hyo Kyung Woo, East Texas A&M University

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This article examines the implications of incorporating Korean pop music (K-pop) within a first-year composition course at Edward Waters University, a historically black college or university (HBCU). Using this interracial teaching environment as a case study, I share the challenges and difficulties I experienced as a composition teacher in my attempt to teach transcultural and interracial discourse in an HBCU writing course. It narrates how students in my class conceptualize and understand non-United States global-culturalism and ethnic formation in their writing practices. Given that Black is the majority race group at Edward Waters University, I observed how my students responded to K-pop amid the recent social environment of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent Asian hate discourse in the U.S. In their in-class writing posts at the beginning of the semester, more than half of the class surmised that interracial solidarity “will never exist in America because America was built of racial injustices and interracial solidarity cannot take place in a country built of hatred or ignorance” (Angel Wallace).[1] The strong cynicism of my students was understandable given that they are a younger generation who has witnessed increasing racism and hatred towards minorities during the BLM movement or the COVID global pandemic and rising attacks on Asians. They did not simply believe in a rosy dream for equality and solidarity in the U.S.

Responding to the cynicism of my students, I designed a composition class representing K-pop as an interracial, hybrid space, especially through its historic, strong connection to Black culture to encourage students to reflect on the value of interracial solidarity through cultural exchange. Specifically, this article describes a visual-narrative analysis assignment I designed that asks students to watch music videos of K-pop groups, BLACKPINK’s “How You Like That” (2020) and BTS’s “Dynamite” (2020), on YouTube and analyze the influence of Black culture in the videos.[2] After performing this work, the students in their essays critically compared and contrasted different racial settings and cultural adaptations between Black American and South Korean cultures in K-pop and navigated the possibility of Afro-Asian Solidarity through cultural exchange. This essay ultimately argues that the transnational pedagogy of critical race theory within an HBCU composition course can nourish the creation of alternative languages of racial discourse between Blacks and Asians beyond the dichotomy of the existing racial hierarchy.

 

A Non-Black, Korean English Teacher at an HBCU

A brief summary of my ethnic and academic background might be helpful in understanding my motivation and goal to adapt K-pop as a composition teacher. I am a South Korean who specializes in Asian American studies and English studies and taught composition and literature courses at Edward Waters University (EWU) in Jacksonville, Florida. Edward Waters University (renamed from Edward Waters College in 2021) is a small private HBCU with an enrollment of about 1,200 students. The student demographic includes 85% Black, 6% white, 4% Hispanic, and 5% multi-ethnic students. Given that I rarely had a chance to meet other Asian colleagues and share similar cultural or racial backgrounds with my students at EWU, it often made me contemplate how I could utilize my difference as a fruitful pedagogical tool to teach composition courses or bond with my students. In other words, I desperately wanted to earn some sort of membership to my “family-like” HBCU community, as I learned about the friendly and supportive nature of HBCUs where some of my colleagues proudly represent themselves as “aunties” and “uncles” of our students.

I started teaching at EWU in 2020 and I am still in the very early phases of exploring my combined pedagogy of composition studies and global ethnic studies via K-pop. Although I must include assignments required by the department, I also have the liberty to design my own course themes and the specific details of assignments. Thus, I decided to teach K-pop to my students to contemplate the complexities of diversity, racism, and cultural exchange at an HBCU in the Fall 2022 semester. On the one hand, my students demonstrated that they were keenly aware of existing systematic racism from their own experiences in class discussions and essays.[3] On the other hand, their interracial experiences with non-white minorities, especially with Asian Americans, seemed pretty rare. For example, in one of my in-class assignments asking them to describe their interracial experience with Asians, their experiences were mostly centered on Chinese food, Japanese anime, or a “super nice Asian lady with amazing skills at a nail shop.” It seems that many students had not had direct or in-depth experiences with Asians. Under these circumstances, it came to me that an HBCU, due to its historical legacy, might be an interesting venue to discuss relations between different races beyond the Black and white dichotomy.

Conversely, the recent emerging popularity of Korean culture within the U.S., especially among black youth fans, inspired me to draw my attention to K-pop as a unique teaching source and communication tool with my students. In the late 2000s, the Korean wave began to spread through North America due to the evolution of social media (Jin, 2017, p. 2244). K-pop artists became YouTube sensations and rapidly spread among the American public. Starting from Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” (2012), which was the first video on YouTube to hit 1 billion views, K-pop groups such as BTS or BLACKPINK took the top spots on the U.S Billboard Chart Hot 100 and won prestigious Grammy awards.[4] In addition, recent K-pop scholarship has paid attention to the inter-cultural aspect of K-pop particularly the largely unnoticed yet heavy influence of Black culture on K-pop. Many Black artists, stylists, and choreographers helped to establish the K-pop industry in a global market. As Deja Heard (2021) rightly points out, “As many would like to ignore the impact black culture has had in the K-pop industry, it’s important to know that a huge amount of dance moves, fashion styles, hairstyles, K-pop artists use or wear comes from black culture.” Therefore, engaging my students based on their experiences and the recent academic discourse of rediscovering Black cultural influence in the K-pop industry, I chose the theme of Afro-Asian cultural exchange in K-pop and used it as a way for my students to explore cultural encounters beyond their racial backgrounds in their writing assignments.

To this end, I emphasized writing within a transcultural and interracial context of K-pop to illustrate how writing can function as a vehicle for creating pathways for successful Afro-Asian solidarity. Writing about the interracial aspect of K-pop bridges critical race theory with composition studies and offers a new possibility for rethinking cultural exchange among minority groups, where my students were assigned the roles of cultural critics and ambassadors. This essay illustrates how writing about K-pop exists as a pedagogical tool for my students to explore diverse racial tensions and solidarity.

Simply put, as a non-Black Asian teacher at an HBCU, I wanted to build a cultural, racial, and pedagogical bridge between my students and myself by discussing the adaptation of Black culture in K-pop. In doing so, the classroom utilized a student-centered pedagogy, allowing students to take the lead and ultimately shifting the power hierarchy between teacher and students.[5] By presenting K-pop as a contested territory between a Korean teacher and HBCU students, we constantly negotiated and learned together in our classroom.[6]

 

 Pedagogical Rationales for Using K-pop in a Composition Class

 Embarking on K-pop as a new research theme for my ENC1102 advanced composition course, I aimed to present this interracial cultural writing project and its challenges to my students in a critical and socially just learning environment, namely an HBCU where the dominant race is Black. Rather than asking students to downplay or negotiate their cultural identities to accommodate white dominant perspectives, I wanted my students to critically examine the influence of Black culture as a subject of discourse with another non-white minority culture. By doing so, students were also required to reexamine a foreign culture, which is seemingly unrelated to them, as well as the definition of Black culture, which cannot be defined in a single term. In this context, I believe that incorporating K-pop in HBCU composition courses could have three potential benefits for my students.      

First, K-pop, due to its origin in a non-Anglophone country and complex cultural hybridity, provides an opportunity for instructors and students to participate in the current discourses on antiracist pedagogy where we reflect our social positions and envision potential social changes (Smitherman, 1995; Lippi-Green, 2012; Inoue, 2015; Davila, 2017; Young & Barrett, 2018; Baker-Bell, 2020). Examining K-pop within a writing classroom in terms of its global culture and diversity, provides what Asao B. Inoue (2015) defines in his antiracist writing assessment as “a complex political system of people, environments, actions, and relations of power that produce consciously understood relationships between and among people and their environments” (p. 82). Deploying writing practice for my students in conjunction with global critical race theories allows them to carefully examine interracial language and cultural experiences between Blacks and Asians beyond our comfort zones. It proposes to forge interracial discourses beyond the dichotomy of white and Black racism, national borders, and linguistic and cultural homogeneity to propose the benefits of Afro-Asian solidarity. In other words, it enables a discourse and practice negating the hegemony of white mainstream discourse assuming the inferiority of the Other, for the process itself allows HBCU students more room to explore alternative discourses and voices among minorities.

Second, K-pop in a writing course offers students an opportunity to deal with a contemporary phenomenon relevant to their current political and racial situations and articulate their responses in critical language. K-pop culture, due to its cultural diversity in global fandom, might suggest a resolution to ethically acknowledge each other’s differences in our extremely globalized and digitalized society where a wide range of cultural citizens communicate across national borders. This transcultural approach to discuss interracial conflicts and solidarity becomes more important than ever, given that we are constantly exposed to intensified visibility of racialized violence and asked to reconsider the purpose and application of higher education (Lockett & RudeWalker, 2016, p. 172). By teaching K-pop as a contested yet exciting terrain where a wide range of global fandoms with different nationalities, races, and ethnicities meet and converse, students obtain a cultural language to respectively communicate with diverse others in a contemporary globalized world. This culturally nuanced language can be an essential survival skill for my students against the daily racist threats and hostile environments within and outside the U.S.

Learning how to verbalize and write about cultural differences and exchanges among diverse groups is imperative at contemporary HBCUs as racial and ethnic diversity in HBCUs is becoming a more complicated issue. This contemporary, interracial approach via K-pop is particularly beneficial to our HBCU students considering the changing notion of diversity of the student demographic at HBCUs nowadays. Racial, economic, and gender diversity in HBCUs challenges traditionally established congenial Black identity at HBCUs (Brown & Dancy, 2018; Davis, Hilton & Outten, 2018).[7] Contemporary HBCUs integrate narratives and experiences of non-Black students, particularly a growing population of Hispanic students, Native American students, Asian students, as well as global Black diaspora groups, such as African, African-American, Afro-Brazilian, Caribbean, and Columbian students. This makes HBCUs ethnically more diverse by complicating the notion of racial heterogeneity within Black student experiences. For instance, some students in their Blaccent argumentative essays (which will be introduced next section) articulated the previously unrecognized disparity between how they see themselves and how others see them at HBCUs based on skin color and language:

I am Brazilian. My first language is Portuguese. Both of my parents are light-skinned. My grandfather is Indian and has a very dark brown color. His spouse, my grandmother, is of African descent, she’s black. I’m brown, which here would be considered or called a light skin girl. I am considered black and that’s how I was raised and oriented by my family and how I see myself. Yet I fail [sic] to say that it is hard to come to an HBCU school only to be always seen as “Spanish.” (Arielly De Souza)

Another student wrote, “because of my skin color, people naturally just assume I am ‘black,’ which, in reality, I’m a melting pot of Cuban, Indian, Haitian, and Bahamian” (Takayla Robinson). In addition to the enrollment increase of non-Black minorities at HBCUs, the diversifying Black identity within HBCUs itself resembles the dynamic racial and ethnic diversity of global K-pop fandom and how they resolve the cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and racial conflicts within the community. As Stephanie Kerschbaum (2014) rightly points out: “understanding diversity’s evolving character is best seen in relation to others,” so doing this within the increasing diversity and complex learning environments at HBCUs creates interesting contexts for exploring the global cultural flow of K-pop where a variety of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds constantly converge and diverge in audiences.

Lastly, K-pop opens a discourse about popular culture that allows students more agency in choosing topics and approaches that resonate more with their current cultural experiences. I found that when students write on topics about which they are passionate, they are likely to actively engage with their writing and develop their genuine voice. Therefore, I tried to design assignments related to a cultural environment in which students participate, especially outside of school.  While teaching contemporary popular culture is a risk for a teacher because students can often show more expertise or experience than the instructor. However, operating within what bell hooks (1994) suggests as “practic[ing] being vulnerable in the classroom,” (p. 21) helps in thinking how a focus on contemporary popular culture helps to transition a traditional composition class into a more interactive class.

 

Playing K-Pop in an HBCU Classroom

For the Fall 2022 semester, I taught English Composition 1102, an upper-level first-year composition (FYC) course at Edward Waters University. Based on a class survey, the students in this course were similar to the racial makeup of Edward Waters University student population. The racial and gender breakdown consisted of 89% Black or African American, 6% white, and 5% Hispanic, with 42% male and 58% female. More than half of the class answered that they did not know about K-pop at all prior to the class and were first introduced to K-pop through my class. 29% previously encountered K-pop through social media and 13% from friends. I designed the course according to my department’s description of it in the catalogue, including four required writing assignments relating to K-pop, consisting of an argumentative essay, an annotated bibliography, a research paper, and a reflection essay. This way, students are encouraged to develop or revise their original impressions and thoughts throughout the semester based on class discussions and peer reviews as members of a learning community.

After observing my students’ experiences of Asia and Asian America, I did not dive directly into K-pop. Rather, I assigned an argumentative essay on the topic of “Blaccent” (the use of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) by a non-Black person) to contemplate on ethical and respectable ways to enjoy other cultures. Prior to engaging in a culture outside of their own, I wanted my students to explore the issue of cultural appreciation and appropriation since genuine solidarity can only be achieved through respect and compassion towards each other. I did not want to simply present cultural exchange between Blacks and Asians via K-pop as an ideal and shallow notion of solidarity. Rather, I wanted my students reclaim the ownership of their own culture, write their thoughts about when “others” use “their” culture, and apply their argument as a theoretical framework to analyze the Black influence in K-pop in a later assignment. The controversy of cultural appropriation has been a major criticism leveled towards K-pop given that many K-pop artists or producers often adapt non-Korean culture without properly crediting original artists or misuse them out of context. The use of a “blaccent” is one of them. While critically examining the definition and practice of Black language and its cultural and political implications, this assignment could possibly equip students with agency and develop their analysis in researching K-pop’s adaptation of Black culture.

As a case study of the problems that can arise in transcultural exchanges, I introduced students to Awkwafina’s recent controversy as an opening remark. Awkwafina (the stage name of Nora Lum) is an Asian American hip hop artist and actress. She is a rare success story as an Asian American female artist who built a successful career in Hollywood. The actress won a Golden Globe for her role in the film The Farewell (2019) and has played diverse roles in movies, such as Ocean’s 8 (2018), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021). Awkwafina has been criticized for using Blaccent for years, especially in her 2012 parody rap song called “My Vag.” Her position as a double minority, being an Asian woman, makes her use of Blaccent an even more complicated issue as cultural appropriation is often defined as an exploitation of cultural elements of a minority group by members of a majority group. In this context, the Awkwafina case demonstrates challenges and difficulties in establishing inter-racial solidarity. After briefly introducing Awkwafina, I played several video clips of her songs and movies, and asked students to write an argumentative essay discussing if her use of Blaccent is cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation.

My students illustrated a variety of opinions over this controversial issue in their essays. Many students pointed out that using Blaccent is “not funny, but insulting and degrading, just like blackfishing” (Angel Wallace) or it is “stealing from the black community without proper recognition” (Alicia Clarke). Some students also shared their confusion that Black language was not always accepted during their upbringing or in their workplace. One student said that “during my time in the Navy, I was always reminded that the way I grew up speaking is not the right way in this world” (Dionte Richardson). More importantly, my students keenly pointed out the structural double standard in using Black language in society:

For most movies and shows, we are portrayed as loud, ghetto, low class, and ignorant people. Often in music we are seen as thugs and cold-hearted people that are more likely to die and not make it to the age of 25. Blaccent tends to get us in more trouble than any other ethnicity that uses it. We may lose our job and much more by just being us, while others who are not of African background gets raises, fame, and even popularity. [Awkwafina] made a career off of blaccenting in a way that is supposed to depict black women as “ratchet” or “sassy,” the characters built on stereotypes. People break us down by saying that we have “broken English” but profit off it. (Asia Parker)

Notably, like the above student, the majority of the students used the word “we” or “our” in explaining the problem of Blaccent. This demonstrates that they consider the issue a problem for their community and Black language as a cultural asset of the entire community. Other students who celebrated Blaccent as evidence for the enhanced influence of Black culture in society, also interpreted it as a recognition and awareness of the community. Student writings demonstrated their understanding of double standards regarding Black language in society and the harmful stereotypes of perpetuating African Americans as “loud, ghetto, low class, and ignorant” due to their usage of Black language. Therefore, their responses to Blaccent demonstrate their findings that language as a cultural apparatus reflects the prejudice of society and system, and it is not a simple individual choice to perform.

Next, I assigned an annotated bibliography assignment as preparation for their research and to develop their ideas further. I considered this process as an invitation to utilize academic language and provided the local and global context of K-pop and Black culture to my students. I assigned three articles,  Crystal S. Anderson’s “Hybrid Hallyu: The African American music tradition in K-pop” (2017), Elizabeth de Luna’s “They use our culture: The Black creatives and fans holding K-pop accountable” (2020), and Wonseok Lee and Grace Kao’s “Make it right: Why #BlackLivesMatter(s) to K-pop, BTS, and BTS ARMYs” (2021). In addition, students had the option to choose their own sources. These articles allowed my students to forge a dialogue in social, historical, and political studies on K-pop and articulate their research findings. Students critically engaged with the issues of cultural appropriation and racial insensitivity in K-pop (Luna), BTS’s involvement in the BLM movement and the role of the BTS fandom ARMY (Lee & Kao), and K-pop’s historic fascination with Black culture and music (Anderson). Through the process of building their annotated bibliographies, students shed light on the invisible connection between these seemingly unrelated cultures to develop their argument about interracial cultural exchange between Black and Asian.

For their final research essay, I encouraged my students to engage with K-pop critically and compassionately in a visual-narrative analysis assignment regarding the cross-cultural experience between Korean pop and Black culture. Specifically, I asked students to watch two K-pop music videos, BLACKPINK’s “How You Like That” (2020) and BTS’s “Dynamite” (2020), on YouTube and analyze the influence of Black cultural elements in the videos. Students were encouraged to explore the definition, social context, and global popularity of K-pop as well as the interrelationship between K-pop and Black culture in terms of imagery, lyrics, costume, symbol, rhythm, visual representations, and dance in their writings. After watching the music videos, students chose which group they wanted to analyze. After all of this, what did my students find? The research papers they wrote were really fascinating, given that more than half of them had never listened to K-pop before this class.

 

Case 1: BLACKPINK

BLACKPINK is one of the most popular K-pop female groups worldwide. Their popularity has been growing since their global debut album Square One in 2016, with songs such as “Whistle” and “Boombayah,” which helped them gain 65.5 million global followers on YouTube. “How You Like That” had more than one billion plays on YouTube, solidifying the song as an international megahit.

After watching and listening to “How You Like That,” students compared BLACKPINK to a diverse range of popular Black female artists, including Missy Elliott, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige, and Rihanna, especially in terms of the global female empowerment trend within the music industry. Many argued that this Korean girl group intentionally demonstrates an “ethnic hip” concept as their videos were often filled with stereotypes and appropriations of Black cultures. It was repeatedly pointed out that the group presents what is so-called “black girl attitude”:

If you look at BLACKPINK members’ clothing, it’s an eerie resemblance to black female artists. From the big fur jackets, miniskirts, and platform shoes you can definitely draw connections. The classic “pimp walk” made popular by black female artists, often called “a savage” or “a ratchet” can be seen in the video. In addition to the clothing, the colored wigs, weaves and extensions, bobs, slick back ponytails, “money pieces,” durags, and gold tooth caps with rhinestones, are all a part of Black culture. (Taylor Hampton)

Here the student carefully observed the visual representation of BLACKPINK and found their connection to Black culture, especially black female artists, problematic.

In addition, students pointed out the group’s adoption of Blaccent when they noted: “I've heard this song a couple of times on TikTok and I would’ve never guessed Koreans wrote this because I don’t hear any [Korean] accents, it just sounds more black language” (Tuamia Smith). Even though the song was mainly performed in Korean, it also includes a variety of English phrases as well as the chorus, which is seen in other K-pop songs that draw a global audience. Students read this linguistic hybridity as BLACKPINK members pronounced certain words like “that” as “dat” or used the phrase “you gone like dat.” Here students noticed the performativity of Blaccent as they noticed that the group used Blaccent in their music video performance while they used standard English in their official interviews. One student noted that “they didn't sound the way that they did when they were singing in English, even their tone was different during the song” (Ja’Quavis Woods). This code-switching was interpreted by my students as a way for the Korean group to gain more cultural capital to widen its audience and make their music seem more “authentic” and “real.”

Students not only compared BLACKPINK to Black female artists but discussed them in their knowledge and representation of Asian women. They argued that BLACKPINK does not reproduce conventional stereotypes of Asian women “seen as delicate, respectful and conservative” but “these young ladies stepped out of the usual stereotype” (Shaliyah Jackson). Students seemed to be interested in how young Asian women resist stereotypes of Asian women by culturally “mixing Black and Asian styles” (Jekiah Williams). Therefore, even though students wrote that BLACKPINK is heavily influenced by Black artists and hip hop, they also found the cultural elements of Korean tradition in the music video. For example, students pointed out that BLACKPINK wore booty shorts made with unique patterns and designs which they presumed were from traditional Korean clothing, even though some mistakenly called it a “kimono” (traditional Japanese garment) instead of “hanbok” (traditional Korean garment).

 

Case 2: BTS

BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondan) is a K-pop male group formed by Big Hit Entertainment in 2013. The group currently has seven members: RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook, who are all South Korean nationals. “Dynamite” was their first song recorded in English, which sold over 2 million units and remained at the top of many charts including Hot 100, the Global 200, and Billboard Global. BTS was also nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, making them the first K-pop group to receive one. As of December 31, 2022, “Dynamite” has over 1.6 billion views on YouTube. The Big Hit Entertainment CEO Bang Si-Hyuk once stated publicly that “Black music is the base” of the group.

The first point that appeared in many student essays was visual style. They noticed a white plain t-shirt, Timberland boots, oversized Wrangler jeans, and a small neck chain, which was the fashion style of 1990s–2000s hip-hop music videos. Students were intuitively able to read BTS’s notable cross-cultural adaptation of legendary black artist Michael Jackson, even though I did not intentionally reveal the fact that the video itself was paying tribute to Michael Jackson, as his nephew Taj Jackson praised BTS’ “Dynamite” music video on his twitter by saying that ‘The guys do MJ proud with plenty of his dance moves’” (Jackson, 2020). One student noted:

As the scenes change, more members are introduced to the scene, where I noticed a few familiar dance moves from Michael Jackson, such as dance moves in “The Kick” and “The Crotch Grab.” The first BTS member appeared in a room drank a glass of milk and wiped his mouth, which I believe was taken from Michael Jackson’s famous music video “Black and White” (1991). In the beginning scene, people would recall a young Macaulay Culkin playing the role of a son that was listening to music and his father thought it was obnoxious as he told him to turn it off. His famous adlib “hee” is also almost exactly replicated by BTS by changing the phrase to “hoo.” (Terrel Carey)

Students not only paid attention to the stylization or dance performance of BTS members but also addressed the cultural proxy of spaces in the music video. They point out that the music video used commonly known “Black hangout locations,” such as a basketball court, an ice cream shop, a record shop, and a disco as backgrounds. They were able to connect these particular spaces to the cultural history of African Americans because “record shops in the 90s and 80s were a big hangout place for Black Americans, while the donut shop looks similar to the popular Dale’s Donut shop in Compton, a predominantly Black area in California” (Eli-Jah Dyer). More specifically, students showed a strong analysis of the ethnic representation of disco and its historical importance for African Americans. Another student observed: “Given that disco evolved from black sounds in the late 70s, BTS were dancing in front of a disco sign with flared bottoms, wildly-patterned shirts tucked into bell-bottoms, and colorful scarves, which would be found on Soul Train, one of the first American music television [programs] promoting the culture of the African American and Black community in the 1970s” (Kristian Jewsome).

The most important critical moment of this assignment appeared when my students described their “dissatisfaction” or “satisfaction” with BTS’s representation of Black culture. These critical observations were not necessarily conveyed in academic language, but it was meaningful that students demonstrated critical analysis in their own language. In addition to their analysis capturing the influence of Black culture in K-pop, students pointed out how the gender representation of Asian men comes into play in BTS’s performance. For instance, in their first drafts, students expressed somewhat abstract discomfort toward BTS by saying that “their dance moves don’t look comfortable” (DeShawn Mackey Jr). Others noted that “It felt as if they were trying too hard to fit into their own music video” (Takayla Richmond), or “It was very corny, it seemed a bit forced” (Alicia Clarke). After peer-reviewing and sharing student first drafts, I encouraged students to articulate their impressions and explain the reason why they felt the way they felt.

As a group, we discussed where the dissatisfaction of “looking awkward” originated, and several students shared their ideas how BTS distinctively twisted their notion of masculinity. For instance, students stated that BTS members seemed to be “cute, happy and well-groomed males that wear pastel-colored clothing” (Brannon Furlow), “a very feminine image” (Aldasjah Plain), or “very open to physical touch with each other and use makeup and jewelry commonly used by women” (Catherine Richards). However, these comments on BTS’s Asian masculinity are not necessarily negative as students compared BTS to traditional stereotypes of Black masculinity. Rather, their evaluation of BTS’s adaptation of Black cultural elements were mostly positive: “BTS didn’t overly use Black American culture as they used bits and pieces of this culture to add spunk, excitement and expression to the song” (Reina Huguley). Students argued that BTS creatively interpreted and recreated black culture into their own because they “did not wear afro hair, gold teeth, chains, and tattoos” (Jekiah Williams) in their adaptation of disco culture.

When articulating dissatisfaction, students acutely observed the regulating model-minority aspect of BTS, often considered the selling strategy of K-pop in general by promoting positive, non-threatening, and wholesome images.[8] One student developed his idea of the spatialization in BTS’s “Dynamite” in comparison to the representation of a Black neighborhood in hip hop music videos in the revision. As aforementioned, “Dynamite” incorporates multiple sceneries of typical Black neighborhood spots from a street basketball court to a record shop, yet it dramatically changed the images:

The very first thing I noticed is that everything deemed negative or dark in the Black neighborhood (people roaming around or being strung out on drugs or selling drugs) is completely changed into a positive outlook in “Dynamite.” Throughout the video you would notice that the colors used are promoting more of a peaceful and bright environment. Nothing that shows that the area is poverty-stricken or any negativity that is pushed on the media about Black neighborhoods. (Dionte Robinson)

In lieu of writing an essay, some students chose to create a multimedia essay and created a video reinterpreting BTS’s use of a Black neighborhood. The project, “Reclaiming the Black Hood,” recreates “Dynamite” within spaces on our HBCU campus, such as a basketball court, student dormitory, and cafeteria, with students performing Michael Jackson’s iconic dance moves readopted by BTS. By doing so, the group project members contemplated the implication of a racialized space and performing certain stereotypes in their chosen movements, and how these choices garner different images and impressions depending on the gender, race, and age of the performer.

 

What Can Teaching K-pop at an HBCU Teach Us about Writing Afro-Asian Solidarity?

At the end of the semester, I asked my students one last question—the question we started with—whether interracial solidarity between Blacks and Asians is possible in their final reflection essay. Their responses made me appreciate my opportunity to teach K-pop at an HBCU, as many stated that the class was “a space to be informed, and educated, [to] grow our own opinions and build our own beliefs to [create] solidarity beyond our own racial and ethnic identities as we are living in 2022” (Arielly De Souza). If my class could encourage my skeptical EWU students—who have witnessed how society and the educational system constantly fail them—to reconsider the possibility of inter-racial solidarity even in the slightest sense, I take it as a small yet meaningful victory.  

That semester, my project of teaching K-pop at an HBCU composition course showed productive accomplishments as well as limitations. Although students offered a variety of creative ideas and sharp close-readings of K-pop and Black culture, they also revealed their prejudice and internalized stereotypes against Asians, especially since one semester is not enough to study specific local histories and cultural contexts. More importantly, it was still unclear at the end of the semester how we, including myself, transfer and develop our newly produced knowledge about Afro-Asian relations into Afro-Asian solidarity in our everyday lives. These limitations also remind me of bell hooks who wisely claims that we do not always need to “master” or “conquer” our narratives generated in a classroom. Sometimes fragmented ideas and messy thoughts may open up a space for more fruitful dialogues in the future as we just started to navigate the possibility of an HBCU as a place to generate new interracial discourses and global solidarities among minorities in 2023. In this sense, we, HBCU communities, must begin thinking through new interracial languages and methodologies to equip our students to better understand and handle our current situation of global racism and violence, and I found that teaching K-Pop in the writing course can begin this process. To initiate a dialogue among minorities, HBCUs should promote teaching and developing the curricular of composition courses that address diverse race relations in the U.S. and beyond. HBCUs provide institutional and epistemological advantages to interwoven marginalized voices without being regulated by the binary, white-dominated view on racial relationships. It is important for composition teachers at HBCUs to find, share, and develop assignments such as K-pop that could provoke interracial discourses and nuanced interpretations of interracial relationships among our students through their literacy skills. The development of a composition pedagogy and methodology can and will help to facilitate processes that will inevitably lead to a change within our society. 

Writing about K-pop at HBCUs can be used as a pedagogical tool to integrate critical race theory in a composition course to reflect on Afro-Asian solidarity. This project enabled my students to make hidden and unexpected connections between Asians and Blacks via K-pop as active knowledge producers who do not simply accept and repeat the existing representations of interracial relations of hatred and conflicts. It equipped them with a useful skillset to reimagine interracial relations and illustrated that writing Afro-Asian relations in a predominantly Black space is a powerful way to interrupt the mainstream view on solidarities among underrepresented groups. I also have to confess that I learned a lot from my students’ essays and conversations in classroom as an “outsider” at an HBCU. Throughout the semester, I felt like I gradually earned a meaningful membership to my HBCU community through conversations with my students. I hope this project ultimately demonstrates that the transdisciplinary nature of the pedagogy of ethnic studies and composition studies can nourish the creation of alternative imaginaries of interracial relationships at an HBCU.

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Hyo Kyung Woo is an assistant professor of English at East Texas A&M University. Her teaching and research interests include multiethnic literature, transpacific postcolonial studies, and Afro-Asian studies. She is interested in incorporating global cultures and space-based learning in her classroom, where she regularly teaches the topics of linguistic justice, translingualism, K-pop, and various literary forms. She recently published a chapter titled “Practicing Black Linguistic Justice at an HBCU in the Age of the Stop W.O.K.E. Act" in Civil Literacy: Practicing Civic Futures in K-12 Classrooms (2024).