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Call for Papers: Kayo Across Borders: Cultures and Histories of “Popular Song” in Korea
MLA 2027 Convention, Los Angeles, CA, 7-10 January 2027
This session invites proposals on popular song cultures in Korea from the 1970s to the present. It seeks to bring together papers that broaden the cultural histories or geographic boundaries through which Korean popular songs have been conceptualized and that address previously underexplored intersections between musical and other forms of cultural production and reception.
Situated in a turbulent era of marked by military dictatorship, radical student activism, and post-democratization social transformation, the term “popular song” (kayo) came to embody a far wider spectrum of forms than its English translation suggests—from objects of commodity culture to tools of government propaganda to performative media of collective political resistance. Popular songs both shaped and were shaped by a range of processes, such as lyrical and cultural adaptation of mainstream and subcultural genres in global circulation, collective performance and canonization of resistance poetry as protest song, and discursive construction of collective identity through the language of musical innovation. The session seeks to reposition such adaptational, discursive, transnational, and transmedial practices at the center of how popular song are understood and theorized. By doing so, it aims not only to broaden historical and intersectional understandings of popular song cultures in Korea, but also to think beyond the pre- and post-democratization divide across which popular song cultures have conventionally been historicized.
The session welcomes interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to the study of popular song cultures in Korea as well as scholarship from beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Korean studies, including but not limited to engagements in cultural studies, sound studies, literary studies, Cold War history, and ethnomusicology.
Please forward an abstract and CV to Ethan Waddell (etwa4020@colorado.edu) by March 20, 2026.
