A Political Sound: K-Pop, French Rap, and the Postcolonial Interruption (1945-Present)

The research project brings a global dynamic to the notion of a ‘declining West’ through the study of global pop culture. It will do this by addressing the topic of deindustrialisation in two parts: First, it will complicate the concept of ‘deindustrialisation’, pulling it further back into the historical past and outside of its western-dominated geography. Second, it will challenge the notion that the West has been ‘in decline’ since the 1970s by demonstrating that socioeconomic decline within individual western states did not amount to a decline of the West overall; indeed, culturally, the period since the 1960s saw the burgeoning influence and triumphant ascent of Western popular culture on a global scale.

The collective decline of the West, I will argue, began relatively recently, and can be seen quite effectively in the turn to look East within global popular culture, and its political parallels. It will bring the literatures on deindustrialization, postcolonial studies, and popular culture studies into conversation to answer the following research question: Has the history of deindustrialisation really been a history of the decline of the West? Using French rap and Korean popular music as its principal archives, this project will argue that popular music in both France and South Korea had and have a ‘postcolonial’ voice, which has ‘interrupted’ the West’s global dominion in the Industrial Age.