What is the Pop Pacific?
The Pop Pacific describes a sphere of exchange in Asian popular music and culture that runs across the Pacific Ocean and within Asia itself, built over more than a century of contact across borders, empires, and diasporas.
This month's talk, jointly sponsored by the Philippine Geographical Society and the UP Department of Geography, is the 11th for the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026. Happening on Monday, 19 October 2026 at 1:00PM Philippine Standard Time (7:00PM Hawai'i Standard Time, 18 October), Dr Jayson Makoto Chun from the University of Hawai'i - West O'ahu will deliver a talk entitled The Pop Pacific: A transnational cultural sphere of the US, Japan, Korea and the Philippines. This talk follows one strand of the Pop Pacific's web: the transnational role of the United States, with popular music as the case study, moving from the Philippines to Japan to Korea, with a stop in China.
The United States played an outside role in this music's development, but local musicians localized it and spread their own versions across the region. After the Philippines became a US colony in 1898, Filipino musicians on cruise ships carried jazz through port cities across Asia. After World War II, US base clubs in Japan and Korea trained the musicians who built the talent-agency system still running J-pop and K-pop today. J-pop grew out of City Pop, a sound shaped by African American funk and soul, before becoming a genre of its own. K-pop developed in the 1990s and is now a major part of Asia's music scene. The Manila Sound turned homegrown Tagalog pop into a source of national pride in the 1970s, the same pattern P-pop acts like SB19 follow now. In China, Teresa Teng was banned on the mainland, yet her cassette tapes crossed over from Hong Kong anyway. No popular culture in Asia grew up alone but rather took shape in contact with others.
Jayson Makoto Chun is a professor at the University of Hawai'i–West O'ahu, specializing in Asian history. He is coeditor and writer for Pop Pacific (https://blog.iias.asia/pop-pacific), a blog on transnational popular culture hosted by the International Institute for Asian Studies. He is the author of "A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots"?: A Social History of Japanese Television, 1953-1973 (2006), along with several articles on J-pop and K-pop. He currently serves as guest editor for a special issue of Education About Asia on Asian popular culture.
The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly event that brings together geography-focused scholars, field and industry practitioners, communities and civil society to engage in a conversation about a broadly geographic topic based on research, pedagogy, field practice, and new innovations in geospatial technology. In its rebranded form, the Heo/Geo Lecture Series was carried out continuously since 2019, and facilitated by the various research clusters of the UP Department of Geography. This talk is presented by the Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research cluster, in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) of the United Nations.
To participate in the lecture, register to this link: https://tinyurl.com/2hjkbzd7
No comments:
Post a Comment