The Politics of Affect in Popular Imagination: On Biopolitics of Sewol Ferry Tragedy and Cultural Resilience through K-Pop Poiesis

This paper examines the rhetoric of the tragic Sewol ferry incident in 2014, and its cultural reception and popular imagination through K-pop culture. The sinking of the Sewol ferry with more than 300 casualties led to a viral socio-political response to the incompetence/absence of governmentality, reopening the notion of Foucauldian 'biopower' in South Korea. However, public mourning and remembrance through non-violent massive candlelight rallies and vigils in memory of the victims were suppressed by Park Geun Hye's government. Considering the political and social dispossession in dealing with the collective trauma of the Sewol incident, commemoration and collective political affect were transformed into a highly metaphorical popular cultural formation with symbolic representation in the K-pop scene as subtle and nuanced texts of critique and resistance. Through a close textual analysis of the K-Pop music videos such as F(x)'s "Red Light (2014)," Yoonsang's "If you want to console me (2014)," The Ark's "The Light (2015)," and Red Velvet's "One of These Nights (2016)," which deal with the Sewol ferry incident indirectly on the theme of the vulnerability of human life, the representation of mourning and resistance to the biopolitics of Park's regime, and mourning / remembrance through symbolic subtlety, this paper seeks to convey and map the political and affective layers of K-pop as a critical agency.