Michelle Cho, University of Toronto.

Retro trends in popular media are a common feature of contemporary cultures across the globe. Nowhere is the nostalgia for 20th century vibes more prominent than South Korea. This talk will discuss “new retro”(aka “newtro/뉴트로)” aesthetics in South Korea, focusing on the television drama Reply 1988 and the recent revival of City Pop on digital platforms like YouTube and Spotify. My presentation probes newtro’s multiple genealogies, to situate nostalgia-tinged portrayals of late ‘80s and ‘90s youth culture as Korean media’s self-reflexive portrayal of the impact of commercial popular media on the social transformations of the post-authoritarian period. Connecting newtro to the transmedia domains of City Pop and related genres of music and media production driven by digital distribution and platform engagement, I’ll argue that the aesthetics and sensoria of new retro illuminate the social impacts and ideological effects of contemporary parasocial engagement, to suggest that the trendiness of retro aesthetics today serves as a visible trace of global media entanglements of human and algorithmic agency.

Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Cultures and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her published work explores contemporary South Korean genre cinemas, Korean television, K-Pop's politicization on digital platforms, and histories of race and racialization in K-Pop and its fandoms. She is co-editor of two forthcoming volumes: Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea with Jesook Song (University of Michigan, April 2024, Perspectives on Contemporary Korea series) and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke UP, August 2024) and author of the forthcoming monograph Genre Worlds: Global Forms and Millennial South Korean Cinema (Duke UP, 2025). Her public-facing writing appears in such venues as The Los Angeles Review of Books, and she's a frequent commentator on Asian media in outlets ranging from NPR to the CBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post. She once hosted a public conversation between hallyu stars and BFFs Lee Jung Jae and Jung Woo Sung at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Introduced by Andrea Bachner, Comparative Literature, Cornell University. This event is part of the East Asia+ Initiative.

The lecture is followed by a reception.