Vincenzo Cichelli and Sylvie Octobre have recently published their last work in Culture and Empathy journal. We are sharing here the abstract of the article and you can access to the full-text as well.
What happens in terms of reception when new players become global cultural leaders within a few years, as it is the case with South Korea? While research has attempted to provide answers to this question using both quantitative and qualitative investigations on the reception of Hallyu in East Asia, Middle East or Americas and Europe, mainly discussing its “Koreanness” or hybrid nature, there are still very little research and publications in France on the topic. This is paradoxical as France is a choice ground for understanding how this cultural wave meets success in a country without a related diaspora nor prior cultural proximity with the country of production. This article aims to break ground the passion of young French people for the Hallyu, within the broader framework of an analysis of the contribution of the “consumption of difference” (Schroeder 2015) — i.e., the consumption of products of global cultural industries — to the formation of the self through the new figure of the “cosmopolitan amateur” (Cicchelli and Octobre 2018).

Therefore, we first look — with the help of 74 in-depth interviews with young people from the Île-de-France region (France) aged between 18 and 31 — at the cosmopolitan skills acquired through the consumption of Korean products, distant from the culture of the interviewees, and the empowerment they nurture. Then, we look at the uses of this empowerment to construct a biographical trajectory. Finally, we focus on K-pop and K-dramas, which are the most consumed Korean products in France and constitute Hallyu’s original core.
This alternative cultural globalization, which takes the form of a real challenge to the large Western cultural industry, particularly in the United States, constitutes a material of choice for understanding:
a) the cosmopolitan apprenticeships linked to the consumption of cultural goods, produced in a country with rare historical links and no cultural proximity with France audiences (this amateurship produces skills related to the consumption of Hallyu products, such as a knowledge of the landscapes, history, mores and urbanity, and language)
b) and how young people use these cosmopolitan resources to build their biographical trajectories (the empowerment through Hallyu).
Bibliography
Cicchelli, V. and Octobre, S. 2018, Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French Youth. A Taste of the World. London: Palgrave.
Schroeder, J. E. 2015. “Communicating Identity/Consuming Difference.” Consumption Markets & Culture 18(6): 485-489.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
grip (17 décembre 2020). Cosmopolitan empowerments and biographical trajectories among young french fans of Hallyu. Les carnets du GRIP. Consulté le 10 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/p7qc