Transnational Politics and Global Pop Cultures

On October 25, 2022, Rishi Sunak became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The British-born Hindu quickly garnered attention from Hindu nationalists within India and the diaspora. Beginning before this appointment was confirmed, Hindu nationalists took to social media to praise the lion of India who would right the wrongs done to India under British colonialism. I have analyzed hours of videos, social media posts, and other mass media productions by Hindu nationalists that laud Rishi Sunak as a secret operative for the movement. By tracing the origins of Hindu nationalism from its beginning to the present day, I explore how the Indian diaspora has played a role in the creation and proliferation of Hindu nationalism. This research is ongoing as new memes and posts are created daily, all this while Rishi Sunak has yet to address the Hindu nationalist claims leveraged against him.

Since 2018, fans around the globe have celebrated the Korean pop group BTS’s birthdays through local pop-up cafés. Through exclusive swag (특전) such as cup sleeves, photocards, and stickers, these fans share memories of the special BTS member, highlight meanings they found in their relationships with him, and form a welcoming community among other fans. Considering the global pop-up cafes as a global religious movement, this paper draws a parallel between this movement and past celebrations of another global celebrity: Jesus—particularly, the representation of Jesus as a white man. This paper examines how the global religious project of white Jesus in an early twentieth-century transpacific context grew into a global celebrity culture through collective acts of imagination. By circulating and interacting with the white Jesus figure, many Koreans imagined, revised, and reconstituted stories of Jesus into their own identity formation process—all while undergoing Japanese colonization.

In his lifetime, Mahatma Gandhi was a global icon that captivated international audiences. Among them was colonial Korea. In 1926, the president of the Dong-a Ilbo (East Asia Daily) in colonial Korea proclaimed Gandhi to be “not a stranger, but a beloved leader of our own.” This paper examines the popularity, multiplicity, and ambiguity of the imagined Gandhi in colonial Korea between 1920 and 1934. The cultural knowledge on Gandhi generated by colonial Korea’s mass media connected the faraway land of India to Korea’s own nationalist movement. I argue that what was at stake in the many (mis)representations of Gandhi is the relationship between religion and politics and the possibility/impossibility of decolonization as a religious, spiritual, and moral project. “How Gandhi was culturally represented” had a more real effect in colonial Korea’s religion and politics than “what Gandhi really was,” destabilizing how scholars conceptualize authenticity and religiosity.