Stanford University Press Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century (Post*45)

Review Vicious Circuits is a major contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between aesthetics and economics. Contemporary films of all kinds become denser with meaning and filled with surfaces that reflect back to the viewer the rapidly transforming financial world in which we find ourselves.--Min Hyoung Song "Boston College"Vicious Circuits is not just a book about contemporary Korean cinema. It's a fine execution of cultural studies in general that I'd want to assign to my students. Each chapter showcases Jeon's eye for detail, witty phrasing, and lucid synthesis of cutting edge scholarship in a variety of fields, from film theory to critical finance and transnational American studies.--Colleen Lye, University of California "Berkeley"[S]eamless transitions between personal and imperial, material and ideological, are what makes Jeon's critique truly dazzling; he has mastered the art of scalar leaps and dives....Vicious Circuitssucceeds in disclosing why a transnational perspective--not just regarding the selection of the films, but also with regard to the book's post-imperial optic--proves indispensable for film studies and cultural studies.--Chang-Min You "Los Angeles Review of Books"A bravura display of associative invention, developing new knowledge in a gymnastic and improvisational recombination of films and ideas whose secret relation was previously invisible. Like a movie, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon brings things to light in a series of brilliant images and insights.--Joshua Clover "University of California, Davis"As the US continues to face the unravelling of its neoliberal-imperialist agendas, the global film industry will, too, continue to reflect and instantiate the mutation of its hegemonic strategies. Vicious Circuits offers a crucial vantage on those mutations, neither privileging their appearance nor subordinating it to the aesthetic materials with which contemporary cinema conveys an unprecedentedly volatile moment of global integration.--Maria Bose "Critical Inquiry"Compellingly argued, especially through close readings of individual films...the volume asserts convincingly that IMF cinema reflects and demonstrates the underlying themes of the transition from a world economy centered in the US to one centered in Asia...Recommended.--K. J. Wetmore Jr., CHOICE Product Description Examining what it terms "Korea's IMF Cinema," the decade of film-making that following that country's worst-ever economic crisis, this book thinks through the transformations of global political economy attending the end of the American century. About the Author Joseph Jonghyun Jeon is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (2012).