Park, S. (2023, November 27). Playing with Blackness: A case study of a Congolese YouTuber in South Korea. The 2nd International Asian Stardom and Celebrity Conference, Bali, Indonesia
After creating wonderful memories at the 1st International Asian Stardom and Celebrity Conference in 2019, I eagerly joined the second conference, held at Tsinghua Southeast Asia Center Campus in Bali. This presentation focuses on the racial and ethnic humor employed by Jonathan, a Black YouTuber and TV personality in Korea.
The paper I presented here has been published as an article titled “Playing with Blackness: critical race humour and the shifting dynamics of Black identity in South Korean media” in the special issue.
Abstract
This study aims to investigate how Jonathan Thonoa Yiombi, a Black celebrity in South Korea, significantly influences and transforms the prevailing public perceptions of race in the country through his distinctive use of racial and ethnic humor on his YouTube channel. Having fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo with his family in 2008 at the age of eight, Jonathan entered Korea as a political refugee. He rapidly gained widespread attention in the Korean media after making an appearance in a reality television show in 2013. His exotic physical appearance, combined with his Korean way of talking and behaving, quickly propelled him to stardom and led to numerous appearances on various television shows. Although the presence of Black celebrities in Korean media is not unprecedented, their portrayals have been limited to serving as exotic foreigners showcasing Korea’s superficial multiculturalism, or as biracial African Koreans reminding Koreans of their troubled history of the US’s postwar occupation. In both instances, Black celebrities have been deprived of their voice, and their presence has solidified stereotypes of Black people rather than raising racial sensitivity in the Korean public. However, Jonathan’s YouTube channel, launched in 2018, presents a different approach. Employing ‘discursive racialization,’ an active form of incorporating Blackness into discussions about identity, Jonathan uses racial humor as a tool for engagement. First, his assassination jokes involve socially ‘killing’ the target by portraying them as a potential racist. By doing so, he unveils the prevailing colorblindness in Korea. His jokes compel Koreans to reconsider the weight of words and expressions that they may have never thought of in terms of racial issues. Secondly, he overtly utilizes race and ethnicity in his content. He consistently identifies himself as Black in various videos, comments on his dark skin, parodies Black-related popular content, and playfully exploits his visual exoticness. He freely employs and navigates different layers of his identity including race, (visualized) ethnicity, and nationality, and this serves both as a source of amusement and a moment of revelation for the Korean audience. Furthermore, he delves into the discourse of nurture versus nature. In one of his YouTube content series, he formed what he named the Korean Black People Association, challenging Black music to prove his lack of Black soul, and thus challenging a prevalent perception or stereotype that Black individuals possess a unique Black soul that other racial groups cannot replicate. Finally, he constructs a polycultural identity, by articulating his racial identity and Korea’s national discourse known as ‘gukmin.’ Despite the inherent risk that his humor may trivialize racial issues, his content emerges as a form of celebrity activism that broadens the concept and perception of racial diversity within Korean society. By examining the politics of (re)presentation of Asian Black celebrities, an area that has received less attention in research on Black celebrities, this study provides an understanding of Asian ethno-mediascapes.
SOJEONG PARK 