Imagining National Cuisine: Food, Media, and the Nation

Abstract

By reading food television as a cultural text, through which the nation is narrated and envisioned, this dissertation examines the evolution of Korean food television and its articulation of Koreanness in contemporary globalization. Theoretically, I suggests understanding the nation as a discourse or a regime of truth from the Foucauldian perspective. In order to bring Foucault’s relativistic notion of truth into play, this dissertation employs Fairclough’s three-dimensional approach for critical discourse analysis (CDA). Through this multi-dimensional approach, I aimed to conduct a thick description of Korean food television’s discursive practice with regard to national cuisine and the Korean nation. My historical analysis of food television shows that an increased awareness of cultural others enhances a struggle for nation-ness. By unveiling the “Janus-faced” characteristic of the nation, which is constructed both against and through differences, this dissertation identifies the inextricable relationship between the nation and globalization, and the hierarchical integration processes inherent in cultural hybridization. Moreover, this research project reveals how the nation-state actively appropriates the banality of food and is involved in the production practices of the television industry in order to produce and disseminate hegemonic discourses on the nation, and to keep nationhood near the surface of everyday life. Through an investigation of the interplay between television texts and social conditions, my dissertation also explicates the socially-constructed and the socially-constitutive nature of media discourse, and enriches the discussion regarding the production cultures of the global television industries.