Its snowing, and Its Raining

It’s snowing, and “It’s Raining” Its snowing here tonight, so when I got home I decided to curl up on the papasan and catch up on some reading. This weekend, I got so caught up in applications that I didnt read Sundays New York Times, usually my favorite read of the week. The front page article in the Arts section was about the Korean pop star Rain: At 23, Rain, who has been labeled the Korean Justin Timberlake and the Korean Usher, is a serious and driven performer (with washboard abs, winsome looks and a Gene Kelly-like ability to leap through puddles while performing his hit song, Its Raining). He wants nothing less than to break down barriers, build cultural bridges and become the first Asian pop star to succeed in America. A few paragraphs later, the author turns to none other than MIT Comparative Media Studies professor Henry Jenkins for reasons why the popularity of Rain has grown in the US: Inevitably, non-Asian-Americans are discovering such easily accessible foreign culture, too. Because of the multidirectional flow of cultural goods around the world, there is a new pop cosmopolitanism, according to Henry Jenkins, professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In an essay in Globalization (University of California Press, 2004), Professor Jenkins writes that younger Americans are distinguishing themselves from their parents culture through their consumption of Japanese anime and manga, Bollywood films and bhangra, and Hong Kong action movies. Previous Henry Jenkins appearances in this blog: On video games On Star Wars Harry Potter fandom On Bollywood