We stand at an exciting time – at least for those of us who profess an interest in Korea, but perhaps, too, for those of us who want to see Western cultural domination challenged. Today, the Korean Wave that sputtered into life with exports of dramas and pop music to China and Taiwan in the late 1990s, has gone global. Its various components are television dramas, K-pop, film, games and nation branding, each of which has a story to tell. Psy's “Gangnam Style”, a song that has now been viewed two billion times on YouTube, has captured the world's imagination most famously. It will take time for academic publications to catch up with the virality of the Korean Wave, but Youna Kim's volume makes a very creditable start.

After a foreword by the University of California professor of Asian American studies, Elaine H. Kim, Youna Kim provides a long and detailed introduction. She first explores globalization, a concept that in the course of the book will return regularly. While globalization is framed by Appadurai and Featherstone, it is centred within Asia by Iwabuchi's “glocalization” and by an overdue critique of the “worlding” concept of Spivak. Kim details each type of Korean Wave medium in a section titled “Export of meaning”. Considerations of digital fan culture and the spaces of identity lead to her perspective on cosmopolitanism: urbanized and broadband-savvy Korea has absorbed Western culture but now exports its own cultural amalgams back to the world. Her discussion of K-pop points out that it is highly planned and targets audiences more deliberately than do television or film productions; it is “not just a random response to neoliberal globalization, but a systematically planned, monitored, manifestation of ‘entrepreneurial self’” (p. 8).

After Kim's introduction, the volume divides into three broad parts. In the first of these, three chapters consider the global context for Korean Wave. Joseph Nye and Youna Kim explore media in the production of soft power, and how “cool” cultural brands promote Korean exports from mobile phones and consumer electronics to cosmetics. Nye's dominant position as a theorist of soft power is not wasted, while Kim provides detail – one astonishing statistic is that 41 per cent of American Korean Wave fans were, in 2013, learning the Korean language (p. 36). Koichi Iwabuchi then extends his ongoing work on inter-Asian culture, discussing how mundane Western forms have become assimilated and signalling the likely limits of Korean Wave. A heavily theoretical contribution by Oliver Boyd-Barrett comes as chapter 3, arguing for an understanding of cultural production that both recognizes Korea as an emerging centre but views it within broader, hierarchical, international relationships.

The second part of the volume pushes strongly on the role of social networking sites in the distribution and impact of the Korean Wave, while simultaneously providing a set of case studies. Youna Kim first reviews her earlier research on how the Internet has allowed Korean Wave productions to generate an international following. Suk-Young Kim next takes us to North Korea, considering the infiltration of a South Korean drama that, ultimately, questions the socialist financial and political system, while Eun-Young Jung offers a diatribe against the gender stereotyping of Asian sexuality, focusing in on the failures of two female K-pop groups, Wonder Girls and Girls’ Generation, to conquer America. The negotiation of identity and power is the focus of Jung-Sun Park's discussion of how Korean American youths engage with the Korean Wave, while Asian diasporas in Austria provide the focus for a chapter by Sang-Yeon Sung. After Dal Yong Jin discusses films and online gaming, the real treasure of the volume comes with Liew Kai Khiun's consideration of K-pop cover dance in Singapore. Khiun finds in the recent diversification and cosmopolitanism of K-pop a model for the Internet age, in which the music videos favoured by satellite and cable broadcasters have been replaced by official and unofficial cover dance versions of songs. In this, “sound trackers” are replaced by “dance trackers”, as texts (lyrics) are replaced or subsumed by bodies (dance), the cognitive by the physical, narrative by choreography, tears by sweat, and so on.

The third part, entitled “Perspectives inside/outside”’ is, ultimately, less successful. What should be an excellent contribution by Hae-Kyung Lee presenting details of Korean cultural policy, and how policy has shifted from the domestic to the transnational, is rendered largely useless simply because everything is given in translation – there are no Korean terms or titles, making it almost impossible to track down the legislation, the publications, or the people. (In fact, throughout the volume, only the family name and a single initial are given for each Korean author, and this, given that some 16 million Kims and Paks are alive in South Korea today, does not allow for easy identification.) Next, the communication and media expertise of Kent Ono is coupled to the specific Korean research of Jungmin Kwon to map the use of YouTube and social media as the interlocutors of K-pop. The last two chapters, by Anandam Kavoori and Yudhishthir Raj Isar, have little to do with Korean Wave and should have been excised by Routledge's reviewers.

“Gangnam Style” reached YouTube at the end of July 2012, yet six of the chapters in The Korean Wave reference it. This is quite remarkable for a book published less than 18 months later. The volume, then, reports as events unfold, and the odd unevenness can be forgiven, not least since mature reflection will need to wait a few years. The Korean Wave renders the few earlier volumes that considered popular culture, including my own edited Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2006), largely obsolete. However, with something as fast evolving as Korean Wave, it is quite possible that this volume will also soon appear old-fashioned; there are, at the time of writing, a veritable mountain of texts in press or being prepared that will expand our knowledge of Korea's new and still novel gift to the world.