M E N T
is a magazine of Korean popular culture. We publish critical and creative work that engages with Korean media forms through a variety of cultural, social, and political perspectives.
Combining intellectual rigor with ardent feeling, MENT desires to bridge scholarly, fan, and public discourses. Our aim is to bring conversation on Korean media out of its often-siloed spaces and into the broader public sphere. We do so in recognition of Korean popular culture’s increasingly central role in (re)shaping personal narratives, communal formations, digital networks, and global media paradigms. Our publication is animated by the point of view that Korean popular culture offers insight into broader issues of gender, race, capital, labor, geopolitics, technology, and sociality.
Diversely resonant, Korean popular culture designates no settled object but names or calls into being emergent trajectories, narratives, communities, and affects. We seek contributions that capture this thematically and/or formally, through writing that merges critical rigor with public accessibility. We are interested in emerging voices, fresh takes, and experimental writing that playfully and productively cut across conventional genre boundaries. Diasporic and transnational perspectives are crucial to this ethos, and we especially invite adaptations and reimaginations of Korean media forms by diverse audiences in global contexts. We also welcome writings that engage with Korean media as a touchpoint for pop culture from other places.
To move between scholarly and public discourse, academic and fan audiences, is to challenge the disciplinary and genre boundaries that Korean popular culture itself has long since broken. MENT exists to bridge discursive worlds and cultivate new epistemological possibilities. In doing so, we hope to intervene in popular and political culture writ large through the formation of communities as yet undreamed of—communities activated around not only Korean cultural objects but also the various ways in which these objects can be loved or otherwise known.
MENT (“멘트”) refers to moments of informal address, a direct turn to an audience.
Originating from the English “comment” or “commentary” and adapted into Korean slang, “ment” captures the play between scripted and spontaneous speech. At the end of a K-pop concert, for instance, the ment is an opportunity for not just the idol’s rehearsed comments but also extemporaneous jokes, feelings, and conversation. It is a blank space in the concert schedule: a pause for reflection and, at times, deep emotion.
As an English loanword turned Korean slang turned global K-fandom reference, “ment” encodes communication mediated by translation and circulation. It is also a versatile suffix, calling up comment, statement, or argument, as well as more abstract ideas of experiment, movement, or simply moment.
We maintain these flexible associations as we invoke the mode of public address the ment allows. In its turn away from rigid or overly formal rhetorical modes, a ment embraces the possibilities of new or unanticipated lines of thought: the spontaneity of the ad-lib, the exciting potential of going off script. To do so responds to the extemporaneity of Korean culture as it moves across the globe in ways we do not always expect.