This monograph examines how post-millennial Korean crime films use Chinese-origin migrants as nostalgic figures to critique the social devastation wrought by Korea's neoliberal transformation following the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. Placing these films in their immediate socio-economic contexts, the book reveals how filmmakers figure foreign migrants as archaic doppelgängers of contemporary Koreans, embodiments of communal ties and social bonds eroded by economic precarity. It elucidates how Korean crime cinema engages with changing gender relations, racialization, xenophobia, and the erosion of community, while exploring the tensions between social critique and nostalgia. The book raises critical questions about the cinematic appropriation of foreign migrants' voices and decentres Korean ethnonationalism by probing the affective ambivalence inherent in such exoticizing, fetishizing cinematic practices, revealing how Koreans rely on a racialized, archaic Other to cope with the seismic social changes that followed the IMF bailout of 1997-2001. This book is intended for scholars and students of Korean and East Asian cinema, media and cultural studies, and those researching neoliberalism, migration, race, and precarity.
