“Spring Day”: Nostalgia, Pop Mediation, and Public Mourning

Abstract

Michelle Cho’s “‘Spring Day’: Nostalgia, Pop Mediation, and Public Mourning” is an analysis of the group’s 2016 single and music video “Spring Day” and fan-produced videos about the music video as an allegory for the 2014 Sewol ferry tragedy, in which a South Korean ferry capsized, killing more than 300 passengers, 250 of whom were high school sophomores on a field trip. In her chapter, Cho analyzes the music video’s intertexts, from literature (LeGuin), cinema (Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer), contemporary art (Christian Boltanski’s “Personnes”), and references to the leitmotif of yellow ribbons—the shared sign of Sewol victims’ memorialization. Cho details how Korean and international fans engage in a form of networked-yet-informal social justice work by contextualizing the local South Korean and global-systemic, geopolitical conditions that caused the disaster, demonstrating the song’s ability to enable collective grief and public mourning across a translocal fandom.