Concepts

Screen Capitalism names the systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, expand, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. It describes screen media not simply as cultural content or representation, but as infrastructures through which capital, affect, attention, industrial knowledge, and cultural forms move across borders.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture, and in “Rhizome in the Shadows: Transplantation of Korean Running Man in the Rise of Screen-capitalism,” Continuum 34 (2020): 73–87. DOI · Article

Amnyu names the persistence of Korean screen culture when its Korean origin is altered, localized, obscured, or disavowed. It describes how Korean audiovisual forms continue to operate after they no longer appear securely, or even visibly, as Korean.

Amnyu concerns an aesthetic and relational process as much as a political one. It tracks how audiovisual forms, affects, industrial practices, and modes of participation survive through mutation, collaboration, localization, and partial invisibility across national, linguistic, and platform boundaries.

It identifies neither hidden Korean influence nor Chinese imitation, but a process of co-constituted transnational reassembly in which origin survives as a shifting trace.

The concept also names durable industrial transformation beneath the visibility of formal cultural exchange, including personnel training, workflow standardization, production practices, and institutional reconfiguration.

Amnyu is therefore not simply a reaction to censorship or geopolitical restriction. The book ultimately argues that it is an ontological condition of Hallyu: an undercurrent that has always sustained Korean screen culture’s capacity to survive through mutation, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and reassembly.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture. Related article

Screen Capitalism and Amnyu are related but distinct concepts. Screen Capitalism names the systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, expand, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. Amnyu names the historical-cultural phenomenon produced through that process: the submerged and mutable persistence of Korean screen culture after visible national origin becomes unstable.

The conceptual move from Hallyu to Amnyu makes it possible to theorize cultural persistence without equating persistence with visible national branding.

Shamanic Audiovisualization theorizes how audiovisual media do more than represent alterity. It examines how media can mediate, channel, and make alterity perceptible as presence.

The concept asks what happens when media cease to function merely as representational surfaces and instead become sites through which different forms of presence, agency, and relationality are produced.

Tian Li, “Channeling Alterity: Toward a Theory of Shamanic Audiovisualization,” Theory, Culture & Society, OnlineFirst 2026. doi.org/10.1177/02632764261479605

Screen Justice examines how screens become sites of testimony, judgment, and justice when formal legal institutions fail, prove inadequate, or lose legitimacy.

The concept asks how cinema and television do more than represent law: how they can stage judgment, redistribute moral visibility, produce public testimony, and function as alternative sites of jurisprudence.

Developed in the second book project, The Spectral Screen: Media, Law, and the Historical Transformation of Screen Justice (book manuscript in progress), and in “Opening a Virtual Space before the Door of the Law,” positions: asia critique 32, no. 3 (2024). DOI · Article