ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intersections between musical style, ethics, and racial formation in transpacific Christianity. African–American gospel's localization in Korea is characterized by a delay between breath and encounter. When black gospel music migrates across the Pacific Basin, it is largely presented as audiovisual commodity disembodied from human originators. As such, black gospel practice in Korea not only intervenes into Christian musical aesthetics, but also raises ethical questions about the mobilization of sounds that originate from socially and geographically distant communities. Proposing that black gospel in Korea makes possible an articulation of re-historicized Christian musical ethics in creative, complex, and contradictory ways, I draw on history, media analysis, and ethnographic interviews to demonstrate how embodiment of black gospel aesthetics invites Korean Christians into an (albeit limited) allied project of religious decolonization. The translocal adaptation of black aesthetics across the Afro–Asian racial line engenders two main interventions. First, the shift in bodily technique required in black gospel performance helps Korean practitioners to articulate a modern Christian subjectivity that departs from the Euro–Western model. Secondly, black gospel destabilizes normative Korean Christian understandings of the postcolonial present. I conclude by addressing the aporias that continue to inform black gospel's localization in Korea.
