Counter-Occupying Americanism in South Korea and Taiwan: Taking Back the Spaces of US Base Culture in the Cold War Musical Number

In the 1960s, an American form of live entertainment emerged on the local music scene in East Asia, due to both the cultural power of America and the actual presence of Americans on US military bases. Entertaining Americans became a significant industry in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, and the US presence expanded into spaces of entertainment such as bars, hotels, and dance clubs. This paper analyzes musical numbers in films from that era, discussing their representation of the entertain ment space and their fashioning of cinematic attraction as a mode of vernacularizing popular music. These films not only bring the experience of American base-adjacent entertainment into mass consciousness, but also stage their own counter-occupation of these spaces with charismatic performance.