Culture travellers: Theorizing transculturing through transcultural fandom in the GenAI age

Abstract This paper develops transculturing as a new theoretical–analytical approach for understanding how culture is creatively, critically, and imaginatively enacted through linguistic and semiotic repertoires in specific communicative moments. Drawing on the concepts of small culture and moment analysis, transculturing frames culture in the micro-dynamics of social life and as shaped by the interplay of utopian (imaginative projection) and utilitarian (grounded productivity) orientations—termed transcultural imaginativity and transcultural productivity—in the making of cultural meaning. Fandom serves as a critical site for examining transculturing, given its innate capacity for production and connection across any sociocultural boundaries. This paper empirically focuses on the Korean Wave (Hallyu) fandom and analyses the creative reworkings of the Netflix series Squid Game in social media, attending to how fans recontextualize and reimagine the series in everyday life, through cultural stereotypes, low-budget grassroots creativity, queer world-building, and machine-mediated performance. Amid the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), transculturing emerges as a hopeful and humanistic practice, rooted in the neural–emotional–bodily–worldly capacities of human beings, that foregrounds creativity, criticality, and care in the entanglement of humans, communities, and machines.