Pop Empires: Transnational And Diasporic Flows Of India And Korea 0824880005, 9780824880002, 0824878019, 9780824878016

Table of contents :
Halftitle......Page 2
Seriestitle......Page 3
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Series Editor’s Preface......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Introduction......Page 14
Part I Queering Routes and Roots......Page 28
1 The Softening of Butches......Page 32
2 Between Screens and Bodies......Page 50
3 K-pop in Mexico......Page 68
4 Making the Past Present......Page 85
PART II Relocating Stardom......Page 102
5 The Politics and Promises of “Gangnam Style”......Page 110
6 Ranveer Singh’s “Chichorapan”......Page 134
7 Consolidating Bollywood......Page 151
8 Imitating Flower Boy Stars......Page 168
PART III (Not) Crossing Over......Page 184
9 Expanding Diasporic Identity through Bollywood Dance in London......Page 190
10 From Seoul to Cinemascapes......Page 208
11 Hallyu in Hollywood......Page 222
12 Sassy Girls......Page 240
PART IV Mediating Circuits and Markets......Page 258
13 Imagining Virtual Audiences......Page 262
14 How K-pop Went Global......Page 281
15 Toward a Global Community......Page 295
16 Thinking Outside the Canvas......Page 316
Bibliography......Page 334
Contributors......Page 348
Index......Page 352
Blank Page......Page 1

Citation preview

Pop Empires

ALLISON ALEXY Series Editor Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s–1970s Daisy Yan Du Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea Edited by S. Heijin Lee, Monika Mehta, and Robert Ji-Song Ku

Pop Empires Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea E D I T E D BY S . H E I J I N L E E , M O N I K A M E H TA , A N D R O B E RT J I -S O N G K U

U N I V E R S I T Y O F H AWA I ‘ I P R E S S   H O N O L U L U

© 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19   6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lee, S. Heijin, editor. | Mehta, Monika, editor. | Ku, Robert Ji-Song, editor. Title: Pop empires : transnational and diasporic flows of India and Korea / edited by S. Heijin Lee, Monika Mehta, and Robert Ji-Song Ku. Other titles: Asia pop! Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2019] | Series: Asia pop! | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019019303| ISBN 9780824878016 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780824880002 (pbk. ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures, Indic. | Motion pictures, Korean. | Motion picture industry—India—Mumbai. | Motion picture industry—Korea (South) | Culture in motion pictures. | Motion pictures and transnationalism. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.I8 P655 2019 | DDC 384/.80954792—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019303 Cover art by Soyeon Jung and Hans Gindlesberger. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Contents



Series Editor’s Preface  ix Acknowledgments xi



Introduction

Robert Ji-Song Ku, Monika Mehta, and S. Heijin Lee  1

Part I: Queering Routes and Roots 15   1

The Softening of Butches: The Adoption of Korean “Soft” Masculinity among Thai Toms Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyen  19

  2

Between Screens and Bodies: New Queer Performance in India Kareem Khubchandani  37

  3

K-pop in Mexico: Flash Mobs, Media Stunts, and the Momentum of Global Mutual Recognition Erica Vogel  55

  4 Making the Past Present: Intertextuality and Pastiche in Bollywood Neo-Noir Gohar Siddiqui  72

v

Part II: Relocating Stardom 89   5

The Politics and Promises of “Gangnam Style” S. Heijin Lee  97

  6 Ranveer Singh’s “Chichorapan”: Habitus, Masculinity, and Stardom Praseeda Gopinath  121   7

Consolidating Bollywood: Spectacularity without Stardom Akshaya Kumar  138

  8

Imitating Flower Boy Stars: K-pop Male Stars and Assembling New Female Masculinity in South Korea Layoung Shin  155

Part III: (Not) Crossing Over 171   9 Expanding Diasporic Identity through Bollywood Dance in London Kristen Rudisill  177 10

From Seoul to Cinemascapes: The Private Lives of Contemporary Cine-Tourism in (and out) of India Samhita Sunya  195

11

Hallyu in Hollywood: South Korean Actors in the United States Valerie Soe  209

12

Sassy Girls: A Transnational Reading of the Monstrous Girlfriend in South Korea, India, and the United States Jane Chi Hyun Park  227

Part IV: Mediating Circuits and Markets 245 13

vi

Imagining Virtual Audiences: Digital Distribution, Global Media, and Online Fandom Monika Mehta and Lisa Patti  249

C o ntents

14

How K-pop Went Global: Digitization and the Market-Making of Korean Entertainment Houses Solee I. Shin  268

15

Toward a Global Community: Dreaming High with K-pop Hae Joo Kim  282

16

Thinking Outside the Canvas: The Lost Art of Cinema Billboards in South Korea and India Roald Maliangkay  303 Bibliography 321 Contributors 335 Index 339

C O N T E N T S

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Series Editor’s Preface

It is my pleasure to write this preface for the second book, and the first edited volume, in the Asia Pop! series. This work perfectly manifests the series’ primary goal: exploring the impact and import of popular culture across myriad perspectives, academic disciplines, time periods, and cultural contexts. Such broad goals may seem overly ambitious for the entire series, but this single volume demonstrates the value and possibility of these interdisciplinary projects. Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea compares the extensive cultural industries located in two nations that are not typically linked in pop cultural analysis. Despite their shared history of colonialism, war, partition, and postcoloniality, India and Korea have not previously been put in such productive conversation as they are here. From Bollywood films to K-pop groups, pop cultural products created in these two nations rocket around the world, enticing enthusiasts in many different cultural contexts and creating something important to many different kinds of people. Popular because of the cultural codes they impart or the emotional and affective responses they command, these films, video games, songs, and television dramas find tremendous purchase among diverse audiences. The chapters of this book make clear how much we can learn by tracing global movements,

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situating pop culture in intersectional analysis, and decentering expectations that American pop culture lies at the heart of it all. In the vibrant chapters that follow, pop culture comes alive in surprising ways, as creators and consumers shade into each other. This engaging volume makes clear the tremendous benefits of interdisciplinary scholarship focused on popular culture.

x

S eries E dito r ’ s P reface

Acknowledgments

The spark that lit this book was the 2013 Hallyu America! The Global Flow of K-pop symposium hosted by the Center for Korean Studies and the program in Asian American studies at Binghamton University. It was during this symposium that Heijin, an invited speaker, and Robert, the program’s organizer, first tossed around the idea of a book. The spark became fire when Monika joined the team. Scholarly treatments of Hallyu and Bollywood as separate entities are extensive, but as far as we know, this is the first book to juxtapose them. We do not consider this to be the final say; rather, we see it as the beginning of a long, fruitful discussion. We first thank the contributors to this book for their brilliance. This book is every bit as much theirs as it is ours. We thank Stephanie Chun, our editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, for her steadfast belief in this project and seeing us through some rough patches. We also thank Masako Ikeda of the University of Hawai‘i Press for getting our relationship with the press started. We are grateful to Allison Alexy, the Asia Pop! series editor, and the anonymous readers of our manuscript for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. This book is undoubtedly a better book as a result. This book was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies 

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(AKS-2011-BAA-2013). Our thanks go out to Sungdai Cho, the director of Binghamton University’s Center for Korean Studies, for making this support available to us. Also providing invaluable support was Binghamton’s Department of English, the Harpur College dean’s office of Binghamton, and the dean’s office of New York University. Finally, the three of us would like to make the following individual acknowledgments. Heijin: First, I thank Robert and Monika for being such generous coeditors; working with you both has truly been a lesson in comradery, co-authorship, and collaboration. Thanks to the fellow Korean American scholars who make up the ASAK crew (Joe Jeon, Daniel Kim, Eun Joo Kim, Robert Ku, Jim Lee, Kimberly McKee, David Roh, and Mary Yu Danico), the diaspora has taken on new dimensions professionally and personally. Our yearly gatherings reignite the stakes (and soju) that fuel my work. All my love to Dean, Hyun, and Yuna who remind me daily, simply through their existence, of what is important. And of course, it is my parents, Myung Ho Lee and Song Za Lee, whom I can thank for bringing me home to Korea every other year as a child. This book, which grows out of that connection to home, is dedicated to them. Monika: I thank Lisa Patti who has been a wonderful collaborator for many years; I learned a great deal from her as we co-authored an essay for this edited collection. Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Praseeda Gopinath, and Anupama Kapse have been valuable interlocutors and fellow fans. I dedicate this book to Rajesh and Sahana, who have indulged my love for both K-dramas and Hindi films, sometimes watching them with me, and always listening as I narrated stories culled from both sources. Robert: In bringing the Korean peninsula and the Indian subcontinent together, this book in many ways is my ode to Harold and Kumar, who famously went to White Castle together back in 2004. I know I speak for many of my East Asian Americans friends (regardless of gender identification) when I say that we love our South Asian American brothers and sisters! Also, for the past several years, I have been immeasurably nourished both professionally and personally by what I call my core ASAK family: Joe Jeon, Daniel Kim, Eun Joo Kim, Heijin Lee, Jim Lee, Kimberly McKee, David Roh, and Mary Yu Danico. It is to them that I dedicate this book and extend not just one but two finger hearts! My love, now and always, goes to Nancy, Eliot, and Oliver.

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A ckn o w ledgments

Introduction Rober t Ji-Song Ku, Monika Meh ta , a n d S. H e i j i n L e e

The start of the twenty-first century has made more visible the challenges to the global circulation of US culture—a hegemonic phenomenon that has been in place for at least a century. Simply put, it has become abundantly clear that the American media apparatus is no longer the only player in the game, if it ever were to begin with. Other media regimes are now agents of “soft power” or “cultural imperialism” in various parts of the world that are economically, politically, and militarily vulnerable—and also in some parts that are not. Two of the challengers vying for the hearts, minds, bandwidths, and pocketbooks of the world’s consumer of culture—principally popular culture—are India and South Korea. To put it figuratively, Bollywood and Hallyu, the two focuses of this book, are increasingly competing with Hollywood, replacing it, or simply filling a void in places where it never held sway. In referring to Bollywood’s influence beyond geographic India, the novelist Aatish Taseer describes Bollywood films as “the cinema of the global South, a fun house mirror image of Hollywood.”1 Something similar can be said of entertainment products that emerge via Hallyu, aka the Korean Wave. In considering the transnational and diasporic flows of popular culture coming from India and Korea, this book attempts to complicate the easy assumption that these cultural products simply reflect, copy, or mimic US popular culture. The title we have chosen for this book, 1

Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea, stems from this objective. Of course, on many important levels, Hollywood remains a powerful global influence and trendsetter; it is perhaps more powerful today than ever before. As Crystal Anderson observes, “The presence of American culture can be seen in the content as well as the composition and marketing Hallyu-era Korean films.”2 Certainly, it is incontrovertible that both the entertainment hubs of India and Korea have adopted industrial, narrative, and aesthetic practices associated with Hollywood. We see this in the ways that corporate entertainment companies are structured, in the contracts that are drawn up, in the publicity campaign strategies, in the consumer culture promoted by stars, in the development of generic content, and in the exploitation of niche markets, to scratch just the surface. We do not deny or dispute this. Jung Bung Choi and Roald Maliangkay argue that the Korean culture industry, and K-pop in particular, cannot be contained within a theoretical model that limits it as cultural hybridity or mimicry. Rather, they characterize K-pop as “augmented entertainment” that takes into consideration pastiche of styles, languages, and forms, as well as its multiple business models and intersections with other regimes of industry and politics.3 In a similar vein, we hope to offer alternative perspectives and approaches—ones that highlight industrial practices and narrative forms that are shaped by particular local business practices and social conventions, as well as particular local consumer tastes and habits, prior to morphing into other forms with transnational or diasporic dimensions. To cite just one example, Korean entertainment agencies regularly scout for young talent; once identified and signed, they are scrupulously trained not only to sing, dance, and act, but also to participate as hosts and guests on a wide array of variety programing across the spectrum of media platforms, including television, stage, internet, and social media. Very few—if any—aspiring singers or actors hoping to make a living in the US entertainment industry undergo such a multipronged training regime. Once signed with a Korean agency, the trainees are said to become, in the parlance of the industry, members of the agency’s “family.” The executives and senior staff members are commonly referred to and treated as parental figures or older family relations whom the trainees are supposed to not only obey, but also are expected to respect, admire, and even “love.” Just as the bonds of family, kinship, and social hierarchies are critical to the narratives of countless Korean 2

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dramas, so are they crucial to the professional relationships within the agency, where the language of family and kinship are key to defining roles and expectations. Similarly, the rise of entertainment corporations in Bombay cinema has been accompanied by a rise in the role of star families and familyhelmed production houses. In fact, although a number of foreign and domestic corporations have recently closed their Bombay offices because they have been unable to recoup their investments in various film projects, the older, family-helmed production houses have enjoyed successes in generating box-office hits. With respect to narratives, Bombay cinema has reworked—if not revitalized—Hollywood’s familiar romantic drama formula, signaling a shift in the movies’ storytelling practices. In this new formula, the first half of films typically showcase metropolitan youth confidently striving to live out their neoliberal dreams and the second half moves toward confirming the value of family and marriage. And, just as important, the films retain the one ingredient that has always been crucial to Bollywood films—the song and dance sequences. At first glance, India and Korea appear to have little in common. Most conspicuously, the two countries are separated by thousands of miles. The gulf between the two is not merely geographic, however, but can be surmised, more significantly, as fundamentally cultural. They have no obvious architectural, musical, sartorial, or linguistic consanguinity or any other sort of interconnection. Or so it seems. Gastronomically speaking, the two countries appear to be entirely alien to one another— despite the preponderance of the New World capsicum in both cuisines. Or so it seems. Moreover, one would be hard pressed to identify any well-chronicled historical overlap that might necessitate the two nations becoming a topic of shared conversation. Again, so it seems. Globalization is often imagined as a relation between the so-called West and the so-called Rest. This construction has produced problematic binaries that homogenize both the West and non-West and reduced the geopolitical terrain to two adversarial entities. In placing Korea and India in direct relation to one another, we wish to underscore that these sorts of adversarial structures are neither apolitical nor natural. We also wish to expand the geopolitical discussion on culture—not only its contents and forms, but also the mutations and flows. Once the seemingly counterintuitive work of juxtaposing India with Korea is initiated, on closer inspection, it is abundantly clear that the two I ntro d u cti o n

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nations do in fact share numerous historical attributes that have been the defining features of the twentieth century. In sum, both are no strangers to the turmoil of colonialism, independence, war, partition, nationhood, postcoloniality, modernity, democracy, transnationalism, diaspora, and neoliberalism. Indeed, in this regard, the parallels are almost uncanny. In addition are the contemporary correspondences that undergird the pairing of India with Korea. Most important for the purposes of this book, this includes the production, dissemination, and consumption of popular culture, particularly within transnational and diasporic contexts. Specifically, these two places are simultaneously unique onto themselves and in juxtaposition of each other in both having actively decided to turn to popular culture as a major export industry. The shared aspects of their histories, therefore, are important because they shape the popular culture sensibilities produced in both places as well as the people who consume these affective products. It is our hope that this book, while revealing similarities between Bollywood and Hallyu, also illuminates the ways in which historical, cultural, social, and political parallels have not necessarily produced the same consequences or results. In US academe, India has been long relegated to the geographic category of South Asia and Korea to East Asia, even as both categories are institutionally subsumed under the general rubric of Asian studies. An important exception to this tendency has been Asian American studies, which has, as early as the 1980s, sought to include South Asian American concerns under its purview, to situate it alongside East Asian American and Southeast Asian American subject matters. Indeed, it was perhaps the inherent diasporic and transnational impulse of Asian American studies that has allowed for such pan-Asian possibilities. Today in Asian area studies there is growing but still too little attention paid to questions of globalism, transnationalism, and diaspora in most areas of the humanities and social sciences, including within the field’s multidisciplinary scope. We hope this book succeeds in helping lessen this deficit. That said, our objective is to contribute to and further the conceptualization of the field of Asian American studies, hence the juxtaposition of India and Korea vis-à-vis the United States. We hope to build on earlier scholarly collection of Asian American popular culture studies, most notably East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, edited by Shilpa Davé, Leilani Nishime, and Tasha G. Oren; Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, edited by Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy 4

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Linh Nguyen Tu; and, in particular, Global Asian American Popular Cultures, also edited by Davé, Nishime, and Oren.4 Moreover, for each of us coeditors, this book has not only intellectual and professional meanings but also personal ones—as both American scholars who happen to be Asian Americans and as cultural studies scholars who also happen to be fans of the subject matters we have taken on. The questions we highlight in this book, therefore, are those we believe are vital to the transnational, diasporic, and global turn that Asian American studies has taken in the past two decades. How do Bombay (or India) and Seoul (or Korea) act as pivotal nodes of popular culture regimes? In what ways are these locations important alternatives (to the United States) regimes of popular culture? In what ways do the popular culture products hinge on the transnational, global, and diasporic dimensions of the human experience? How do the two locations explicitly or implicitly critique or challenge the hegemony of US popular culture regime? In what ways must we also critique or challenge the hegemony of Indian and Korean popular culture regimes? How does the juxtaposition of Bollywood and Hallyu lead to new critical understandings about the power and pleasure of popular culture in an era of heightened transnationalism, globalism, and diaspora? And how does a critical engagement with the two alternative popular culture regimes change or advance the trajectory of the field of Asian American studies? In addressing these questions, this book finds inspiration in the words of Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, who write in Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field that their book “explores a model of ‘transpacific studies’ that can illuminate the traffic in peoples, cultures, capital, and ideas between ‘America’ and ‘Asia,’ ” as well as across the Pacific Ocean. What we find especially pertinent is their observation that from “alternate narratives comes the possibility of collaborations, alliances, and friendships between subjugated, minoritized, and marginalized peoples who might fashion a counterhegemony to the hegemony of the United States, China, Japan, and other regional powers.”5 With Pop Empires, we hope to highlight the alternative possibilities of India and Korea not only as simultaneous counterhegemonies but also as newly established regional powers. An important facet of the contemporary post-economic liberation of India has been the embracing of commercial cinema by the Indian state. Previously, the government generally distanced itself from the industry I ntro d u cti o n

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that produced popular cinema, instead investing money and other state resources to art or auteurist cinema. In the 1990s, the government began to recognize commercial cinema as an industry on par with other industries, such as agriculture. This recognition was critical to the current corporatization of the Indian entertainment industry. Similarly, in South Korea, the mode of popular culture production at times cannot be separated from the machination of the state. Since the 1960s, popular culture has been tightly monitored, censored, and controlled by the country’s military regimes. Whereas the democratic movements of the late 1980s began the palliation of state-sponsored cultural oversight, the late 1990s witnessed a different sort of relationship between the entertainment industry and the government. Beginning with and as a response to the International Monetary Fund crisis of the late 1990s, the South Korean government began to aggressively provide financial and other critical support to the business of entertainment, which, as in India, resulted in the increased corporatization of the film, music, and television industries. The parallels do not end there. The sixteen chapters of this book are perhaps the first concerted effort by a critical mass of scholars who work not only in South Asian studies and Korean studies, but also in Asian American studies, music studies, film studies, television studies, and cultural studies, among other academic arenas, not only to explore the innumerable parallels between Bollywood and Hallyu, but also to point to crucial and telling points of departure. Thus, this critical multidisciplinary anthology puts in relation the mediascapes of India (the site of Bollywood), South Korea (fountainhead of Hallyu), and the United States (home to Hollywood) to explore the transnational flows of technology, capital, and labor. Discourses on global popular culture have tended to center on US cultural hegemony. This book instead asks what sorts of political and economic shifts have occurred to make India and Korea important alternative nodes of technocultural production, consumption, and contestation. Yet global popular culture is more than mere entertainment. By adopting comparative perspectives and mobile methodologies, and by linking popular culture to the industries that produce them as well as the industries they support, this book connects films, music, television serials, stardom, and fandom to nation-building, diasporic identity formation, and transnational capital and labor. And, by considering Indian and Korean popular culture not only as synecdoche of national affiliation 6

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but also as discursive case studies, the contributors to this volume individually and collectively examine how popular culture intersects with race, gender, and empire in relation to the global movement of peoples, goods, and ideas. John Fiske argues that consumers make meaning out of popular culture in unexpected ways that cannot be predicted by the producers of it, particularly as national and cultural borders are traversed, disobeyed, and negotiated. For example, consumers often look beyond their national culture in search of fulfillment that they perceive their own cultural producers are either unable to provide or incapable of delivering. Fiske notes, for example, that 1950s British working-class youth identified more with American popular culture than British at that time because it better reflected their burgeoning class sensibilities. Likewise, 1980s Australian aboriginal youth, rather than identifying with Australian mainstream popular culture, instead connected with African American hiphop culture because they found in it a more relatable oppositional politics.6 As Fiske asserts, “A national culture, and the sense of national identity which many believe it can produce, which is constructed by the cultural industries or by politicians or cultural lobbyists, may not coincide with the social alliances that are felt to be most productive by subordinate groups within the nation.” 7 In other words, when people perceive that their national culture lacks what they are in search of, they often look elsewhere for popular cultural forms that matter to them. Although each has some ways to go to compete with consumers of Hollywood products, the fandom of both Indian and Korean popular culture has become increasingly heterogeneous. In the United States, for example, K-pop fans come from all walks of life, as the legions of devotees who attend the annual KCON music festival attest. What started out as a local southern Californian event in 2012, KCON is now also staged annually in both the New York City area and Japan. Expansion to Abu Dhabi and Paris is in the offing. One of the questions raised by KCON’s global spread is, why K-pop? The same question can be posed when we consider the global spread of Bombay films to such disparate places as the United States, Canada, Mauritius, Dubai, South Africa, Russia, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia?8 Why Bollywood? In early twentieth century, the radio became the primary vehicle through which popular culture sparked the creation of new meanings I ntro d u cti o n

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across and beyond national and cultural borders. The midcentury arrival of television expanded this process. Today, the digital realm has exploded it. It is with this most recent technological stage of popular culture’s place in the world that this volume hopes to critically engage. On one level, Indian and Korean popular cultures are themselves expressions of national cultures. What this book hopes to do is question how these cultural forms travel and translate beyond the nations from which they emerge. In other words, what meanings arise from these national cultures as they globetrot? To what extent do Indian and Korean entertainment regimes borrow from and code switch not only with Hollywood forms but, perhaps more important, from one another? And how do these activities reference the respective nations’ colonial pasts, postcolonial presents, and neoliberal futures? For the three coeditors of this book, questions surrounding Bollywood and Hallyu are as personal as they are professional. Yes, we (Heijin, Monika, and Robert) have been engaged with these subjects as scholars. Just as important, however, is the undeniable reality that all three of us are avid fans of contemporary Indian and Korean popular culture. No doubt to study a subject matter is not necessarily the same as to enjoy it, but what we find especially compelling is what a direct engagement with their simultaneity might entail. In this regard, for us, the notion of fandom is inseparable from professional engagement of the subject. That is, this book is our attempt to make sense of the lived reality that we are not only scholars and pedagogically engaged teachers, but also fans who find pleasure in being avid consumers of contemporary Indian and Korean popular culture. For Monika, watching Bombay films with her family, friends, and neighbors while growing up in Delhi left an indelible impression. Her continual attachment to these films has as much to do with the venues where she watched them as with the people she watches them with. Her fondest memories are of hearing or yelling “Batti aa gayi, batti aa gayi!” (The light has come back, the light has come back!), which would spark an immediate emptying of children playing on the streets; they would dash up the stairs into her home where everyone would gather to watch the eagerly awaited precious films screened only on Sundays on the national television station, Doordarshan. There were also regular trips to Connaught Place where at Plaza, Odeon, or Regal, she watched the latest films alongside passionate audiences who would unabashedly cry, 8

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laugh, sing, and talk back to the characters on the screen. For Monika, these films, along with the venues and audiences, would prove to become early lessons in emotional and social grammar—a how-to guide, so to speak, on love, sacrifice, justice, pain, anger, and responsibility. These films shaped the expectations she still has for the cinematic medium as a film scholar. The thrill, pleasure, and intellectual curiosity she derives from films today are directly tied to those early Delhi days of sharing Bombay films with her family, friends, and neighbors. While on her sabbatical in 2013, Monika had finished watching the meager selection of Bollywood films on Netflix when a friend recommended that she give Korean dramas a look. It took only a few episodes for her to be struck by how similar the emotional syntax of K-dramas was to that of Bombay films. She immediately intuited that something was uncanny about the ways in which the characters and plotlines of K-dramas and Indian films overlapped, especially when they involved social, kinship, and romantic interplay. One thing she noticed was the ever-present and conspicuous music in K-dramas. While the music of K-dramas and Bollywood films was qualitatively different, they were similar in terms of the role it played in propelling the storylines forward. In both instances, music was essential to the stitching together of the characters’ narrative emotions. This is when Monika began the habit—which she still has—of translating in her mind the English subtitles of K-dramas to Hindi-Urdu. Quite frequently, she found herself thinking that the English subtitles that accompanied a particular scene sounded awkward, old-fashioned, or simply ill fitting. This was especially true of scenes involving deep feelings of loss, betrayal, or affection among, say, family members or between erstwhile lovers. Monika guessed that viewers who understood Korean did not find these scenes to be awkward; instead, the emotional dissonance was a function of the words being rendered into English. Thus, when she began retranslating the English subtitles to HindiUrdu, the awkwardness vanished. In other words, even with the two degrees (if not more) of linguistic separation, the emotionally charged scenes of Korean characters and the Hindi-Urdu words that corresponded with them appeared to fit. And it made sense—not only on an emotional level but also structurally. By channeling K-dramas through Hindi-Urdu, Monika saw how the narrative contexts of both K-dramas and Bollywood films hinged on the resolutions of social structures that I ntro d u cti o n

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existed within the interpersonal or intersocial relationships that appeared on the respective screens. Like Monika, Heijin’s introduction to, and perhaps fondest memories of, Korean popular culture was through family, although instead of films, it involved television serial dramas produced in Korea—aka K-drama. In the 1980s and 1990s, K-dramas were one of the primary, and most pleasurable, ways in which her family, like other diasporic Koreans, stayed connected to and kept up with Korea. She remembers sitting with her parents on Friday evenings to watch whichever drama or variety show aired on the single Korean channel that was available to them on cable television. Later, when she could drive, she would run errands to the nearest Korean grocery store, which stocked not only jars of kimchi and other essential Korean kitchen staples, but also shelf after shelf of VHS cassette tapes with Korean programming. She would bring home the latest dramas in stacks of ten or fifteen (twenty always seemed just a little too indulgent) VHS tapes (at a dollar a pop) in black plastic bags. The effortless and almost immediate ways in which we access digitalized cultural products today over the internet leaves little or no trace of the emotional affect of viewership. Back then, however, the bulky VHS tapes and flimsy plastic bags were tactile and concrete evidence of her family’s hunger for some sort of connectedness to Korea. They were material affirmation of her family’s addiction to the binge watching of K-dramas and an indisputable reminder of the countless hours that they would spend getting caught up on a particularly popular drama that had only days ago aired in Korea. Despite the temporal delay and spatial distance, thanks to the ritual of VHS K-drama rentals, Heijin’s family stayed connected to family and friends in Korea; and, perhaps more important, they shared in the experience of being a part of the Korean diaspora, of what it means to be Korean in the United States. In particular, Heijin remembers being riveted by Moraesigye (Sandglass or Hourglass), a twenty-four-episode drama that chronicled the political, social, and class conflicts of South Korea during the turbulent decades of the 1970s and 1980s. The story, of course, was told through the equally turbulent love triangle of the three protagonists—because, after all, what would K-dramas be without love triangles? Having attended American public school her entire life, this was Heijin’s first real exposure to modern Korean history; it was also the first time she was able to contextualize—that is to say, make sense of—her parents’ migration 10

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to the United States. Moraesigye was the catalyst for the slow process of making sense of her own diasporic experience in the United States vis-à-vis the history of Korea’s political upheavals and cultural transformations. Because of the VHS tapes of Moraesigye, the sentiments that Korean American community leaders expressed following the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrests, which Korean Americans call Sa-i-gu (literally four-two-nine, or April 29), became clear to Heijin. She now understood that Sa-i-gu, which took place not far from her Southern California home, belonged to the long-standing legacy of not only the American but also the Korean struggles for social, political, and economic justice, such as the Gwanju Uprising that was movingly, tragically, and graphically depicted in Moraesigye. Just as noteworthy, though, are more recent moments when Heijin’s fandom transitioned from something she shared with her family to something she shares with her students. One occurred not long ago when the student council of the residence hall where Heijin is a faculty fellow asked her to cosponsor a movie night. Among other duties, the council organized events that might pique the interest of the student residents, make them feel less homesick, and help foster a sense of community for students who for the first time were living far from their families. The film they chose was Queen, a 2014 Bombay comedy; with it, they served Indian food. Although the students were a diverse group, most had little familiarity with India, Indian films, or Indian food. However, several students were of South Asian background and some even donned saris for the event. While sitting with these students watching Queen, Heijin could not help but think back wistfully to the days when she shuttled back and forth to the Korean grocery store with bags full of VHS tapes in an effort to satiate her thirst for some sort of Koreanness. But she immediate awoke from this reverie when a student rose and lamented aloud about not being able to watch the end of the film. “Don’t worry,” one of the organizers replied, “you can watch this on Netflix anytime.” Korean dramas were introduced to her by way of family, but Heijin credits her students with keying her into the world of Bollywood films. Compelled by the film, Heijin looked into the background of Queen and was surprised to discover that the film had its world premiere in Korea, of all places, at the prestigious Busan Film Festival. In its twenty years of operation, the Busan Film Festival has not only come to showcase I ntro d u cti o n

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Asia’s cinematic talent but also and increasingly become the site where such talent is launched to a global audience. Since debuting at the Busan Film Festival, Queen went on to gross more than $16 million and earn several international film awards before ending up on Netflix, where it has joined the slew of K-dramas that Monika found herself binge watching during her sabbatical. As a result of today’s digital age, both Bollywood films and K-dramas, having undergone a similar zigzag route of national production, transnational flow, and diasporic settlement, are now easily accessible to both American college students and professors alike. Hooray for Bollywood! Hallyuwood! For Robert as well, family laid the foundation for his current interest— or obsession, rather—for all things Hallyu. His earliest, fondest memories involve singing, clapping, and dancing to popular Korean songs of the late 1960s and early 1970s with various family members, especially his mother and her sisters. This was when he was six or seven, a couple of years before his family emigrated to Hawai‘i in 1973. It was not until decades later, when he took on a scholarly interest in Korean popular culture, that he discovered that the up-tempo and ebullient sound that he was first exposed to was “trot” (teuroteu in the Korean vernacular), the dominant style of popular music in Korea for generations until the rise of K-pop. Not all trot is cheerful and dance-inducing, of course. His mother’s favorite singer, Lee Mi-ja, who is among the most revered trot singers of all time, is best remembered for her melancholy songs about loss, pain, and longing. Although she was known as the Queen of Elegy, it would not be unreasonable to call her the Billie Holiday of Korea. Among the most indelible image that Robert has of his mother during his childhood is of her quietly singing Lee Mi-ja songs to herself under her breath while doing housework. And again, it was not until decades later when Robert was researching K-pop that he accidentally came across on YouTube a hauntingly beautiful song that stopped him in his tracks. Although he had not heard it for some forty years, he instinctively knew it was one of Lee Mi-ja’s songs that his mother often sang to herself. The song was “Dongbaek agassi” (Miss Camellia), written by Lee Yeong-Ho and recorded by Lee Mi-ja in 1964, which just happens to be the year Robert was born. Besides being notable for being one of Lee Mi-ja’s earliest and biggest hits, the song is significant in Korean popular music history because it is representative of the cultural repression of the Park Chung-hee era. Accused of sounding too 12

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much like Japanese enka, the song was banned from the public airwaves for twenty years. But during the period in which it was banned, thousands of miles away in Hawai‘i, Robert was able to listen to the song from his mother’s lips while she cooked his dinner. Until Robert left for college to California, dinner at home usually meant Korean food. Having to juggle two jobs while looking after her three children and her husband, his mother prepared food that was principally meant to fill the family’s stomachs, not delight their taste buds. It also had to be cheap, fast, and simple to rustle up. If the food turned out to be tasty, well, that was a bonus. One such menu item that fulfilled all these conditions—filling, cheap, simple, fast, and tasty— was kare. Among everything his mother made, this was hands down Robert’s favorite dish. As with trot music, it was not until years later that he realized the deeper meaning of something from his childhood: kare was curry! Robert’s introduction to curry was not until the early 1990s when he lived in New York City and some friends took him to Jackson Heights, Queens, to a place called Jackson Diner, which was not a diner, as the term is understood in New York, but an Indian restaurant. If Robert had to pick a moment in his life that was the primal scene that would eventually lead him to abandon literary studies midstream into his academic career and pursue food studies, this was it. This was where he first tasted vindaloo, aloo gobi, sag paneer, and malai kofta. He understood this was curry but what he did not understand until some years later was why it was called curry and what this curry had to do with the kare that his mother made. How did the vast repertoire of tastes, flavors, textures, and other culinary constituents of the Indian subcontinent get reduced to a single word spelled C-U-R-R-Y? How did kare become a staple Korean food, popular in homes across the Korean diaspora? In other words, what are the dots that connect Indian curry to Korean kare and is it possible that similar or same dots connect India to Korea? It is Robert’s hope that this book, though not explicitly about food, will prove to be not only good to “eat,” but also good to “think” in this regard. This book is divided into four parts: “Queering Routes and Roots,” “Relocating Stardom,” “(Not) Crossing Over,” and “Mediating Circuits and Markets.” Each part contains four chapters that explore in one way or another the transnational, global, and diasporic dimension of Indian I ntro d u cti o n

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and Korean popular culture within a broadly defined theme. Each part begins with a brief introduction. The decision that led us to organize this book into these particular themes (out of potentially limitless number of others) is simple: these are the four principle ideas that we collectively hoped to present in the book. We are therefore elated that the sixteen contributors made it possible for us to make this hope a reality. N OTE S 1. Aastish Taseer, “Why Do I Love Bollywood?” New York Times, August 24, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/opinion/why-do-i-love-bollywood.html. 2. Crystal S. Anderson, “HallyU.S.A: America’s Impact on the Korean Wave,” in The Global Impact of South Korean Popular Culture, edited by Valentina Marinescu (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 128. 3. JungBong Choi and Roald Maliangkay, “Introduction: Why Fandom Matters to the International Rise of K-pop,” in K-pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry, edited by JungBong Choi and Roald Maliangkay, (New York: Routledge, 2015), 4–5. 4. Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha G. Oren, eds., East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, eds., Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha G. Oren, eds., Global Asian American Popular Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 5. Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 2, 3. 6. John Fiske, “The Popular Economy,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed., edited by John Storey (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2006), 537–553. 7. Ibid., 547. 8. Rajesh K. Pillania, “The Globalization of Indian Hindi Movie Industry,” Management 3, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 115–123.

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PART I

Queering Routes and Roots

At the time of writing, South Korea is being lauded for how it “does democracy,” having just recently elected—in the stead of impeached and now imprisoned former President Park Geun-Hye—Moon Jae-in, the first liberal president to be elected in a decade.1 Despite Moon’s history as a human rights lawyer and his liberal policy views, which include rapprochement with North Korea as well as promises to create jobs and reduce long working hours, he has taken a decidedly conservative stance on LGBTQ issues, declaring in a public debate that he is opposed to not only gay marriage but also homosexuality as a whole. LGBTQ activists have long pointed out that progressive politics does not necessarily mean protection for all and, as this contradiction suggests, containing queer politics and subjectivities has historically been salient to both capturing and branding the nation-state. Yet, queer subjectivities cannot be contained by political rhetoric. Despite the South Korean state’s best efforts to distance itself from its LGBTQ communities, K-pop—one of its main cultural symbols—and its idols, aesthetics, and movements, has ironically become synonymous in some countries with LGBTQ identities and cultural practices. In this way, we see pop culture as, following Jack Halberstam’s formulation, a form of “knowledge from below.” Halberstam explains that such knowledges are what Foucault calls “subjugated knowledge” and as such, 15

have been “disqualified, rendered nonsensical or nonconceptual.”2 As Halberstam so cogently suggests, the popular is too often dismissed as frivolous. Theodore Adorno famously goes a step further to argue that it is “anti-enlightenment” insofar as it encourages conformity and discourages critical thinking, making it, in his view, the ultimate antithesis to democracy.3 We instead view pop culture as a site rife with possibilities and alternatives to hegemonic norms and disciplinary gestures. In other words, pop culture has the potential to provide the space for new ways of being, thinking, and acting. Accordingly, we highlight the alternative and unforeseen possibilities that are opened up by Bollywood’s and Hallyu’s global circuits. By exploring the queer routes pop culture travels as well as the ways in which pop culture’s roots get queered in the process, the contributors here illuminate how Bollywood’s and Hallyu’s—the “other” pop empires—routes and roots provide not only alternatives to US or Western formations of pop culture but in so doing, constitute the social, cultural, and creative landscapes for the cultivation of alternative sexualities, subjectivities, power and production relations and global genres. As James Clifford points out, the routes of culture create “cultural action, the making and remaking of identities,” which takes place in the “contact zones along the policed and transgressive intercultural frontiers of nations, peoples, locales.”4 Indeed, by considering how Korean idols become role models for Thai “tomboys” (known as toms), Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyen shows how K-pop catalyzes “cultural action” and “the making and remaking of” LGBTQ identities. Kang posits that modeling idol corporeal styles and mannerisms generates new gender and queer possibilities as well as social norms in Thailand. The results of Kang’s fieldwork in Thailand underscore his assertion that the global is not simply a field structured by and around the West vs. Rest binary; instead, as evidenced by the interplay between J-pop and K-pop vis-avis Thai Toms, alternative global flows require consideration. Similarly, Kareem Khubchandani tracks emerging queer performances led by a white-collar class. Although these performances draw on Bombay cinema’s song and dance sequences, they disrupt the gendered, heterosexual norms associated with them. Moreover, the semi-professional nature of these performances interrogates the requirements of pedigree and lineage while abetting the rise of experts and specialists in an increasingly neoliberal Indian economy. Like Kang, Khubchandani shows 16

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that queer cultures and communities do not simply mirror a homogenous, global gay culture. Instead, they are produced by and at the same time are themselves reproducers of local cultures, identities, and spaces. Although the local and the global are often cast as binaries, Kang and Khubchandani illustrate that sites of culture are negotiated and contested in both local and global exchanges. Because we take an intersectional approach to this book, essays that highlight sexuality as an analytic are not cordoned off in one section but instead appear throughout to showcase how sexuality intersects with multiple themes and other analytics. In this way, we invoke queerness in terms of both sexuality and the unexpected reformulation of norms, hierarchies, and possibilities. That is, this book takes seriously how the act of queering takes place on multiple registers that revamp, reinterpret, or reevaluate common sense logics. For example, Erica Vogel illustrates how fans actively queer K-pop in their local contexts through their affective labor. Rather than treating fandom as a trivial matter, Vogel shows how Mexican fans exceed their status and embody their desires to be global producers as well as consumers through their fan clubs, flash mobs, cover dances, and dance competitions. Ultimately, Vogel argues that these acts of devotion should be understood as creative acts of global social change that are not simply mimicry or imitation but rather, serve to queer the original. Similarly, Gohar Siddiqui shows how Bombay films deftly employ local and global conventions in ways that generate new genres and conventions altogether. Siddiqui offers a close textual analysis of Johnny Gaddaar, showing how the film director Sriram Raghavan pays homage to both Hollywood and Bollywood. In asserting local sensibilities that have transnational appeal, the film is an exemplar of Bombay cinema’s “distinctive contribution” to the “global neo-noir.” That the remake rights of Johnny Gaddaar were purchased by Automatic Media, a Los Angeles– based company, testifies to the ways in which the local gets revamped and reimagined such that neo-noir is now a genre with transnational marketability. N OTE S 1. Ishaan Tharoor, “South Korea Just Showed the World How to Do Democracy,” Washington Post, May 10, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/ wp/2017/05/10/south-korea-just-showed-the-world-how-to-do-democracy.

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2. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 11. 3. Theodor W. Adorno and Anson G. Rabinbach, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” New German Critique, no. 6 (1975): 18. 4. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7.

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1

The Softening of Butches The Adoption of Korean “Soft” Masculinity among Thai Toms Dredge Byu n g ’ c h u Ka n g - Ng u ye n

I’m riding the BTS Skytrain with my gay friend Beer.1 He looks across the way and finds someone especially attractive. “Do you think that is a guy or a girl? S/he is so cute, but I can’t tell. I don’t know if I can hit on her/him?”2 Because I am a foreigner with little shame and like to play matchmaker, I do what most Thais would rarely do, I go and ask. I come back and report: “S/he’s a tom.” Beer is no longer interested. Later in the evening, Beer and I meet up with my gay daughters at Fake Club, a popular gay bar in the Ortorkor area of Bangkok, where, like other gay bars in Bangkok, the majority of music played is neither Western nor Thai, but Korean.3 A tom named Pop approaches me and asks for my phone number. In bar environments, it is quite common for gay men to send a woman to make such a request, to make it less threatening and soften potential rejection. So, I ask who it’s for. She says for her. A bit confused, I reply, “I’m a man.” She says, “I know.”4 I give her my phone number, we chat for a bit, and then we dance with each other throughout the evening whenever she visits my table. Since the late 1990s, Thai aesthetics have taken a decidedly eastwardlooking turn. The intensification of inter-Asian media flows, where Thailand is more often the recipient than originator, has created new aesthetic standards for hair, cosmetics, clothing, surgery, and other selfenhancements. Some desirable features, such as white skin or big eyes, are often misread by Westerners as a desire to look Caucasian. I argue 19

that they instead represent a desire to look “white Asian” (Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and others), a new racialization of Asianness associated with light skin, economic development, and modern lifestyles, but also conceptualized as physically and culturally similar to Thais.5 White Asians have thus become the exemplars of beauty for Thai middle-class people of various gender presentations. Young queer people are on the vanguard of this trend in following East Asian popular culture, most notably the recent adoration of K-pop idols and drama stars. However, the kinds of gender identifications and associations being performed are not simply an imitation of same- or cross-gender forms from developed Asia, rather, they are an indigenization of new imaginings within contemporary Thai frameworks. Toms and sissies, for example, have convergent aesthetics but attach different meanings to them. More than mimicry, these new beauty ideals point to a bricolage of styles that localize foreign influences into practices of self-transformation. Megan Sinnott and I have written about Thai tom, les, sissy, and gay male mimicry of Korean aesthetics.6 This chapter examines how young Thai tomboys and sissies have become virtually indistinguishable in public. Tom and sissy aesthetics have converged because they are modeling themselves on the same Korean idols. One result is the softening of female butchness relative to a previous generation. I do not assert that East Asian media directly fashions new Thai desires and subjectivities. Instead, I argue that the practice of “soft” masculinity facilitates new queer gender and sexual possibilities.7 These forms transcend cross-gender couplings, such as tom-gay or the relationships of tom (akin to a butch lesbian) with other tom rather than dee (the feminine partners of tom).8 According to Sinnott’s earlier work, this tom-tom pairing would previously have been unimaginable.9 Thai queer youth have fashioned contemporary sartorial assemblages by localizing East Asian media flows that have until recently been coded as “conservative,” but that now allow for the reimagining of new gender and sexual identities and practices. This essay is based on comparative data for young tomboys (tom) and sissies between 2004 and 2015. My tom data is derived from several years of participant observation with tom, including living with one who transitioned from tom to tom bi categories over a twenty-three-month period, participant observation at two tom clothing stores, interviewing five tom about their relationship with K-style, and tom media such as @tom act (a glossy tom magazine) and online sites. My sissy data is 20

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derived from several years of participant observation and seventy-five interviews with variously gendered and self-identifying individuals who position themselves between masculine gay men and kathoey (transgender women). GAY, SISSY, KATHOEY, AND OTHER MALE-BODIED IDENTITIES

There are five primary gender-sexuality categories with an ontological fixity in Thailand: male, female, kathoey, tom, and gay.10 Queer male-bodied gender-sexuality forms are multiple and shifting. There is currently no good term for Thai sissies because most simply refer to themselves as gay (เกย์ ) and sometimes as tut ( : sissy or queen) or another slang term.11 The previous use of gay king and gay queen to differentiate masculine and feminine gay men is still understood but no longer common in everyday speech. These terms have been replaced by the sexual positions ruk and rap following the Japanese seme (invader) and uke (receiver), which do not assume heterogender difference but rather focus on sexual positioning.12 Sissies would not think of themselves as kathoey (transgender women), though they often joke about it. Although they identify with femininity, necessarily present a feminized comportment and sartorial aesthetic, and often use female speech patterns (such as the -kha female polite particle and terms like jang-loei that express feminine mood or affect), they think of themselves as essentially male. This is also true of many kathoey, who express complex relationships with their bodies, religious identity, and wider discourses about sexual diversity. Sissies are also not kathoey noi, male individuals who present their faces as female (wear obvious women’s make-up) but wear short hair and dress in men’s clothing. From the perspective of masculine gay, particularly those only aroused by other masculine gay men, sissies might as well be kathoey or on the path to become kathoey, which is not necessarily the case. Masculine gay refers to sissies as gay-ork-sao (gay who expresses girliness). This is also the standpoint of Thai social critics who are embarrassed by Thailand’s putative shortage of male masculinity.13 Gay are presumed to be masculine and undistinguishable from heterosexual men. Thus, only gay-ork-sao are said to “show” themselves and often come to represent all gay men in public space. In academic Thai, sissy is rendered gay sao (เกย์เสา, girly gay). However, this term is not used in everyday T he S o ftening o f B u tches

21

discourse. For this essay, I sometimes use tut to mean femininely identified gay, given that many sissies reclaim and self-identify with the oftenderogatory term. I also reclaim “sissy” to be used in an embracing rather than pejorative manner. Sissiness in this sense articulates the refusal of normative gender dimorphism and subsequent expectations of gender presentation, what Dennis Lin refers to as “queered effeminacies,” particularly in light of the growing popularity of feminized masculinity among heterosexually identified men in East Asia.14 Many new Thai terms specifically refer to soft masculinity. Recent terms such as “cutesy boy” (phuchai pen phet thi mung-ming, ผูช้ ายเป็นเพศทีม่ งุ้ มิง้ ) specifically refer to the style of masculinity one would expect from a K-pop idol or boys love character. TOM, L ES , D E E, A N D OT H E R FE M A L E- B ODIED EROT ICISM S

The categories of female same-sex relationships in Thailand coalesce around three general archetypes. These include the relatively rare but increasingly visible trans men, who identify, like transsexuals in other parts of the world, with a desire to change sex via medical intervention that includes use of hormones and, less often, surgery. Second are the more prominent tom (a relexification of “tomboy”), who identify with masculinity but do not want to change their sex. Thai tom typically dress as men, cut their hair short, and do not use feminine cosmetics on their face. But tom typically use female pronouns and polite particles in speech. Tom is a gender category that “shows” and Thais would assume that trans men are tom. Dee (a relexification of “lady”) are feminine women who are labeled as such only when they are the partners of tom and alternatively are referred to as women if they are partnered with men. Dee is thus a gender normative category relational to and less fixed than that of tom. Third are the increasingly visible les (a relexification of “lesbian”), which typically refers to more femininely identified women who love women (ying-rak-ying). The les categories have valences of being more middle class, Westernized, and gender egalitarian. Whereas trans men are asserting a more distinct presence, tom and les categories are increasingly overlapping. The last decade has seen a proliferation of tom and les subcategories. These include les king, les queen, les two-way, les bi, tom one-way, tom two-way, tom bi, tom gay king, tom gay queen, and tom gay both. Many of these categories, based on sexual preferences for being active or passive 22

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during penetrative sex, are explicitly modeled on Thai gay men’s discourse. Previously, tom would be assumed to only be penetrative partners and to be in relationships with dees rather than other toms. However, tom sexual practices have broadened. One-way and two-way refer to whether a tom/les is only penetrative, or also is also penetrated. Both is a Thai relexification of “both,” which means “versatile,” playing both top and bottom roles in penetrative sex. At the same time, other typologies of female same-sex desire rely more on the affective nature of one’s personality, for example: prince type, queen type, romantic type, cool type, cute type, sweet type, calm type, host type, SM type, and hot type. These labels both point to highly differentiated subcategories and various ways of conceptualizing gender and sexuality that are not uniform in either thought or practice. What is most striking, however, is that the sexual practices of tom have significantly transformed, from assuming a masculine role with a dee to one that is more flexible, both in choice of gendered partners and sexual activity. Toms now can partner with each other and engage in reciprocal sex, activities that previously were unconceivable. ASI A N RE G I O N A L I S M

I want to shift one of the key terms of Asianification or Asianization to Asian regionalism.15 I do so to acknowledge Thailand’s medial position in the production, consumption, and circulation of queer popular culture in Asia. Thailand is a producer and has been increasingly recognized for its role in “inter” (international) queer popular culture areas such as film and music. Films such as Love of Siam (2007) and Bangkok Love Story (2007) have been popular throughout the East/Southeast Asian region, as have musicians and groups such as Tata Young, Girly Berry, and Kamikake featuring Baitoey. Thais have also been involved in indigenizing pop culture forms from Korea and Japan. Subsequently, these localizations are often recast and branded as queer Thai in other areas of Southeast Asia, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Indeed, Thailand is beginning to dominate the boys love drama genre in the region. In relation to Asian regionalism, I also briefly define two neologisms I use: “white Asian” and “Korpanese.” “White Asian” is an etic term that combines two Thai concepts that have emerged in the mid- to late 2000s: khon khao (literally “white person,” it does not refer to Caucasians, T he S o ftening o f B u tches

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who are farang) and khon echia (literally “Asian person,” referring to East and Southeast Asians but not South Asians, who are categorized as khaek). Khon khao became popularized after a controversy surrounding the Oishi Amino Plus Brightenn advertising campaign of 2010–2011. Jillana Enteen observes that, between 2004 to 2008, Thai gay men start using the term “Asian.”16 Thais have historically referred to their Asian neighbors by terms of ethno-national groups, such as Chinese, Malay, Burmese. The use of “Asian” represents a new regionalization and racialization of Asianness as a common group.17 This is not to be confused with ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), though the integration of those states and its permutation of ASEAN +3 (China, Korea, Japan) and Taiwan, roughly defines the geography of Asia as conceptualized by Thais. What is important is that the groups featured are those that meet two criteria: they have “white” skin (Thais generally do not describe themselves or other Asians as “yellow”) and they are either from developed countries or represent relatively economically, though not necessarily politically, powerful Chinese minorities. White Asianness is epitomized by the “Korpanese.” I use Korpanese as a shorthand for the hybridization of Korea and Japan. These two countries are often conflated and combined in Thai discourse and practice, like two sides of the same coin. For example, Korean music is ubiquitous in Japanese restaurants, the hosts may wear a combination of kimono and hanbok, the brand ambassadors are typically K-pop stars, and the food is fused so that sushi comes with a side of kimchi. There is also the tendency to attribute Koreanness to Japanese things because the Korean Wave has become the dominant foreign media.18 Japanese practices like yaoi, or the practice of constructing homoerotic imagery from found photos and video, are also interpreted through Korean forms. Currently Thai khu-wai (literally “Y couple,” similar in sound to Japanese kawaii) is dominated by K-pop yaoi and now, Thai boys love drama series. Various representations of soft masculinity, queerness, Asian racialization, and middle-class modernity are coming together in the construction of a new Asian “taste continent.”19 THE C O NV E R G E N C E O F TO M A N D SISSY G E ND E R AE S T H E T I C S

Within this context of Asian regionalism, Thai beauty practices and gender have increasingly incorporated East Asian elements. For the sake of 24

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brevity in this chapter, I address only tom and sissy groups, but these Korpanese aesthetics have affected all gender and sexual identities, especially in youth subcultures. As Megan Sinnott notes, one of the new forms of gender or sexual expression becoming dominant among women loving women is the tom-gay, that is tom in relationships with other tom as opposed to dee, feminine women in relationships with tom. Tom-dee relationships are increasingly being displaced by tom-gay ones. Indeed, when conducting online searches for tom-dee images in 2015, I was struck by the absence of tom-dee images on tom websites. Sinnott notes that in tom-gay couplings, subtle differences of masculinity that structure gender difference remain, but the same-gender coupling is a major contrast to the cross-gender tom-dee pair.20 It more closely approximates gay and lesbian same-gender attraction. Indeed, the language being used in terms like les king and les queen is a direct borrowing of older gay slang’s use of gay king and gay queen. Both among women and gay men, the term “lesbian” is being more positively evaluated via the abbreviated use of les among women and the increasing acceptance of sissy sissy and kathoey kathoey or kathoey gay relationships, which were previously referred to disparagingly as “lesbian.” Interestingly, tom gay are now also using the abbreviated acronym TG (thi-ji) as shorthand for tom gay, similar to kathoey borrowing of TG for the English word “transgender,” as it is used in international HIV prevention efforts. These changes are occurring amid an ongoing proliferation and reorganizing of gender and sexual categories.21 In 2013, Police General Pongsapat Pongcharoen, the Pheu Thai Party candidate for Bangkok governor, ran the first Thai electoral commercial targeting alternately gendered constituents. The video included images of ten queer gendersexual categories including angie (แองจ ี,้ kathoey who likes tom), cherry ( , woman who likes gay or kathoey), adam (อดัม, man who likes tom), and “uncertain.” The ad promoted Pongsapat’s candidacy by aligning with a progressive tolerance of sexual diversity, ending with the message “It is now the twenty-first century.” Against pollsters’ predictions, Pongsapat lost the election. However, the advertisement points to ongoing shifts in Thai identities as well as the increasing influence of gender or sexually diverse constituencies. The conjunction of the internet, Korpanese media, cross-gender cover dance, and other media and consumption practices opens up new possibilities for desires that are neither anatomically based nor reliant on a masculine-feminine gender binary.22 That is, the recent proliferation T he S o ftening o f B u tches

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of categories such as in the Bangkok governor’s race advertisement are not limited to types that pair based on dualistic gender difference (tomdee) or similarity (lesbian), but increasingly based on putatively previously unimaginable couplings.23 Here I follow Ara Wilson in suggesting that new gender and sexual identities are made possible with style commodification, and, more recently, borrowing of Korpanese gender aesthetics.24 In this process, the aesthetics of sissies and tom are increasingly converging based on Korpanese soft masculinity and allow for new sexual possibilities to emerge. S O F T MA S C U L I N I T Y I N E A S T A S I A

Soft masculinity is the recent feminization of masculinity in East Asia epitomized by the Korean flower boy (kkonminam) and the JapaneseChinese herbivore or grass-eating man.25 These new styles of masculinity have also engendered masculinist backlashes and are being critiqued in places like Japan and Thailand as diminishing fertility. Before the 1990s, Koreanists would not have predicted that flower boy masculinity would be popularly dramatized, become fashionable in Korea, and spread through K-pop, K-dramas, fashion, and cosmetic advertisements. Indeed, Korea remains one of the most militarized states in the world, where mandatory military service of two years are still required of all men. But now, one can buy and bring one’s own camouflage cosmetics because the lowquality products supplied by the military might cause skin irritation. And though Korean men generally lack aegyo, or the winsomeness associated with Korean media, young Korean male stars are generally expected to act the part and engage in homoerotic displays referred to as “fan service” like in Japan.26 Historical antecedents for a soft Asian masculinity, homosociality, and homosexuality are deep seated. Louie suggest that soft masculinity is modeled from prior scholarly masculinity as opposed to militaristic masculinity.27 Others link it to a long tradition of masculine homosocial bonding in such works as the Chinese classic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and the Japanese scroll “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night.” I do not, however, believe such a lineage is necessary, given more proximate antecedents. Nor does such a lineage acknowledge the role of women in shaping male masculinity through their desire for relatively egalitarian companionate partners.28 I suggest that instead 26

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East Asian masculinity has feminized as men adapt to what women find desirable in them. The recent antecedents for soft masculinity derive from Japanese popular culture in the figure of the modernized bishonen (beautiful boys), which dates to the 1960s, and the practices of boys love and yaoi fandom that have subsequently emerged. These bishonen characters, often portrayed historically, such as in King and the Clown (Korea, 2005) and Frozen Flower (Korea, 2008), are contemporary conceptions of the past. They are also hugely popular: King and the Clown, for instance, was the top-grossing Korean film at the time of its release, and these sales are driven by women. McLelland, for example, argues that Japanese women’s desires for gay men, in the production of boys love material, represents their indirect protest against gender oppression.29 Cultural representations can be tied to actual demographic shifts in relation to gender egalitarian values and expectations.30 Louie himself has updated his notions of Chinese soft masculinity as they have been transformed by contemporary Korean and Japanese popular culture.31 He notes that women define what a “sexy man” is. Thus, a softer masculine ideal is made possible because it is created in women’s fantasies, which constitute a large consumer market. As a major market segment, female desires for gentle, romantic men, unlike traditional patriarchs, have proliferated a vast explosion of soft masculine imagery that caters to them. Like Louie, Darling-Wolf noted earlier that “the fact that Japanese female media consumers are longing for representations of men who can take on what have traditionally been more female roles and character traits may itself be significant, as indicative of a female-influenced shift in the conceptualization of ideal masculinity in Japan.”32 I argue that these images not only influence masculine ideals, but also shape how East Asian men see and cultivate themselves in order to appeal to women. That is, in a dialogical relationship women’s frustrations with patriarchal masculinity become reimagined and disseminated in media as new soft masculine ideals that are then taken up by some men who conform to these new ideals.33 Young, aspirational, middle-class men, in particular, use newly defined soft masculine aesthetics as resources for male beauty practices, courtship performances, and everyday embodiments. In Thailand, sao-wai (literally “Y girl,” where the “y” is an abbreviation of the Japanese yaoi) are fans of boys love genre manga and other media, in which the narrative, produced primarily by and for women, T he S o ftening o f B u tches

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revolves around the romantic and sexual relationships of young male couples. But there are also the men, both gay-sissy and heterosexual, who desire the attention and affection of sao-wai and thus fashion themselves in the image of boys love.34 KORE A A S I M AG I N E D TO M B OY PAR ADISE

Another common depiction in Korean media is of cross-gendered female to male characters. In Korean popular media, gender is highly regulated yet simultaneously transgressed. Again, this is not common in real life. Nonetheless, it is a popular trope, especially in K-drama. Further, the media consumed within Korea is often strikingly different from the K-version that is exported. Early in my fieldwork, I was commonly asked by Thais, because they had watched popular series like Coffee Prince (2007) and You’re Beautiful (2008), why there are so many tom in Korea. In Coffee Prince, a female tomboy character, Eun-Chan, must play a male because she wants to work in a café that hires only attractive male staff. The owner of the shop, Han-Gyul, mistakes her as a man and hires her to play a gay lover to sabotage the matchmaking dates his parents set up for him. Later, Han-Gyul falls in love with EunChan and must come to terms with his homosexuality. After Han-Gyul accepts himself as gay, the plot climaxes in what has been dubbed “the man or alien kiss,” where Han-Gyul professes his love to Eun-Chan and states that he does not care whether Eun-Chan is a man, alien, or whatever. This is roughly contemporaneous with the Thai film Love of Siam, a boy love story with a kiss. The kiss between the boys was censored when it played on Thai television but the kiss in Coffee Prince was not. Based on storylines such as this, many Thais make the assumption that tom, gay, and other gender-sexual differences are socially acceptable in Korea when, in fact, Thailand is much more socially tolerant of homosexuality in everyday life, even though local homoerotic representations are more likely to be self-censored in relation to Thai Ministry of Culture regulations and thus less likely to be televised. Boys love and tomboy images and stories have become extremely popular, common elements evolving over time and recirculating through online parodies, often by K-pop idols themselves. The extreme popularity of Coffee Prince set it up for spinoffs and remakes including Happy Michelin Kitchen (2012, Taiwan), Coffee Prince Thai (2012, Thailand), which repeats 28

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the “man or alien” line, and Coffee Prince (2012, Philippines), in which the “man or alien” line is replaced with a joke in which the Tagalog pronunciation of “keys” is used to initiate the kiss. You’re Beautiful (2009, Korea) continued the tomboy theme, was also parodied and recirculated by 2PM, which is famous in Thailand for having a Thai band member, Nichkhun Horvejkul (a Sino-Thai born and raised in the United States, who had never lived in Thailand and is now fluent in Korean). Although tomboys are not common in Korea, they are frequently represented in K-dramas, which are popular and broadcast in prime-time television viewing slots in Thailand. These images promote the idea among Thai tom that Korea is accepting of tomboys and that there are many there.35 At this point, I turn to tom accounts of their turn to soft masculinity. “ W E L OO K TH E S A M E A S S I S S I E S ,” “W E L OO K TH E SA ME A S KO R E A N S ”

Tomboys in K-drama follow flower boy aesthetics and this, along with K-pop idols, is one of the primary sources of tom inspiration in Thailand. Among younger urban tom, their aesthetics of gender presentation have shifted from a butch rebel style (e.g., James Dean, Marlon Brando) to a localized soft masculine style epitomized in K-pop.36 Some tom subclassify into K-tom or J-tom type, based on whether they look stylistically more K-pop or J-pop. However, by the time of my interviews in 2015, this labeling became unnecessary as J-tom disappeared and K-tom became presumed. Tom stores specifically cater to this market with small-sized men’s clothing, accessories, and cosmetics. Often, clothing like Adidas is marked “Korean” to give it more cachet. The @tom act magazine (www.atomact.com) and singer Zee (Matanawee Keenan, Zheza Records) epitomize this style. As the aesthetics of East Asian masculinity have recently “feminized,” Thai tom following East Asian trends have similarly softened.37 This means that, in Bangkok, although very different meanings (being a masculine female or being a feminine male) are attached to the same style, young tom and tut (sissy) aesthetics have increasingly converged. I met See through a mutual activist friend. We agreed to meet for an interview about toms, Korean style, and new trends. On the day of our interview, I started receiving text messages from her stating that she would be late. Ultimately, See arrived ninety minutes late. She had driven T he S o ftening o f B u tches

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with her girlfriend, Som, and apologized profusely, noting the traffic from the Thonburi side of Bangkok to Lad Prao was jammed. I apologized and said that I could have met her closer to where she lived had I known. See shrugged it off and said they were planning to come to Lad Prao anyway because it was their regular hangout as a tom-dee couple. See and Som typically came to this area every weekend to eat, shop, and hang out. As a twenty-four-year-old, unemployed, recent college graduate, I assumed that driving meant that she lived with her family and used their car. See confirmed this, which meant that she came from a relatively wealthy family. When starting our interview, I began with two anecdotes of recent experiences I had in which my gay friends could not tell whether a tom was male or female, that is, whether the person was dating material. Both See and her girlfriend Som laughed. “Yes, it’s hard to tell these days. Sometimes I’m confused too. You look and then you have to look again. You have to examine closely for signs. Like an Adam’s apple. Or the size of the hands. Or the pitch of their voice when they speak.” Som nodded. “It’s not easy to distinguish anymore.” I was taken aback. The description reminded me of how Western men talk about identifying whether a Thai woman is “really” female or a ladyboy (trans woman). It seemed ironic that the influence of East Asian soft masculinity was creating new Thai anxieties around gender differentiation along the same lines that Westerners had about local gender formations. I was repeatedly told by tom, dee, and gay that the adoption of soft masculinity made it increasingly difficult to differentiate young tom and sissy. See had repeated what I had heard over and over again: tom (referencing those under thirty-five years or so) now follow K-style and thus embody a soft masculine style. This style, however, did not only reference gender, but also a racialization of white Asianness. Em is the manager of a tom store that specializes in “Korean style” clothing. The store is located at the Central Plaza Lardprao mall. Technically the shop is not in the mall itself, but in a permanent lower-end market that links the MRT (subway) to the mall. When I visit the shop on a Saturday afternoon, her girlfriend is hanging out with her and agrees to watch the shop while we go to the McDonald’s to talk. Em reiterated much of what I’d heard from other tom: this area (Lad Prao), and particularly, Union Mall (a lower-end mall) across the street, are ground zero for tom in Bangkok. Among young tom, the popularity of 30

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Korean media is very strong, and drama series like Coffee Prince were a major influence on her ideas about living in a masculine role. She identified with characters like Eun-Chan and assumed that there were many tom in Korea because there were so many representations of females who dressed and lived as men. But, as an employee at a tom clothing store, this was manifest to her not only in televised dramas but also through Korean tourists. Em maintained that tom were everywhere in the world and many were in Korea, as in Thailand. She made this assertion based on the visitors to the shop. According to Em, the tom foreigners who most commonly visited were from China, Korea, and England. Among them, Em noted, “we [Thai tom] look the same as Koreans.” When I asked her to elaborate, she replied that farang tom style is very different from Asian tom style. Thai tom look similar to Chinese tom but like Korean tom. For Em, the significant difference was in the hair styling. Chinese, Koreans, and Thais dressed the same, following Korean fashion. However, “Chinese have a natural hair style.” By this, she meant that Chinese do not use a lot of hair products, which looks soft and natural, whereas Thais and Koreans have harder, wetter, molded hair styles. Thais, she noted, took the extra effort needed to emulate the Korean style, which Chinese did not, by styling their hair more like Koreans. Em also stated that Thais were more likely to dye their hair popular colors such as platinum blond, lavender, or light pink, blue, and green. This was a distinction of pride for Em, who emphasized how closely Thai toms followed Korean style. This exhibition of high maintenance hair styles, however, was not universal nor even in the majority of my observations of young tom. Yet it was an important difference for Em, given that she was a purveyor of K-style at the shop. Looking “Korean” was her job. Several toms reported that their current or previous girlfriends have been sao-wai. But when I raised the issue of toms, and particularly tom gay couples looking like boys love couples, they were perplexed or repulsed. For example, Yu was a college student studying sociology who worked on the weekends at the Chatuchak Weekend Market. I met Yu through a close friend who owns a shop near the stall where she works. When I noted that Thais had been particularly successful at K-pop cover dance competitions, Yu agreed. But when I asked her whether Thai tom, and, in particular, tom gay couples had any resemblance to the khu-wai (boys love) couples in K-pop fandom, Yu recoiled in horror. “Not at all!” Like with other tom, I tried to make the case that their sartorial practice T he S o ftening o f B u tches

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was not only like sissies, but also, when in couples, similar to boys love imagery. Although Thai tom acknowledged that they looked similar to Thai sissies, the idea of their looking like boys love couples seemed revolting to them. The line between tom resembling the same kind of soft masculinity as tut and sharing similar gender or sexual identities was clear. Tom gay couples looked like soft gay couples but were not like gay men. That is, tom investment in soft masculinity was divorced from gay male sexuality and the adoration of girls who love boys love. The medial role of Thailand within wider Asian networks of media circulation is paramount to understanding recent changes in Thai gender and sexuality practices as well as Thailand’s impact on its neighbors. As noted, Thailand consumes a great deal of media produced in Korea as part of the Korean Wave. Some of this media is read as “queer” even though the plots often reinforce normative heterosexuality. The consumption of this media is affecting local ways of performing gender and sexuality. Here I focus on the recent softening of Thai butches. Yet I also want to highlight how Thais are indigenizing, localizing, and recirculating Korpanese flows. Thailand produces a significant volume of queer media that is circulated regionally. Inter-Asian cultural flows are transforming everyday Thai gender practices and performances. Korpanese media is molding contemporary beauty aesthetics. One of the most visible examples is cover dance, the copying of choreographed movements in K-pop songs.38 Since 2009, K-pop cover dance has become a definitive social activity among Asian sissies and girls and is also being taken up by tom. Cover dance is organized into an extensive contest circuit leading to an international competition in Korea. Thai sissies are among the most prolific practitioners of K-pop cover dance, engaging in various forms of cover dance and posting their videos online. Indeed, groups such as the Wonder Gay, Millenium Boy [sic], and Tom Act have risen to national celebrity.39 The cover dance performed by tom and sissies are often cross-gender. That is, sissies perform to girl groups and tom perform to boy bands. Semi-professional cover dancers constitute a class of “hyper-fans” who become “demi-idols” with fan followings in their own right. This has created a local scene in which Thais can idolize K-pop cover dancers as well as K-pop stars themselves. This means that Thais have refashioned khu-wai boys love practices to create local celebrities. These images are then circulated not only in Thailand but throughout East and Southeast Asia as well. 32

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Various communities of queer Thais (e.g., gay, tom, kathoey) unite for political activism but lack unifying affective platforms for routine socialization. That is, queer Thais often come together across community divides for political actions but typically do not spend recreational time with each other. Yet, in recent times, Korean and Japanese popular culture has had a dominant impact on the beauty ideals of Thais. These new beauty ideals are most prominent among queer Thais, who have embraced being “Asian,” and specifically, the realm of developed East Asians, or what I refer to as “white Asians.” Following Jackson’s assertions about the Asianization of Bangkok and Boellstorff’s conceptualizations of the nationalization of queer Indonesians, I argue that Asian identification provides a new way for queer Thais to identify with each other in everyday life outside the discourse of (Western) human rights via popular culture.40 Although different queer communities are not engaging each other in the same spaces, they are often appropriating the same aesthetic sensibilities, aligning themselves with East Asian forms and each other through this common interest. The Thai localization of Korean media simultaneously highlights the shifting boundaries between media consumption and production and the regionalization of inter-Asian popular culture. In the reworking of white Asian aesthetics, Thai beautification practices allow for the development of new forms of gender expression and sexual desire that transcend conventional norms. I describe the convergence of tom and sissy aesthetics in relation to Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, in relation to Thailand’s medial role in the consumption, production, and circulation of soft masculinity in East and Southeast Asia. I argue that new media flows dominated by the Korean Wave are shaping Thai aesthetics and, that soft masculinity, in particular, is enabling new possibilities for alternative gender and sexual relations that transcend heterogender pairings. The softening of Thai butches has enabled new categories such as the tom gay. Furthermore, East Asian popular culture is not only being consumed by Thais but digested, reworked, and rebranded and consumed as Thai in other parts of Southeast Asia. N OTE S I would like to thank Peter A. Jackson for inviting me to present an earlier version of this chapter for the designated panel Queer Southeast Asia: States, Markets, and Media at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference 2014. Additionally, the T he S o ftening o f B u tches

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responses and feedback provided by Andrea Friedman, Jeffrey McCune, Mary Ann Dzubac, Trevor Sangrey, and other participants of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Colloquium Series at Washington University in St. Louis were invaluable in refocusing this essay on toms. 1. All names are pseudonyms. 2. The third-person pronoun in Thai is gender neutral. 3. In 2015, Fake Club moved to the Ratchada area of Bangkok. 4. Author field notes, 2010. 5. Dredge Byung’chu Kang, “Eastern Orientations: Thai Middle-Class Gay Desire for ‘White Asians,’ ” Culture, Theory and Critique 58, no. 2 (2017): 182–208. 6. See Megan Sinnott, “Korean-Pop, Tom Gay Kings, Les Queens and the Capitalist Transformation of Sex/Gender Categories in Thailand,” Asian Studies Review 36, no. 4 (2012): 453–474; see also Dredge Byung’chu Kang, “Idols of Development: Transnational Transgender Performance in Thai K-pop Cover Dance,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (2014): 559–571; Kang, “Cultivating Demi-Idols: The Queer Convergence of New Media and Korean Dance Performance in Thailand,” in New Media Configurations and Socio-Cultural Dynamics in Asia and the Arab World, edited by Nadja-Christina Schneider and Carola Richter (Berlin: Nomos Publishers, 2015), 287–303; Kang, “Eastern Orientations”; “Surfing the Korean Wave: Wonder Gay and the Crisis of Thai Masculinity,” Visual Anthropology 31, no. 1–S2 (2018): 45–65. 7. Sun Jung, Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-pop Idols (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). 8. On tom-gay, Sinnott, “Korean-Pop”; on tom rather than dee, Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Cultures (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986); Michael G. Peletz, Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times (New York: Routledge, 2009). 9. Megan Sinnott, Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). Similarly, acceptance is increasing of sissy-sissy couplings, which have previously been derided by gay men as “lesbian.” Indeed, these couples are now the subject of boys love (khu-wai) fandom in Thailand. 10. Dredge Byung’chu Kang, “Kathoey ‘In Trend’: Emergent Genderscapes, National Anxieties and the Re-Signification of Male-Bodied Effeminacy in Thailand,” Asian Studies Review 36, no. 4 (2012): 475–494; “Conceptualizing Thai Genderscapes: Transformation and Continuity in the Thai Sex/Gender System,” in Contemporary Socio-Cultural and Political Perspectives in Thailand, edited by Pranee Liamputtong, 409–429 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014). 11. In Thai, gay refers to an identity similar to the English “gay man.” The term in Thai is a noun. Thus, I use gay and “gay man,” respectively. 12. Peter Jackson suggests that the terms are derived from Thai kickboxing moves of offence and defense (personal communication July 14, 2017). Given the recent shift in use of these terms, I suggest that they are influenced by Thai gay male consumption of Japanese pornography. 13. Kang, “Surfing the Korean Wave.” 14. Dennis C. Lin, “Sissies Online: Taiwanese Male Queers Performing Sissinesses in Cyberspaces,” Inter-Asia Culture Studies 7, no. 2 (2006): 270–288; Hong-Chi Shiau and Chi-Chien Chen, “When Sissy Boys Become Mainstream: Narrating Asian Feminized Masculinities in the Global Age,” International Journal of Social Inquiry 2, no. 2 (2009): 55–74. 34

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15. Peter A. Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early Twenty-First-Century Queer Boom,” in Queer Bangkok: 21st Century Markets, Media, and Rights, edited by Peter A. Jackson (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 17–42. 16. Jillana B. Enteen, Virtual English: Queer Internets and Digital Creolization (New York: Routledge, 2010). 17. Dredge Byung’chu Kang, “White Asians Wanted: Queer Racialization in Thailand” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2015). 18. The exception to this is pornography, where Japan is dominant. 19. Tania Lim, “Renting East Asian Popular Culture for Local Television: Regional Networks of Cultural Production,” in East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave, edited by Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 33–51. 20. Sinnott, “Korean-Pop.” 21. Peter A. Jackson, “An Explosion of Thai Identities: Global Queering and Re-imagining Queer Theory,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 2, no. 4 (2000): 405–424; Kang, “Conceptualizing Thai Genderscapes.” 22. Peletz, Gender Pluralism. 23. Sinnott, “Korean-Pop.” 24. On style commodification, Ara Wilson, The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); on gender aesthetics, Sinnott, “Korean-Pop.” 25. Arguably, boy bands and male teen idols are often rather feminine in Western pop music as well. The emulation of Justin Bieber by lesbians is a parallel example of modeling soft butch aesthetics off of pop icons. 26. Kazumi Nagaike, “Johnny’s Idols as Icons: Female Desires to Fantasize and Consume Male Idol Images,” in Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture, edited by Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 97–112. 27. Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 28. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 29. Mark McLelland, “ ‘A Mirror for Men?’ Idealised Depictions of White Men and Gay Men in Japanese Women’s Media,” Transformations 6 (2003): 1–14. For a similar argument on China, see Chunyu Zhang, “Loving Boys Twice as Much: Chinese Women’s Paradoxical Fandom of ‘Boys’ Love’ Fiction,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 3 (2016): 249–267. 30. Makoto Atoh shows that the dramatic decline in Japanese fertility does not follow a Western pattern of secularization, individualism, and antinatalism but has more closely followed increasing gender egalitarianism, changing gender roles, and female autonomy. See Makoto Atoh, “Very Low Fertility in Japan and Value Change Hypotheses,” Review of Population and Social Policy 10 (2001): 1–21. 31. Kam Louie, “Popular Culture and Masculinity Ideals in East Asia, with Special Reference to China,”  Journal of Asian Studies  71, no. 4 (2012): 929–943; “Chinese Masculinity Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Westernizing, Easternizing and Globalizing Wen and Wu,” NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 9, no. 1 (2014): 18–29. 32. Fabienne Darling-Wolf, “Male Bonding and Female Pleasure: Refining Masculinity in Japanese Popular Cultural Texts,” Popular Communication 1, no. 2 (2003): 83. T he S o ftening o f B u tches

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33. Here I would suggest that the aesthetics of boys’ love, especially as manga imagery, and soft masculinity more generally preceded their everyday embodiments among men rather than reflected or magnified actual male gender performances. The literature on “metrosexuality” in the United States focuses more on the commodification of soft masculinity, its reflection of ongoing gender trends among heterosexual men, and the difficulty of its execution in everyday life. See, for example, Helene Shugart, “Managing Masculinities: The Metrosexual Moment,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies  5, no. 3 (2008): 280–300; Donnalyn Pompper, “Masculinities, the Metrosexual, and Media Images: Across Dimensions of Age and Ethnicity,”  Sex Roles 63, no. 9–10 (2010): 682–696; Margaret Ervin, “The Might of the Metrosexual: How a Mere Marketing Tool Challenges Hegemonic Masculinity,”  in Performing American Masculinities: The 21st-Century Man in Popular Culture, edited by Elwood Watson and Marc E. Shaw (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 58–75. 34. Byung’chu Dredge Kang, “Realizing Boys Love: Y Couple Fandom in Thailand” (paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society World Conference, Bangkok, Thailand, July 2017). 35. Thai gay men, especially those who have traveled to Korea, are less likely to hold these beliefs and instead see Korea as much less accepting of homosexuality, especially in public. 36. Sinnott, “Korean-Pop.” 37. I want to emphasize that the feminization of Asian masculinity should be understood in relationship to itself and the West. I particularly caution that Western commentators often already see the Orient as feminized. Indeed the “lack” of sexual dimorphism in Southeast Asia (such as short hair among women and long hair among men) justified colonial domination. Further, I follow Nguyen Tan Hoang in emphasizing that femininity need not be abject but can be a “bottom” position of social and political alliance formation. See Tan Hoang Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Repression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 38. Kang, “Idols of Development.” 39. Kang, “Surfing the Korean Wave.” 40. Jackson, “Bangkok’s Early”; Tom Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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2

Between Screens and Bodies New Queer Performance in India Ka re e m Kh u b c h a n da n i

Held in the courtyard of a makeshift art gallery behind the famous Rex Theatre on Bangalore’s Brigade Road, the Bengaluru Pride Mela, part of the Karnataka Queer Habba, took place in the city’s center, just out of view of the general public. Kanu, from the LGBT organization Chennai Dost, emailed me in advance to inquire whether there would be a mic and stage available for their skit, a melodramatic love story told through mime, gesture, and dance. Two men danced a sweet love affair to a melodious Tamil song, but their tender bliss was rent by three attackers— representing family, society, and friends—who left the couple bloodied and broken as A. R. Rahman’s “Bombay Theme” played. The audience clapped eagerly for two moments: a jump-and-lift that evidenced strong technique and rehearsal, and the wicked attack of exaggerated punches, slaps, drags, and red paint on the attackers’ palms to bloody the victims. In this moralistic melodrama, I observed a set of circumstances, techniques, and aesthetics that I understand as “new queer performance in India.” New queer performance is given platform through burgeoning LGBTQ festivals: pride, film festivals, memorials of community members lost to murder or suicide, and commemorations of legal battles.1 With titles such as “habba” and “mela,” queer organizers ground the global festival in local sensibilities. This skit emerges out of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) industrial-complex, yet exceeds liberal 37

NGO agendas by allowing these men to stage their bodies as queer and desirable. The community-centered and semi-professional nature of Chennai Dost’s performance distinctly differs from high-productionvalue gay theater.2 Yet it still carries a sense of bourgeois professionalism and artistry, both in the desire for audio equipment and proscenium stage and the use of technique-based and rigorously rehearsed dance, that is, the lift. At the same time, theatrical virtuosity does not dictate the primary pleasures of this performance because we see audience members, many of whom personally knew performers, impressed by the overacted homophobic attack. Taking place against the backdrop of Indian cinema, literally in the shadow of a film hoarding, the performance drew on filmic citations such as Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995) to make legible its moral tale.3 NE W Q U E E R P E R F O R M A N C E I N I NDIA

New queer performance is an emergent form of middle-class entertainment, artistry, and activism that exists in relation to and yet separate from other forms of queer performance: gay theater, hijra dance, and public protests and marches.4 I draw from Ruby Rich’s formulation, “New Queer Cinema,” which describes the consolidation of experimental and independent filmmaking—production and funding networks, as well as aesthetic trends—facilitated by the sprouting of gay and lesbian festivals across the United States and globe in the 1990s. The connection to film is particularly relevant here in that cinematic aesthetics are mobilized by several of the artists I describe, and because film festivals serve as performance venues. Across India, Pride festivities feature variety shows, open mics, cabarets, and melas leading up to the march.5 These semi-professional and experimental performances by community members, curated but not always vetted, short and transportable, makeshift but rehearsed, are increasingly common on the stages of a growing queer festival culture.6 These performers, artists, and cultural workers do not come from heritage performance communities; many are white-collar professionals—actively or peripherally connected NGOs—who perform as a hobby, or who later in life studied and rehearsed their craft to become professional artists. Queer Indian cultural studies has on the one hand attended to film and literature.7 On the other, it has offered ethnographic and discursive 38

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accounts of social and political activisms.8 We need greater attention to performance, to the ways that embodied art practices both stage and influence politics, activism, and community. My description of Chennai Dost’s skit marks both the subject and the method of this essay: performance. This study of performances produced by and about queer Indians is made feasible by my own performance as a witness, participant, organizer, choreographer, curator, consultant, and workshop leader. In line with this anthology’s interest in global flows of media, and particularly Bollywood, this essay explores the agential appropriation of mediated genders, sexualities, and affects through performance. Apprehending global, national, and regional media forms (H/B/K/M/ Tollywood) on to their bodies, Indian performers conjure complicated gender and sexual subjectivities that exceed both the discursive frames of those media and of global gay discourses. I map artistic trajectories of several middle- and upper-class cultural workers, showing how they interact with media forms (YouTube; blogs; dating websites; Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and US film; Broadway musicals) to complicate familiar trajectories of globalization. At first blush, my data suggests that the performances I describe are structured by Western notions of gay modernity. However, the intimate information I offer from interviews and witnessing reveals more complicated genealogies and readings of performances that elucidate situated contexts and consequences of these creative works. Because gayness is perpetually interpreted as foreign, as a violation of “Indian culture,” it is especially useful to document the deeply local qualities of new queer performance. GAYSI ’ S D I RTY TA L K : FRO M W E B TO S TAG E AN D B ACK Listen, everything I’ve been trying to do has been done in the west. There’s this line, ‘Apna ghar ka maal hai.’ There’s so much here, but we haven’t found it yet. — A NUJA P ARIKH

In late January 2012, the online forum for LGBTQ desis, Gaysi, held its first open mic night, Dirty Talk. Founded in 2008 by queer women in Mumbai and London, this website has created a massive transnational online community. Gaysi editor Anuja explains that there was a desire among members to know each other beyond a pseudonym, to B et w een S creens and B o dies

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humanize bloggers and readers. As these women conceived a possible event, Anuja recalled open mic nights she attended in New York City where she worked for a postproduction company, intimate gatherings of fifteen weirdoes in a Tribeca basement bar where audience members were other performers. However, the first Dirty Talk, held at a Bandra bar in Mumbai and emceed by radio jockey Rohini Ramnathan, yielded more than a hundred people. Gaysi introduces its online-offline audiences to a variety of global queer forms: zines, drag kings, and open mic nights. But, by tapping into the nuances of local issues, aesthetics, and personalities, Gaysi’s Dirty Talk evokes a distinctly Mumbai ethos. I emailed Anuja a week before Dirty Talk to ask whether I could perform. Following website protocols, she asked whether I would like to be introduced by an alternative name; the overlap between online and offline community spaces is a quintessential part of Indian LGBT organizing, and the ubiquity of pseudonyms is a vestige of this.9 By email, we learned that we had both lived in Chicago, a reminder of the overlap between diaspora and subcontinent in LGBT South Asian middle- and upper-class communities.10 Despite meticulous planning, the event was running late, and performances couldn’t start until a slew of activists promoted their causes. Unlike the casual atmosphere that inspired Anuja, Dirty Talk was weighted with extended pageantry, familiar to Indian event-goers, and endemic to NGO-related productions. Dirty Talk was emceed by charismatic radio jockey Rohini, and in attendance was also Bollywood heartthrob Imraan Khan; these highprofile presences raised the production quality and classy ethos exponentially. Although there was no cover charge, Gaysi later decided to capitalize on the event’s success and raise funds for local queer and feminist organizations; funding for queer women’s organizations is desperately lacking. Given the newly introduced fee, subsequent events were curated to give people a “bang for their buck,” inviting well-known personalities: comedian Aditi Mittal, sketch comedy groups All India Bakchod and East India Company, and film and television actors Mona Ambegaonkar and Kalki Koechelin. Organizers curated content not only to value patrons’ donations but also to ensure original queer content. The highest caliber performances came from straight comedians commenting on queer and feminist issues; amateur queer artists have not had platforms

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to refine their acts. It has thus been necessary to commission and workshop queer performance for the rowdy bar environment. One such performance was a monologue by Urmi that Gaysi workshopped as a way of remedying the lack of trans representation in their lineups. Urmi, a hijra activist, is already popular in Mumbai’s LGBT scene as a member of The Dancing Queens.11 Her monologue captures an interiority, a feeling, that she argues depictions of hijras have been unable to tap into: darr (fear).12 She remarks on the newness of this storytelling medium for herself, differentiating it from the dancing she is known for, and from the slick jokes of the comedians before her. After an extended introduction, she shifts into the Hindi monologue, describing the chronic fears she felt as a gender nonconforming child, that pursue her into hijra adulthood. You can hear the buzz quell when Urmi shifts from her introduction to the performance; her demeanor shifts too, and the performance registers differently from the irony of a Moth podcast. It lands more like the earnest monologues of Hindi film heroines framed in closeup, “diva testimonials” that extract an affective response and desperately seek social change.13 Unlike the optimistic “It gets better” series that rely on a teleological narrative of coming out, Urmi’s repetition of the fears she has as an adult hijra and as a child map the cyclical psychic and social traumas inflicted on transgender people. Urmi rhythmically poses questions to the audience, placing responsibility on the listener to feel complicit in social and political change. Urmi’s hijra identity, her use of Hindi, and her mobilization of cinematic melodrama ground this monologue in an Indian sensibility. Following the warm reception of Urmi’s performance, Gaysi collaborated to produce a web-based version of the monologue. Filmed in black and white, Indian speakers of various gender presentations and skin colors recount Urmi’s prose over evocative music. This format honors Urmi’s words, but also makes them palatable to a wider range of listeners beyond Dirty Talk’s live audience. On YouTube, Gaysi documents both Urmi’s monologue and the made-for-web performance, sustaining common flows between online and offline community. Given the brevity, specificity, and amateur nature of new queer performance, this genre is less likely to live on in the portfolios of a

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company or individual artist. Gaysi’s impressive documentation of Dirty Talk and other shows, on YouTube and on its blog, makes it one of very few archives of new queer performance. MAYA MMA: B ROA DWAY TO B A N GAL OR E, VI A K U TTA N A D My dad said that my [gay] sexuality is a sin, but drag is ok if you get money out of it. — A LEX M ATHEW

The first Dirty Talk concluded with a drag performance to the sexy Bollywood song “Chikni Chameli.” With a wig of neon yellow ringlets, an unrealistically buxom chest, and messily tied ghagra choli, the performer invoked the improvisatory drag of gay Indian house parties rather than the carefully rehearsed style of a cabaret queen. Although various cross-dressing performance practices thrive across India, gay men performing in feminine styles within queer subcultural space has been relegated to house parties.14 Recently, in Bangalore, a drag queen has emerged who performs in public venues: Mayamma, the alter ego of Alex Mathew. Mayamma has performed at variety shows held by the Queer Arts Movement collective in Bangalore and Hyderabad. She exhibits the global influences that inform the structuring ideals of new queer performance—professionalism, mobility, improvisation—but with particularly regional accents. Mayamma’s performances, as well as the background narrative Alex has created for her, are particularly South Indian. It is necessary to think about the regional qualities of Indian performance, not only to resist producing a monolithic image of the country but also to acknowledge specific historical and political formations that shape experiences of gender and sexuality.15 Mayamma is from Kuttanad, Kerala; she is the daughter of a fisherman and a housewife, and used to perform at a local tourist resort. Through these references, Alex invokes bucolic visions of Kerala that are familiar to Indian audiences; Kerala, branding itself “God’s own country,” relies on Indian and foreign tourism to the state. While performing at the resort, Mayamma met Anand, a tourist and “IT-guy” from Bangalore, with whom she fell in love and ran away. Bangalore, a global city in the bordering state of Karnataka, is known as 42

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the Silicon Valley of India and is a significant destination for professional migrants in South India. It is also important refuge site for queer and trans people across South India given the long-standing presence of relevant NGOs. Mayamma’s departure aggravates her parents’ already strained relationship, and her father, Ishwarappen, beats up her mother, Saraswatiamma. Mayamma, who has watched her father beat up her mother since childhood, returns home to “thrash [her father] with a coconut branch” before fleeing to Bangalore permanently. Mayamma’s reference to a coconut tree is not the only region-specific reference here; addressing domestic violence in Kerala recalls long-standing contradictions of gender equity in the state.16 Taking my advice, Alex began integrating storytelling into Mayamma’s routine so that others could hear her elaborate backstory. He has since used this technique, stringing together songs through Mayamma’s stories, to critique femmephobia in the gay community—something he has experienced more frequently since performing in drag. Alex infuses Mayamma’s performances with a regional flavor, singing popular English-language songs in a Malayali accent, referring to her audience as “kuttys and kuttans” (girls and boys), and altering the lyrics of Lady Marmalade to “Hey chechi [sister], go chechi, soul chechi.” When Alex went to karaoke nights wearing a dapper vest and button down to sing “diva songs” such as “And I am telling you,” and “Defying Gravity,” straight audiences would compliment the performance but not “relate to it.” Mayamma became a way of legitimating his identification with these songs, and giving a feminine body to these diva affects. Alex cites inspiration from Hollywood, Bollywood, and Mollywood— Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire, Govinda in Chachi 420, and Dileep in Mayamohini—resisting an authenticity trap that provides a singular origin site for his drag artistry. Whereas Alex is branching out toward high-fashion styles as his popularity (and budget) grows, Mayamma has a signature look: simple white cotton saris, braided black hair with fresh jasmines, and bare feet. This minimalist style gives Mayamma the appearance of a small-town girl in the big city and provides a sweet surprise when she belts out sexy numbers such as Madonna’s “Express Yourself.” Performing as Mayamma has been essential to Alex’s navigation of work and family life. He completed his master’s of business administration B et w een S creens and B o dies

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Mayamma, in her traditional white sari and with fresh jasmine in her hair, performs at The Humming Tree, a trendy bar in the upscale Indiranagar neighborhood of Bangalore. Photo by Manasi Marathe.

(MBA) in Hyderabad and worked for a multinational company there; it was at an office party that he tapped into his performance talents. For a while in Bangalore, he found it difficult to settle into a job because of workplace homophobia, made worse by colleagues’ awareness of Mayamma. Because he could not keep Mayamma a secret from them, Alex also came out as gay to his parents. Because cross-dressing traditions in India are not all associated with gay subcultures, his conservative Christian father did not disapprove of drag but did disapprove of his sexual orientation. His mother had a different conservative response; she thinks Mayamma should be a more respectable woman: “dress more elegantly, don’t show your stomach, wear those Indira Gandhi blouses, pleat your sari properly!” Mayamma was initially conceived as a character for a YouTube channel and though she continues to receive performance opportunities, she has also developed a healthy social media presence. Alex posts footage of her live performances, and also makes Dubsmash videos lipsyncing both the voices of US drag queens such as Rupaul and Bianca del Rio, as well as camp scenes from Hindi movies such as Devdas. Like Dirty Talk, Mayamma works across media platforms to produce performance that is globally legible but aesthetically regional.

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IN D U A NTO NY: P E R F O R M I N G FO R T HE L EN S Travel photography was never really my thing. I don’t like landscapes or wildlife. . . . I would take photographs if the subject was involved in my photo making. If there is equal consent on both sides. — I NDU A NTONY

Alex’s Mayamma is not much of a departure from Lola Kutty, alter ego of Channel V video jockey Anuradha Menon, who speaks in Malluaccented English, ties a traditional sari, and wears fresh jasmines. Lola Kutty’s sidekick is Shiny Alex, a buffoon character with a curly mop and lifted lungi. Photographer Indu Antony captures an image of Sowmya, a member of the activist and social queer women’s group We’re Here and Queer (WHAQ) as Shiny Alex. Sowmya has on a curly black wig, large mustache, bright rosy blush, black banyan (tank top), rubber chappals (flip flops), green and blue lungi folded at her knees and tucked at the waist, and white and red dustcloth over her shoulder. Indu captures Sowmya/Shiny Alex on a dilapidating pavement in front of a pile of fresh green coconuts. During the shoot in this public venue, Sowmya took great pleasure in scratching her balls and grossing out onlookers.17 Indu made this photo for MANiFEST, a calendar of drag kings, featuring queer women dressed as iconic male characters: Sherlock Holmes, Superman, Jack Sparrow, Chulbul Pandey, Quick Gun Murugan, and others. Indu’s photography reconfigures mediated genders on to unexpected bodies and relies heavily on performance as a way of making images. Several of her projects are collaborations with queer and trans folks that encourage her subjects to stage their bodies on their own terms; as she says, consent is crucial to her project. Like Alex and Anuja, Indu departed from a professional path to pursue art. On finishing medical school, she took up art classes; she had always been drawn to visuals and coped with moderate dyslexia during her education by drawing ideas and concepts. Befriending several out queer men, Indu was interested in their feminine performances: “They would say to each other, ‘You’re such a bitch,’ or call each other Rekha [Bollywood actress] I said, ‘Why don’t we conceive a photo shoot around your feminine names?’ ” The resulting project was titled Bitch Please!, a photo series of six men in

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various interpretations of feminine drag: naked bodies with luscious wigs, androgynous archangels, sari-wrapped Bollywood divas. Performance was central to producing the images. Over the course of a month, Indu worked with the men—IT workers, HR professionals, graphic designers—to conceive of their character’s names, hobbies, desires, style, and personalities. “It was shot over two days, in the extra room of my house. . . . Once you entered the house, you were your character.” The performers understood that their drag resembled Western modes of queer performance. Henry says, “Drag is a part of Western gay culture. Not here. Were we ready to go that public? We debated a long time.”18 Turning to photography rather than live performance and shooting inside Indu’s home shielded the men from public shaming, a daily experience for trans feminine people across India. New queer performance, as a particularly middle- and upper-class formation, affords private space for both rehearsal and exhibition. Henry created a character named Foxxxy, a 1970s-style badass black disco diva. Cross-racial performance is complicated, as are blaxploitation archetypes.19 Nonetheless, Foxxxy allowed Henry to publicly validate his dark skin and to enjoy feminine beauty that does not center whiteness and fair skin. WHAQ members, inspired by Bitch Please!, approached Indu with a similar project. After several discussions, they decided on distinctly different approaches: to embody popular characters instead of creating alter-egos and to shoot in public. Stylist Rahul Pillai comments that the accessories for feminizing a body are commercially available, but that those for masculinity are less so—masculinity is eager to efface its own performativity. Styling these shoots meant improvising with everyday objects—gluing tea powder to create stubble, stuffing crotches with socks and shampoo bottles, and binding breasts with saran wrap. This photo shoot also relied on performance. Rohini Malur, used to a high femme self-presentation, had to rehearse an unfamiliar masculine posture for her shot. Indu comments that the spectacle of a public shoot drew many onlookers who thought a film was being made. On the sidelines, Tamil cowboy Quick Gun Murugan and supercop Chulbul Pandey engaged in a play-fight: “I’m the defender of the poor!” “Watch out, I’ll shoot you!” In these bursts of public performance, Bollywood 46

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and Kollywood masculinities meet each other, not on the screen but in the streets of Bangalore, in the bodies of queer women. Indu muses that without the mask of costumes, these queer women were rarely so theatrical in public; recognizable costumes allowed them to enjoy female masculinity without the quotidian discipline of gender nonconformity.20 These queer performances also permit an embodied reimagining of the hyperphallic masculinities of Kollywood and Bollywood stars Rajnikanth and Salman Khan.21

This parody of Tamil Cowboy Quick Gun Murugan in Indu’s MANiFEST calendar bears the caption: “The train stopped on the track beside me, full of people cheering and shouting, made me nervous for a few seconds and then gave me the adrenaline rush to get into the skin of the character.” Photo by Indu Antony.

Bitch Please! was printed as coasters and bookmarks, and MANiFEST as a calendar; both were sold at Pride melas. These images have been exhibited in various public venues—art galleries, LGBTQ festivals—and Indu relishes the “social life” of her artwork: “As a calendar, we can infiltrate into people’s lives.”22 As everyday objects, her photography performs quotidian representational work to familiarize female masculinity, male femininity, and LGBTQ identity. Moreover, Kajri Jain has demonstrated that paper calendars function as particular ideological and economic objects in Indian homes.23 In Indu’s work, not only do her subjects perform to create images, but the images themselves also perform as quotidian objects in the home. B et w een S creens and B o dies

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THE PI NK D I VA S : Y E S FAT S , Y E S FE M M ES I wanted to cross dress completely . . . I was scared that my belly would do more dancing that me, and [Harsh] said, ‘That is your asset, shake it as much as you can.’  — N ATASHA

Sowmya, who appears as Shiny Alex in MANiFEST, is also a prominent figure in Indu’s I Have a Big Heart!, which traces the everyday pleasures of fat women. One image shows Sowmya learning a dance gesture from Harsh during a Pink Diva rehearsal in the office space of Swabhava Trust, a small LGBTQ NGO. Her midriff pokes out of the bottom of her top. In another picture, she leans over a counter to get close to a mirror and adjust her eye makeup. She is backstage at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF), getting ready for her Pink Divas

Indu captures Sowmya learning Harsh’s Chikni Chameli choreography at the Swabhava Office for a Pink Diva performance. Photo by Indu Antony.

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performance. Her pink choli and low-tied rainbow-flag sari unabashedly reveal her tummy. The Pink Divas, an amateur queer dance group committed to performing feminine dance styles, interfaces with South Indian, Bollywood, and US pop music. Their performance training ranges: some had danced solely in the privacy of their bedrooms; others performed at college talent shows, trained with contemporary dance companies, or were immersed in classical dance education. I started Pink Divas in 2012 at the request of members of a gay community group called Good As You (GAY) in Bangalore, and our first performance was at the Pride Mela mentioned at the beginning of this essay. An ad hoc group of dancers came together after an email I sent to the listserv, and we rehearsed at the NGO where GAY meets, Swabhava, surrounded by LGBTQ magazines, books, and DVDs. Since my departure from Bangalore, the group has sustained itself—with regular rehearsals and shifting membership— and addresses sociopolitical issues didactically in their performances, and informally through the staging of femme, fat, dark, and untrained dancing bodies. BQFF is a three-day event that takes place at the Alliance Française and features short and feature-length films from across the world. The organizers traditionally scheduled a small window for live performances at the festival venue, and the Pink Divas have received recurring invitations to perform. The group usually dances to a medley of women-sung songs from South Indian films, Bollywood, and US pop; they variously wear glitter, heels, pleather, mesh, fringe, sequins, makeup, scarves; their dance moves are insistently sexy—running hands over the rest of their body, blowing kisses, spreading legs, and thrusting hips. In my short YouTube documentary Meet the Pink Divas, I show how the group critiques the homophobia of the Indian Supreme Court in their 2014 BQFF act and their 2015 dance similarly mocks police authority.24 Moral policing of public premarital and queer intimacy, particularly in malls and parks, but also in raids of hotels, clubs, and homes, has been on the rise under the auspices of conservative Hindu politicians in collusion with police. The final track of the 2015 BQFF medley is “Jumme Ki Raat” (Nighttime Kisses), and two couples on stage flirt and frolic with flowers in hand. Srini, dressed as a policeman with a baton, intimidates the lovers. Praveen, reprising his role from the 2014 dance as an angel, arrives to defend the couples, who have been beaten, B et w een S creens and B o dies

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punished, and forced to bribe the policeman. When he threatens to sodomize the angel with his baton, Praveen turns his willing bum to him and smiles, refusing the stigma attached to anal penetration. During rehearsal, when the Divas have added new choreography and run a sequence from the beginning of a medley, they declare, “From the bottom!” This playful language values feminine traits instead of privileging “the top,” that is, the penetrative and purportedly masculine sex partner. In valuing femme, fat, and dark bodies, the Divas respond to tendencies in the gay community to demean and police such bodies. These phobias materialize most literally in preferences announced on digital platforms: “no girly boys,” “no femmies,” “no fatties,” “wheatish complexion pls,” “no uncles.” Varun points out that although the Pink Divas have gained immense popularity in Bangalore’s gay community, the men who won’t date or talk to them are “the men on Grindr” who can hide behind digital anonymity to criticize and shame nonnormative bodies. Natasha (a pseudonym) is nervous about his jiggling stomach on stage. Another dancer expresses anxiety over the lack of appeal of his dark skin; he joined the Pink Divas explicitly to feel sexy. Neoliberal Bollywood rarely casts fat or dark-skinned background dancers, let alone protagonists. Additionally, both costumes and choreography are delineated by binary gender; but in the Pink Divas, Sowmya and Harsh execute the same steps and share jewelry. By ignoring the embodied aesthetics (skin color, body shape, sartorial silhouette, choreography) of the media they are citing, the Pink Divas offer critique while indulging in the pleasures of the songs. Additionally, by reveling in the sexiness of their bodies, they refuse the phobic tendencies of both mainstream conservativism, as well as gender and body hierarchies in the economy of gay desire.25 A B HI SHE K S I N GH A N I A : H E E LI N G PR AXIS I’ve seen those videos, it came from west, I should go out and learn from the people who live it every day. — A BHISHEK S INGHANIA

Natasha realized the dream of performing as his childhood idol Sridevi in full drag with the Pink Divas at a Pride Mela in 2013. Narratives of childhood diva worship and returns to her choreography in adulthood are common across my research sites. This trope reappears in my interview 50

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with Abhishek—a queer dancer visiting New York City from Bangalore to study at the Broadway Dance Center (BDC)—who starts by saying, “I used to love Madhuri Dixit.” At the 2015 Holi celebration in New York City, Abhishek danced as Bollywood megastar Madhuri Dixit to her notorious Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What is under your blouse?).26 He wears a bright red ghagra (flared skirt) and a gold scarf tied over his chest like a choli (midriff exposing top). Whereas the sexual innuendo of this song is often choreographically muted in live performance, Abhishek sits on the ground, arches his back, and places the crown of his head on the floor.27 This contortion highlights his pulsing “breasts,” and the audience cheers for this sexy surprise.28 Like so many other cultural workers described here, Abhishek, who earned an MBA, left his job at a prestigious IT multinational to pursue dance as a full-time craft. As a child in Chandigarh, he took classes at Bollywood choreographer Shiamak Davar’s dance academy. In Bangalore, he auditioned for Nrityarutya, a contemporary Indian dance company. In Nrityarutya, he found creative responsibility and rigor that he had not had previously and more importantly was welcomed for his sexual orientation. Abhishek also found opportunities in the Queer Arts Movement events to perform in ways that he couldn’t with Nrityarutya: in heels. Since stumbling upon French choreographer Yanis Marshall’s viral YouTube videos, Abhishek has wanted to perform in heels. He describes strutting about in his mother’s heels as a four-year old, suggesting that dancing in heels is not only an aspiration cultivated by YouTube Yanis, but also really something closer to home. Dancing in heels is an opportunity for Abhishek to reconnect with a childhood self, as well as aspire to Yanis’s cosmopolitan sex appeal.29 With financial support from his elder brother in the United States, and a side-hustle as a server, Abhishek lived in New York City for a year taking classes at BDC. To stay in the United States, Abhishek signed a contract with an Indian dance company. Unlike many other artists I describe, Abhishek has transnational mobility; his membership in professional dance companies in India allow him to claim cultural expertise and get a cultural arts visa. But, his mobility within the United States, and even the time he has for classes, is regulated by visa and professional constraints: “I auditioned for an Indian dance company in New York and got a cultural arts visa, P-3. Because they’ve given you a visa they treat you as slaves.” B et w een S creens and B o dies

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I’ve discussed how various performance styles seen online and on television can be appropriated in queer Indian spaces. Abhishek’s immersion in repertory style dance training leads him to argue that some techniques must be learned from “those who live it everyday.” At BDC, Abhishek found hip-hop classes in heels, the queer black form of waacking, and jazz funk. His waacking instructor Princess Lockeroo introduced him to entertainer Bob the Drag Queen. Under Bob’s mentorship, Abhishek learned particular cultural references, makeup techniques, and gags for live performance—techniques he hopes to share with the queer festivals he performs at in Bangalore. But who will mentor Abhishek’s drag when he returns? When Mayamma tweeted drag superstar Bianca del Rio asking whether she would be her drag mother, Bianca responded dryly, “You’re in India! I can’t afford that kind of child support bitch!” The difference between Abhishek’s immersion in technique and training in queerly abundant New York City, and his artist hustle traveling across India to offer workshops, is a reminder that middle-class queer performance in India does not yet have an “everyday life.” Performance opportunities arise perhaps five times a year in a given Indian city, disallowing a regular honing of one’s skills and stage presence. New queer performance in India thus exists at the cusp of professionalism, always requiring innovative improvisations to bridge the distances between form and context, and often turning to the support of community members rather than the expertise of seasoned art professionals. This essay has attempted to offer a glimpse into the rare and beautiful spaces that open up for live performance, and the innovative strategies, mediated references, and syncretic aesthetics that various individuals and groups engage as a means of producing new queer performance in India. N OTE S 1. In 2009, the Delhi High Court read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, decriminalizing sodomy between consenting adults. In 2013, the Supreme Court reversed this decision following a case filed by several conservative parties. Orinam.net offers useful resources to understand Section 377. See also Arvind Narrain and Alok Gupta, Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011). 2. The plays of Chetan Datar, Sachin Kundalkar, Vijay Tendulkar, and Mahesh Dattani have been well received in major theater houses. These gay male artists, especially Dattani and Tendulkar, have also received greater scholarly attention for their work.

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3. Playing A. R. Rahman’s “Bombay Theme” invokes Mani Ratnam’s 1995 Tamil blockbuster Bombay, which depicts communal violence between Muslims and Hindus in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. 4. On gay theater, see note 3. On dance by “third gender,” trans, and nonbinary performers such as hijras, see Anna Morcom, Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion (London: Hurst and Co., 2013), chapters 3 and 6; Aniruddha Dutta, “Claiming Citizenship, Contesting Civility: The Institutional LGBT Movement and the Regulation of Gender/Sexual Dissidence in West Bengal, India,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 1 (2012): 110–141. Marches in major cities and smaller towns, inspired by a global LGBT pride movement, have performative elements including music, dance, and speeches, but fall less into the intentional and creative registers that I am describing of new queer performance. 5. I have written in detail about a performance that uses community members and friends to stage a short play as part of a series of Pride events in Bangalore. See Kareem Khubchandani, “Staging Transgender Solidarities at Bangalore’s Queer Pride,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (2014): 517–522. 6. Arundhati Roy critiques the growing art festival culture in India due to the deep collusion with corporate entities. Most of the LGBT festivals I attended, however, refuse corporate funding. See Arundhati Roy, “Capitalism: A Ghost Story,” Outlook, March 26, 2012, http://www.outlookindia.com/article/capitalism-a-ghost-story/280234. 7. See Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya, The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India (New York: Seagull Books, 2007); Ruth Vanita, Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York: Routledge, 2002); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 8. See Dutta, “Claiming Citizenship”; Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Narrain and Gupta, Law Like Love; Naisargi N. Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 9. Parmesh Shahani’s understanding of LGBT activism in India as online-offline applies well beyond his case study of Mumbai-based GayBombay. See Parmesh Shahani, Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008). 10. See Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), chapter 5. 11. The Dancing Queens’ work also qualifies as new queer performance, appealing to bourgeois norms of rehearsal and presentation but drawing on improvisational and working class traditions of hijra dance. 12. sherlockgaysi, “Transgender Rights Activist Urmi Performs at Dirty Talk (Open Mic),” YouTube, March 21, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NkJWPgLdng. 13. I reference here Lauren Berlant’s notion of “diva citizenship.” See Lauren Gail Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), chapter 6. 14. See, for example, Kathryn Hansen, “Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi Theatres (1850–1940),” in Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities, and Culture in South Asia, edited by Sanjay Srivastava (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 99–122.

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15. Gayatri Gopinath uses a regional analytic within the transnational frame of a gay and lesbian film festival to think through representations of Kerala in the film Sancharram. She argues that regionalism becomes a way of thinking about locality through and against globalization. “Queer Regions Locating Lesbians in Sancharram,” in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 341–354. 16. Kerala boasts high female literacy and employment, but also increasing rates of suicide and intimate partner violence, a friction that informs significant regionally situated scholarship. 17. Malavika Velayanikal, “These Men Are from Venus,” DNA India, 2012, http:// www.dnaindia.com/bangalore/report-these-men-are-from-venus-1754591. 18. Malavika Velayanikal, “India—They Are the Dancing Queens, Young and Queer,” actup.org., 2012, http://actup.org/news/india-they-are-the-dancing-queensyoung-and-queer/. 19. See Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), chapter 5. 20. See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), chapter 6. 21. Krupa Shandilya, “Of Enraged Shirts, Gyrating Gangsters, and Farting Bullets: Salman Khan and the New Bollywood Action Film,” South Asian Popular Culture 12, no. 2 (2014): 111–121. 22. I am drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “the social life of things.” See The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 23. Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 24. Kareem Khubchandani, “Meet the Pink Divas,” YouTube, February 17, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMHLei0QdMY. 25. See Dwight A. McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University, 2005), chapter 3. 26. For an explanation of the controversial nature of Choli Ke Peeche, see Monika Mehta, “What Is Behind Film Censorship? The Khalnayak Debates,” in The Bollywood Reader, edited by Jigna Desai and Rajinder Dudrah (New York: Open University Press, 2008), 122–133. 27. For a reading of one such performance, see Sunita S. Mukhi, Doing the Desi Thing: Performing Indianness in New York City (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000). 28. An alternate performance of the same piece can be found online. Abhishek Singhania, “Choli ke peeche choreographed by Abhishek Singhania,” YouTube, March 21, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqtV4z0mAXI. 29. See Kareem Khubchandani, “Snakes on the Dancefloor: Bollywood, Gesture, and Gender,” Velvet Light Trap 77 (2016): 69–85.

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K-pop in Mexico Flash Mobs, Media Stunts, and the Momentum of Global Mutual Recognition E r i c a Vo g e l

“Give a sexy pose. Don’t just stand there!” Angela, a choreographer of HallyuMex, one of Mexico City’s many Korean Wave fan clubs, called out to the other members at this Saturday morning K-pop dance practice.1 We were in a park in the center of Mexico City and the thirty members present ranged from age fourteen to twenty-six and were all wearing casual clothes, such as sweats or jeans. Some of them laughed in response to Angela’s serious command to “be sexy.” Apparently unfazed, Angela held up the cell phone she was trying to use as a sound system and watched as the HallyuMex members fanned out in front of her and made an effort to pose like a K-pop idol: one hip out, one hand on the hip. Angela hit Play on her cell phone, and the group began moving in synch to the K-pop girl group 2NE1’s hit “I Am the Best.” They were trying to follow the steps the stars used in the official video, and Angela frequently stopped the rehearsal to refer to the video’s choreography. Some of the members knew the moves better than others and everyone knew the first part of the dance better than the end. They sang along to a few parts of the song, including the chorus in Korean “Naega cheil chal naga!” (I am the best!) as well as some phrases in English like “Beat!” and “Oh my God.”

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I was in Mexico City to conduct research about the country’s growing fan base around the Korean Wave of pop music and films, or La Ola Coreana, as it is known in Spanish. HallyuMex were preparing for a flash mob event—a spontaneous group performance—of dances choreographed to songs by Korean pop (K-pop) groups such as 2NE1, Super Junior, Big Bang, and SHINee, that they hoped to stage in the Zócalo, the huge main square in the heart of Mexico City. Mexican K-pop fans knew the events they produced could reach other fans and the press. The YouTube video HallyuMex had posted of one of their previous flash mobs, which they had performed in front of the Monumento a la Revolución, another quintessential public Mexican space, had reached more than 114,000 views. Events they and other clubs staged had appeared in Korean and Mexican newspapers and television programs, Tweets sent by their favorite stars, or were even featured on Korean government websites such as the Korean Embassy in Mexico and Korea.net. Although recent scholarship has lamented the decline of the Korean Wave and its inability to successfully penetrate US borders and reach true global popularity, in Mexico City, La Ola Coreana is steadily gaining momentum.2 In November 2013, a concert by the K-pop group Super Junior sold out the twenty-two-thousand-seat Mexico City Arena in just one day, and subsequent concerts by groups like U-Kiss saw equal success. In 2013, to “promote cultural exchange,” Arirang TV (an English-language broadcaster in South Korea) and Televisa (one of the largest broadcasting corporations in Latin America) created a reality program for which MBLAQ, a K-pop group, went to Mexico and Reik, a famous Mexican rock group, hosted them and then traveled to South Korea to perform. Although the impact of these corporate plans is hard to measure, it dims in comparison with the growing number of Mexican fans who organize around their favorite groups, entertainment management companies, and television dramas. Mexico City has more than seventy Ola Coreana fan clubs that, like HallyuMex, do things such as discuss Korean dramas or stage flash mobs and dance competitions choreographed to the songs of their favorite Korean pop artists.3 HallyuMex is one of the larger fan groups, boasting an active online discussion forum, a Facebook page with more than sixteen thousand likes, and various events where members hang out offline. 56

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As scholars writing about the Korean Wave have pointed out, to a large extent, the global popularity of K-pop is a process that is orchestrated, funded, and promoted by various Korean entertainment companies and branches of the Korean government.4 As scholars have also pointed out, much of the work of spreading global media is done through the unpaid affective labor of fans who produce the wave of popularity through their “feelings” and “love” for the music and stars.5 However, even the most dedicated government office or powerful management corporation cannot fully control globalization or create a global fad, as evidenced by the singer Psy’s (Park Jae-sang) continuing one-hitwonder status in the United States despite efforts to capitalize on the momentum of “Gangnam Style.” I wanted to know how HallyuMex and other Mexican K-pop fans saw themselves in relation to this global Korean Wave machine. What stakes did they have in not only being the consumers of K-pop, but also arguably the coproducers of global trends through the events they created? After practicing for nearly four hours straight, HallyuMex members came over to me to talk about their club. Many lived on the outskirts of Mexico City and spent hours on public transportation just to get to the weekly practice. One young girl and her grandmother had left their house at 6 a.m. to arrive in time for the 10 a.m. practice. I asked the members why they wanted to put on these flash mobs, which took hundreds of hours in practice and travel time to produce. “It’s fun!” Many of them told me. “We want 2NE1 to know we love them!” others said. But then Mito, one of the younger members, exclaimed, “The newspapers have started talking about us!” Mito’s statement caught my attention because it summed up the reactions I heard from many different K-pop fans I interviewed in Mexico City. Club members told me proudly that their flash mobs, which by most definitions should be spontaneous and organic, were cosponsored and sometimes even made to order for the Korean Embassy and the Korean Cultural Center. Rather than feeling manipulated by the global plans of the Korean Wave machine, when fans expressed their delight at being covered by the media for their roles in these coscripted events, it highlighted the fact that they saw themselves as an important part of the machine. I suggest that the system put into place to orchestrate the global popularity of K-pop sets up the possibility for mutual recognition between K-POP IN MEXICO

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various people and entities with stakes in the rise of K-pop, including the Korean state, Korean entertainment companies, the K-pop stars, Mexican fans, and the Korean and Mexican media. I argue that it is the transnational circulation of the stories of the rising global popularity of K-pop in the media and internet formats such as YouTube that allows for this mutual recognition and acknowledgment on a global scale and fuels the excitement and events around K-pop in Mexico City. The events are simultaneously orchestrated and organic, imitations and new creations, and the fans and media alike thrive on the fact that they are individually recognized as being both the consumers and producers of the Korean Wave’s global popularity and that they can contribute a part of a global story that is still being written. Although fans do not profit financially from their affective labor, it helps them mitigate feelings of anonymity in an increasingly globalizing world by helping them forge a local community with other Mexican fans. First I discuss the reality show starring Reik and MBLAQ to explore how the global buzz around K-pop was created through transnational recognition between people in Mexico and South Korea. I also describe a dance practice session held by School Beat, an all-male group of female K-pop imitators who were hoping to win a K-pop contest sponsored by the Korean government to think about how the Korean Wave machine allows fans to be both consumers and producers. I then return to the HallyuMex flash mob practice to talk about how being a K-pop fan not only helped people participate in globalization but also became something quintessentially Mexican. For this project, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork and archival research online and in Mexico City between 2013 and 2016. I explored web pages run by the clubs and the Korean government, YouTube videos of flash mobs and other performances in Mexico, and media articles surrounding K-pop in Mexico to gather background information on the ways fans, the media and the state promoted and discussed K-pop and its popularity. I followed the production and reception of the reality show starring MBLAQ and Reik to see how fans reacted to corporations attempting to promote cultural exchange between Mexico and Korea. My research assistant, Rivelino Pacheco, a student studying art and cultural history at the Universidad Autonoma de la Ciudad de Mexico, knew people from his days as an online member of Little Monsters (fans of Lady Gaga), who had recently turned away from US pop 58

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stars and started posting links on social media focused on K-pop. Through these contacts, I set up several interviews with the K-pop fan community.

A poster advertising K-pop dance classes at Frikiplaza in Mexico City. Photo by Erica Vogel.

In Mexico, I spent ten days in January 2014 interviewing forty-five people and attending various K-pop events. I observed one flash mob dance practice by HallyuMex, a K-pop dance class, and a dance practice held by School Beat. I also used the contacts I had made with Mexican citizens during fieldwork in South Korea to set up an interview with a Mexican woman who had traveled to Korea in the mid-2000s after becoming a fan of the Korean drama Jewel in the Palace. Her interview helped me see how La Ola Coreana had gained momentum and changed over time. Finally, through snowball sampling and visiting places such as El Barrio Coreano (Korea Town) and Frikiplaza, a multistory shopping plaza in the center of Mexico City filled with booths specializing in both original and pirate copies of East Asian pop cultural commodities, I gathered more interviews and data. I conducted K-POP IN MEXICO

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all interviews in Spanish with a few Korean and English phrases sprinkled in when applicable. B ACKG ROUN D : M E X I C O A N D KO R EA

Although in recent years K-pop has become popular in many parts of Latin America, including Peru and Argentina, Mexico is a particularly interesting place to explore the spread of a global trend because of the global distance and similarities between Mexico City and Seoul. Some studies argue culture flows more easily from the more to the less powerful countries. South Korea and Mexico, however, have comparable economies (ranked thirteenth and fifteenth respectively). Further, Seoul and Mexico City are both enormous, cosmopolitan city centers that lead the cultural trends of their countries and regions. The Seoul capital area has a population of 25.6 million and the greater Mexico City population of 21.2 million is the largest of any metropolitan area in the western hemisphere. Hallyu’s success in Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and other markets since 2002 marks South Korea’s entry into the arena of global media. Mexico, however, is firmly established as one of the world’s most powerful producers of global Spanish-language media.6 The music, telenovelas, and films produced there are consumed worldwide. Many Spanish-language artists who have now become global superstars, such as Shakira (from Colombia) and Ricky Martin (from Puerto Rico), gained momentum after first launching their international careers in Mexico. Although Americans are fond of thinking that culture spreads from west to east, and imagine that things originating in the west, such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks, define globalization, that was never the case. The rise in the global popularity of Japanese cultural items such as sushi and Hello Kitty both challenge a west-east model of globalization, and highlight the importance of “recentering” the ways we think of the relationships between global cultural producers and consumers.7 Mexican fans and the interaction they have with the Korean government and media not only recenter globalization, but also show that the center is constantly under construction. K-pop gains momentum not only as it moves transnationally, but also as its momentum is witnessed and acknowledged by fans, the media, and government entities in different global locations. 60

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GL O B A L P ROJE C T S

It was not just the Korean government and entertainment companies that saw K-pop as a tool for globalization; the Mexican K-pop fans I interviewed saw their fandom as part of a global project as well. They contrasted their level of devotion, worthiness, and organization as fans with the efforts of fans from two other countries—the United States and Peru. They were annoyed that more K-pop groups had performed in Peru than Mexico because they thought Peruvian fans were disorganized and ill behaved. They had seen them on various fan forums and watched news pieces about them online. They also disapproved of US K-pop fans, who they saw in concert footage posted online. “They just sat there and watched. I would have been screaming!” Lourdes, a sixteen-year-old HallyuMex member, told me. Aware that I was from the United States and perhaps not wanting to hurt my feelings, they would qualify their criticisms by saying that not all US citizens were problematic, but that the dominant image they had were of mochileros (backpackers), whom they described as poor, unbathed, long-haired hippies who wandered aimlessly around Mexico. Their descriptions showed they thought US fans were the antithesis of the image they had of the well-behaved, perfectly coifed K-pop stars and the fans who emulated their images. When I asked my interviewees why they wanted to put on flash mobs, participate in dance competitions, and buy original CDs and posters, some said it was for fun; others said they wanted to impress groups like 2NE1 so they would decide to come to Mexico and give a concert, but all wanted to put Mexico on the map in South Korea. The sentiment also appeared in some of the comments written under a YouTube clip of the reality show produced by Arirang TV and Televisa of Reik visiting Seoul in the company of MBLAQ. One commenter wrote in Spanish, “How cool to know Mexico is also recognized in Korea. And not just the United States, like usual.” Writing in English, another commenter wrote simply, “This make [sic] me so proud to be Mexican.” The Mexican K-pop fans I interviewed liked K-pop not because they had limited access to domestic music or other global products—in contrast most talked about liking Mexican, US, and Japanese artists first— but because it allowed them to expand their knowledge of and K-POP IN MEXICO

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participation in what I term the “global realm.” I use global realm to refer not to globalization in general, but to the ways people understand the global world as it relates to themselves. My use highlights the fact that people have varying levels of knowledge of and access to places in the world based on their personal connections, and that the different connections we have make up what we think of as the global world.8 Elsewhere I have used global realm as a way of analyzing how undocumented migrants map out the world and rank destinations that are profitable, prestigious, dangerous, or impossible for them to reach from where they are in the world.9 In the case of K-pop fandom in Mexico, I saw how learning about Korean culture as it was presented by K-pop stars, in dramas and by branches of the Korean state located in Mexico City, gave Mexican fans a chance to discover the music and a new world behind it and to essentially place South Korea in their understanding of the global realm. When I asked what people thought of Korea, multiple interviewees told me they hated Korean military conscription—a two-year obligation for male Korean citizens—because it took their favorite stars away. They sought out the specific brands of ramen noodles, coffee drinks in a can, and other snacks they saw people consume on dramas. They spoke admiringly of how they thought Korean men were kinder and more effeminate than Mexican men. One woman who had been a fan of Jewel in the Palace had even traveled with her friend to Korea in the early 2000s in search of Korean boyfriends. “Of course we found out that the men in Korea are not like the Korean men in the dramas,” she told me. She told me how her friend, whom she described as short, overweight, and having a dark complexion, was treated very unkindly in Korea. However, most Mexican K-pop fans I spoke to had never been to Korea and knew only a few Korean words. Some of the girls from HallyuMex were taking Korean-language class at their high school, and many of the people I talked to had signed up for culture classes at the Korean Cultural Center. The mothers of HallyuMex members were surprised to hear that I had lived in Korea and told me they dreamed of sending their daughters there to study. They were going to look into the scholarships offered to Mexican students by the Korean Embassy. In writing about the circulation of K-pop, Sun Jung argues that part of K-pop’s appeal in global markets is its ability to be both culturally 62

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specific (to be very Korean) and a global Korean export at the same time.10 Jung uses the Korean term chogukjeok, meaning trans- or crossnationality, to describe how boy bands use “versatile masculinities” to gain such widespread global appeal.11 The boy bands’ masculinities are both undeniably Korean and yet have little connection to a normative Korean masculinity.12 I find that for Mexican fans of K-pop, it is not only an interest in the chogukjeok blend of Korean cultural specificity and global hybrid that makes K-pop exciting, but rather the ways K-pop serves as a symbol of an emerging world in their global realms. Further, the ways the Korean Wave machine was set up to respond to their fandom (by not only providing the cultural material but also consuming their flash mobs, Tweets, and ticket sales), Mexican fans became coproducers of the story of K-pop’s globalization and therefore Korea becomes a place in their global realm that was still being constructed and is full of potential. O R G A NI C A ND O R C H E S T R AT E D : M B LAQ AN D R EIK

The reality show with MBLAQ and Reik was an excellent example of a project that was orchestrated by media networks but constructed differently by the fans who watched it in Mexico in the hopes that their favorite groups would note their devotion. The show was produced by the networks in conjunction with KOCCA (Korea Creative Content Agency), a government agency that promotes Korean culture abroad. In an interview with Reik in Seoul, the hosts of an Arirang TV news program introduced the program as a reality show meant to “promote cultural exchange between the two countries.” The host introduced the band and said, “You’re here to promote your music. But you’re also here with a mission to promote the Korean Wave back in Central and South America, right? Tell us more about this two-way project that you’re working on.” Jesús Navarro, Reik’s lead vocalist, replied in English: Well, the networks came up with it. They sort of picked us to come on this trip and sort of show the guys from MBLAQ around back home in Mexico City. . . . We’ve never been to Asia before, let alone Korea. . . . We hear it all the time that we have a lot of cultural similarities between Korea and Mexico and I feel that the K-pop movement is huge in Mexico and so we’re trying to bring a bit of our stuff here.13

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After watching this interview and footage of the shows and concerts of Reik in Korea, I was curious what the Mexican fans would say about the shows. The footage of Reik performing in a Korean shopping center shows a bored audience, its members looking as if they were waiting for the next act. When I asked a member of School Beat about the show, he said, “We decided to support MBLAQ so they [Korean entertainment companies] would send more groups.” What I kept thinking about after fans gave their tepid review of the show was Navarro’s opening quote from his interview on Arirang TV: “The networks came up with it.” The fans were not excited about the show itself and definitely did not care about MBLAQ, a group that was popular in Korea but not in Mexico. Everyone I interviewed said they had watched the show to demonstrate to Korea that they were good, supportive fans who were worthy of more significant groups coming to give concerts. They had supported this orchestrated show of cultural exchange not because they had been manipulated into becoming fans of MBLAQ, but because they wanted to get the attention of other groups, such as Girls’ Generation. In trying to stand out for being good Mexican fans, they had molded themselves into something akin to the image of the perfect, docile Korean subject that anthropologist Swee Lin Ho argues the K-pop machine tries to produce in South Korean youth through things like K-pop schools.14 Their hopes of being in the global realm of the K-pop stars could be aided by the Korean government, which, while promoting the globalization of K-pop to a domestic audience also provided the mutual recognition the fans desired. For example, Korea.net, a web portal promoting the Korean government, published various articles about the popularity of the Korean Wave in Mexico that focused not only on the efforts of the fans but also on the coverage of the fans by the Mexican press.15 One such article was titled “Korean Wave in Mexico Hotter than Tropical Weather” and discussed a sold-out U-Kiss concert in Mexico City.16 The Korean story contained a photograph of the front page of El Universal, a newspaper in Mexico City, on the day it featured a story of U-Kiss with a headline (in Spanish) that read “The Korean Wave Has Arrived.” What this article did was essentially send out a message over the internet that the South Korean government was acknowledging Mexican fans for acknowledging South Korea. This and other articles 64

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like it set up the channels for the mutual recognition that fans looked for. When Mito from HallyuMex told me that they had been featured in the press, it was within these circular transnational media and government channels of stories about the story of La Ola Coreana. Mito and the other K-pop fans were both creating and consuming the connections and events that we think of as globalization. O R I G I NA L I MI TAT IO N S : S C H OO L B E AT

One group of fans who garnered some fame in the Mexican media for their success at imitating K-pop groups was School Beat, the group of eight men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five who were hoping to win a spot on Music Bank, a show broadcast by the Korean Broadcasting Company (KBS) by imitating Korean girl groups. They got so good, that in January 2014 they were invited to perform the song “Bang!” by the girl group After School on ExaTV, a music video cable television network popular with young adults in Mexico City. They wore masculine versions of the sexy red military-style outfits worn by After School in their official video. Their modified version consisted of a red vest top with gold cord and white tassels on the shoulders and black pants. They followed the moves from the video

Dance practice with cover group School Beat. Photo by Erica Vogel.

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exactly but did not try to present themselves as women. This was not a humorous imitation but a serious endeavor to honor the music and choreography. In an interview conducted backstage before the show, Gabriel, the leader of the group said, “This is like a dream. It’s my first time stepping on a stage, and [on live TV] no less. I am very excited and feel proud to be doing this with people who I know are going to give as much as I do.”17 As Gabriel’s statement makes clear, perhaps the most important thing the K-pop machine gave Mexican fans was the ability to find each other. They had formed the group after finding each other online through K-pop forums. Some of them had first learned about K-pop through friends, others through using the imported Korean Pump It dance machines popular in Mexican arcades, and another had worked at a store that sold Korean films. All were surprised to find other people in Mexico City who also liked K-pop. One School Beat member became emotional during our group interview. “I didn’t have any life before,” he said. “Three years ago, I found K-pop and friends at the same time. After that it was pure Pump It, pure songs, pure SHINee. And then I learned more and more.” As he said this, the other members sitting near him hugged him reassuringly. I attended one of their weekend rehearsals at a dance studio located in the southernmost part of the city. They paid $20 weekly to spend three hours in the studio, which had walls of mirrors, ballet bars, and a disco ball. Rivelino and my husband Omar and I watched as they danced to songs such as “Hush” by Miss A, and “SNSD” by Girls’ Generation. Although none of them were trained dancers, they looked— having the appropriate clothes and haircuts—as if they could pass for K-pop stars. One member had dyed his hair blue and another red. They were also very serious about getting the choreography exactly right. Whenever they disagreed about a particular move, they gathered around an iPad and watched the original video that was the ultimate decider on what was right. Manuel, one of the members, said, “The style of the music is coordinated so that they reach perfection with each song. It’s all about having a perfect technique.” They were trying to replicate this in their cover performances. When I asked them how they had chosen to cover girl groups rather than boy bands, they said they did it to stand out. “We saw online that girls always imitated the boy bands,” one explained, referring to the 66

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many videos of Mexican fans performing flash mobs to boy bands. “So, we thought, why can’t we cover the girl groups?” They hoped covering girl groups would help them be unique in a global competition like the K-pop World Festival where K-pop cover-groups from around the world were invited to Korea to compete. An all-female group from Mexico had gotten pretty far in the 2013 competition, and Ryan, a solo competitor who imitated the singer Rain, had nearly won the 2015 competition in Changwon. Although that competition was yet another joint effort between KBS and the Korean government to globalize the Korean Wave, I do not see School Beat’s efforts to cover Girls’ Generation as a sign that the strategy had succeeded as planned. Rather than trying to be an exact copy, they wanted to stand out for having a unique take on the process of imitation. When writing about the relationship between globalization and subjectivities, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff used the term “dubbing culture” to explore how gay and lesbi Indonesians came to understand their own subjectivities through contact with global media.18 Rather than adopting a Western gay identity, he found that his interlocutors dubbed an alternative soundtrack of their personal and localized experiences onto images they saw in the media. In aspiring to participate in this orchestrated global event of the K-pop World Festival, School Beat was “dubbing” a global culture of masculinity and fandom. They had used the format of K-pop and the Korean Wave machine to expand the “versatile masculinities” popular in K-pop by challenging gender stereotypes.19 Their largest interest in being K-pop fans, however, was not to understand Korea, but to find a local group where they felt they belonged. GL O B A L F E TI S H E S : C AT H O LI C S A I N T S AND K-P O P P O S T E R S

For many of the groups I observed, being a K-pop fan not only helped people participate in globalization but was also becoming something quintessentially Mexican. This was true of the HallyuMex fan group. At first I thought it would be easy to spot them at their flash mob dance practice at a public park in the center of Mexico City. I had felt certain a group of people dancing in unison to cranked-up Korean pop music would stand out in this neighborhood park in January. However, it K-POP IN MEXICO

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turned out they had forgotten their usual sound system, which was a mochila de bocina, a backpack outfitted with an amplifier and car battery that they had modeled after those used by peddlers selling pirate CD compilations of Mexican music in the metro. So, not only were they quiet, they almost blended in with the other groups in the park arguably doing even more spectacular things than K-pop dancing. For example, near the metro station a group of people played long animal horns like trumpets, some women danced in a circle with tambourines, and a group of middle-aged men and women twirled flags in formation. Only after twenty minutes of wandering from club to club did we finally find the HallyuMex rehearsal. The most notable aspect of locating them was that within this park, which traditionally provided free space for the public to gather, K-pop fandom did not feel very foreign. We approached a few mothers and grandmothers of the younger members. Standing on the edges of the plaza watching the practice, they held their dancers’ school bags, which were covered with buttons that had images of Seungri and G-Dragon from Big Bang printed with text such as “I love U-Kiss” and “I love 2NE1.” One of the bags had a Doraemon doll, an animated blue cat from Japanese manga, attached to it. The mothers and grandmothers knew all the songs because they watched their videos at home with their children. The fairly large range of ages participating in the HallyuMex practice was something that I saw at many of the K-pop events I observed—including fan meetings, K-pop dance classes and at stores. Just as Yoshitaka Mori found in his study of Japanese housewives who watched the Korean drama Winter Sonata with their daughters, K-pop fandom seemed to be a great leveler of difference.20 It united Mexicans from different parts of the city, different social classes, ages, and genders as they worked together to learn about K-pop and Korean culture and to create things that would attract the attention of their favorite stars. When we asked whether their children’s fandom had affected their lives, one of the grandmothers said, “She takes down my saints so she can put up her K-pop posters!” We all laughed at the thought of her fourteen-year-old granddaughter clearing off a shelf that can be found in many Mexican homes, which typically displays figurines of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Saint Judas, to make room for a Big Bang poster. Another mother with two daughters at the practice told us she could understand why there was not enough space in the woman’s house for 68

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the saints. Her daughters had K-pop themed T-shirts, socks, CDs, and posters, all imported from Korea. They bought them at Frikiplaza, the shopping center in the center of Mexico City that had booths selling cultural items from East Asia. One of the vendors at Frikiplaza told us their sales of Korean items had dramatically increased in the past year, overtaking the Japanese pop items that used to be in demand. Both women and men of all ages came in to buy items, and 90 percent of what they sold was merchandise for the boy band Super Junior, who had recently played a sold-out show in Mexico City. Like the saints, the original CDs and posters fans bought were like fetishes, or inanimate objects that people believe hold a special power to do things or cause things to happen. Both the store owner in Frikiplaza and fans told us that pirate K-pop CDs were available in Mexico City markets, but true K-pop fans only wanted to buy original items imported from Korea. This marked a significant difference in price given that pirate CDs cost about $1 each and imported CDs cost between $35 and $50. However, fans told us they wanted to show their support to their favorite artists by making the sacrifice to purchase the original CD. Doing so made them feel as if they were getting the mutual recognition they hoped for from the K-pop stars they supported. They fetishized the original CD as a thing that not only marked their global belonging, but might bring also about the individual recognition they desired. Many Mexican fans I interviewed saw K-pop as an intriguing package of catchy music with a few English lyrics that let them piece together the meaning of the song, attractive artists with exciting and stylized dance moves, and an underlying Korean culture they could become knowledgeable of through the stories they followed in Korean dramas. Being Mexican fans in the Korean Wave machine allowed them to not only include Korea in their global realms, and potentially be recognized by their favorite groups, but also—and more important—forge new connections with others in Mexico. Despite an undeniable level of orchestration in the Korean Wave, the real momentum behind its global popularity comes from the excitement of feeling recognized for being an important individual in a global world filled with anonymity. Fans followed stories in both the Mexican and Korean press about Mexican flash mobs and the rising popularity of K-pop in Mexico, and these stories were being produced, monitored, and consumed by various actors working both independently and K-POP IN MEXICO

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simultaneously, including Mexican fans, K-pop stars, Korean entertainment companies, the Korean government, and Mexican and Korean media. The momentum for these stories came from the way they circulated transnationally between Mexico and Korea. The Korean Embassy would ask a fan club to put on a flash mob, the Mexican media would cover the flash mob, and Korea.net would cover the story of the Mexican press covering a story about K-pop in Mexico. This system set up to promote K-pop established lines for the mutual recognition and acknowledgment that fans were looking for. Under the Korean Wave machine, globalization became a mix of organic and fake, but the fans willingly contributed their affective labor because they were aware they could contribute to a part of the global story still being written. In this globalization machine they are recognized as producers and consumers, self-promoters, and people in search of recognition. N OTE S I thank my research assistant Rivelino Pacheco, who helped me locate and interview K-pop fans, navigate Mexico City, and find answers to my myriad follow-up questions. A special thanks to our interlocutors in Mexico for showing us the Ola Coreana by welcoming us into their club activities, dance practices, and afternoon CD shopping trips. Omar Pacheco, Seo Young Park, and Erin Hayes’s insight guided me at various stages of the project. 1. I have used pseudonyms for all groups and interviewees in this chapter except for School Beat, whose members wanted to use their real names. 2. This was prior to the rise of BTS (the Bangtan Boys) in the United States and elsewhere. Kyung Hyun Kim, Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Doobo Shim, “Hybridity and the Rise of Korean Popular Culture in Asia,” Media, Culture & Society 28, no. 1 (2006): 25–44. 3. Nayelli Lopez Rocha, “Hallyu y Su Impacto en la Sociedad Mexicana,” Estudios Hispánicos, Asociación Coreana de Hispanistas 64 (2012): 579–598. 4. Swee Lin Ho, “Fuel for South Korea’s ‘Global Dreams Factory’: The Desires of Parents Whose Children Dream of Becoming K-pop Stars,” “Special Issue on Korean Wave: Coming to Terms with Academia,” Korea Observer 43, no. 3 (2012): 471–502; John Lie, “What Is the K in K-pop? South Korean Popular Music, the Culture Industry, and National Identity,” “Special Issue on Korean Wave: Coming to Terms with Academia,” Korea Observer 43, no. 3 (2012): 339–363; Shim, “Hybridity and the Rise.” 5. See Andrea Muehlebach, “On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2011): 59–82. 6. Mark Pedelty, Musical Ritual in Mexico City: From Aztec to NAFTA (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

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7. Theodore C. Bestor, “How Sushi Went Global,” Foreign Policy 121 (2000): 54–63; Christine R. Yano, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 8. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 9. Erica Vogel, “Ongoing Endings: Migration, Love and Ethnography,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 45, no. 6 (2016): 673–691. 10. Sun Jung, “K-pop Beyond Asia: Performing Trans-Nationality, Trans-Sexuality and Trans-Textuality, in Asian Popular Culture in Transition, edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons and John A. Lent (New York: Routledge, 2013), 109–129. 11. Jung, “K-pop Beyond Asia,” 109. 12. Lie, “What Is the K in K-pop?” 13. Arirang TV, 2013. 14. Ho, “Fuel for South Korea.’ ” 15. Arirang TV, “K-pop Thrills in Mexico,” December 19, 2011, http://www.arirang. co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=123780&category=2. 16. “Korean Wave in Mexico Hotter Than Tropical Weather,” Korea.net, 2013, http://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/Culture/view?articleId=109746. 17. School Beat: Back Stage @ ExaTV, YouTube, July 16, 2014, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=DZG5jHcg7wI. 18. Tom Boellstorff, “Dubbing Culture: Indonesian Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities and Ethnography in an Already Globalized World,” American Ethnologist 30, no. 2 (2003): 225–242. 19. Jung, “K-pop Beyond Asia.” 20. Yoshitaka Mori, “Winter Sonata and Cultural Practices of Active Fans in Japan: Considering Middle-Aged Women as Cultural Agents,” in East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave, edited by Beng Huat Chua and Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 127–141.

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4

Making the Past Present Intertextuality and Pastiche in Bollywood Neo-Noir Gohar S idd iqui

Sriram Raghavan’s Johnny Gaddaar (Johnny the Traitor, 2007) is bookended by a repeated scene shown in grayscale at the beginning of the film and in color at the end. The black and white pre-credit scene evokes the atmosphere of classic noir. The night and rain create claustrophobic effect as a police van patrols the area. A car hurtles through the empty streets and screeches to a halt in front of a gated house; a man runs out to the garage door; very slowly, a hand holding a gun materializes in the lower right corner of the frame and fires several shots; and the man’s body convulses against the half-opened garage door and falls to the ground moments before the garage door comes crashing down. The frame is then suffused with blood-red color that streams down the garage door and the name of the film is emblazoned across the screen, now saturated with a red haze. This scene’s monochromatic rendition gives way to a contrasting burst of color in the credit sequence that follows. The neo-noirish red filters and the tint that gives the images a gritty illustrative look are combined with the music and style of credits reminiscent of 1970s Hindi films. The music recalls the kind of score that accompanied chase sequences in the action-masala films of the past and complements the montage containing shots from Vijay Anand’s Johnny Mera Naam (My Name Is Johnny, 1970) and Jyoti Swaroop’s Parwaana (Moth, 1971). The fonts and the languages (such as the Urdu titles) also 72

serve as reminders of pre-1990s films. But the visual style resembles transnational neo-noir discernible in Quentin Tarantino’s and Guy Ritchie’s films and draws attention to the filmmaker’s craft. Stylistically as well as textually, Johnny Gaddaar revels in announcing its intertextuality with international noir, including Hollywood, as well as from past Hindi cinema. Raghavan’s cinephilia and affection for noir and neo-noir genres and auteurs is obvious in the visual style of the film. The film begins with a dedication to “crime thriller maestros, Vijay Anand and James Hadley Chase.”1 Even though it is not a remake, Johnny Gaddaar can be placed in line with other neo-noir influenced films produced by Bollywood after 2000. In this chapter, I argue that the shift from unacknowledged remakes of neo-noir films like Kaante (Sanjay Gupta, 2002) to the self-reflexive intertextuality in hatke films like Manorama Six Feet Under (Navdeep Singh, 2007) and Johnny Gaddaar displays Hindi film industry’s shifting relationship to borrowing from other cinematic texts. This particular trajectory allows me to pay attention to shifts in the industry from liberalization to the post-liberalization decade, which affect the way the films represent their worlds. Further, all three films are influenced by noir, a genre known for its promiscuous intertextuality and travel across international industries. Thus, even as they acknowledge the Hollywood influence, these films also complicate any hierarchy between Hollywood and Bollywood by foregrounding the transnational borrowing that is part of any global industry, including Hollywood.2 DIF F E RI NG RE GI S T E R S

All three films are influenced by noir, but they register the influence of their source texts differently, in ways representative of the industrial context within which they were produced. Kaante follows the plot of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) very clearly but still Indianizes the characters by providing personal and familial motivations that justify the characters’ actions.3 On the other hand, Manorama Six Feet Under and Johnny Gaddaar offer intertextual acknowledgments of the texts that influence them. The cinephilic imagination of the two directors here and the nod to the source texts set these films apart from most Hindi remakes until this time.4 I do not see these films as evidence of a progressivist development in Bollywood, but instead as examples of M aking the Past P resent

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what is called hatke cinema—a sort of auteurist alternative to Bollywood mainstream that, at the same time, is made possible by and profits from the corporatized changes within Bollywood. The self-reflexivity about the borrowing puts these films in the realm of pastiche. Kaante is an unacknowledged remake of Reservoir Dogs and goes through what Tejaswini Ganti calls “(H)Indianization” to indicate the transformation into codes and conventions of Hindi cinema based on how the filmmakers understand their audiences, or audience fictions.5 Ganti’s qualification of Indianization is different from the one expressed by scholars such as Rosie Thomas. Thomas focuses on the sets of codes and conventions that underwrite Hindi cinema and the filmmakers follow while remaking a film, such as the addition of emotion through song and dance and melodrama, adding familial aspects to shift from the individualism of Hollywood cinema and paying attention to codes of gender that support connotations of Indianness. Ganti’s formulation, though it supports Thomas’s ideas, also allows for incorporating shifts and changes within the industry especially as the link between Indianness and Hindi cinema weakens as well.6 On the other hand, Manorama Six Feet Under and Johnny Gaddaar make obvious through intertextuality their homage to different films. Kaante’s Indianization involves the addition of song and dance numbers and expansion of plot to include backstories for the characters, both of which function to justify plot and character motivations for the heist and create audience sympathy for them by depicting them in a network of human relationships. However, the manner in which Gupta translates Tarantino’s film questions the Indianness of the codes of Hindi cinema. Gupta adapts the story to Bollywood standards, but he also adds aspects that Westernize it. Kaante is thus an example of remaking in the cross-cultural context where the remake tries to profit from the newness of foreign storylines rather than get rid of the alien aspects in the cultural transformation. The film introduces the idea of a Hollywood-style-Bollywood gangster film for its globalized Indian audience. Remaking Tarantino’s film was a risk for Kaante’s filmmakers because of how inconsistent it was with Bollywood film style. However, this inconsistency is not just a product of a different subject matter; it is also a product of the filmmakers’ decisions in trying to make the film have the look and feel of Hollywood. Most remakes until Kaante had gone through what Caroline Durham calls “transformation” into the 74

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new culture by being stripped of the host culture.7 Kaante, however, uses the remake to bring in the foreignness as a selling point. In interviews before the film’s release, the principal actors in the film repeatedly mention its newness and its difference from usual Bollywood productions. Mahesh Manjrekar, who plays Baali, indicates the audiences’ changing tastes: “It is difficult to predict whether this film will do well. Who knows? People might like it. It is not a typical hero/heroine film; it is not what people are used to. But then people have been rejecting films they are used to, so it might succeed.” Sanjay Dutt, who plays Ajju and is also a producer of the film, talks about the slump in the industry, which, he argues, is because of lack of change in the product: “Let us not forget every Hollywood film is now dubbed and shown in Tamil, Telugu and other regional languages. So Indian audiences know what international standards are all about. . . . We made Kaante because we believed the audience was ready for a Hollywood kind of action thriller.”8 The gangster genre allows for the depiction of stunts and fights that function as attractions within Hindi cinema. However, the film also revels in the mimicry of Hollywood-esque deployment of technology and spectacle. It uses a lot of pans, slow-motion shots, jump cuts, brief black and white snapshots, and CGI effects that often become excessive. Multiple scenes demonstrate how the filmmakers understand the Hollywood style. Like other Hindi films trying to achieve a globalized look, Kaante has characters who often speak in English (and indeed the diegesis often requires them to); it uses American actors for nonmajor roles; it models the heist after Hollywood films rather than transforming it into masala in the manner of Hindi films; and even the gang’s attire, complete with sunglasses and black clothes, can be interpreted as code for Bollywood-doing-Hollywood. Thus both the film’s story and its visual style mimic international or Hollywood genres because of the audience fictions the producers create. The idea of remaking as Indianization therefore loses meaning in the film’s connection with any idea of Indianness because it includes a simultaneous Hollywood-ization but retains that connection to appeal to the filmmaker’s understanding of audience’s changing desires. This approach to audiences and to remaking (although neither the director nor the actors ever acknowledge that it is a remake) explains the resultant schizophrenia in the film. M aking the Past P resent

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Neelam Sidhar Wright notes that in Kaante, the Indian film industry’s fantasy of ‘being Hollywood’ is realized in order to eliminate its Western superior. This form of mimicry is thus a symptom of the remake’s ambivalent feelings of adoration and abhorrence towards its predecessor—its intimacy and distanciation, valorisation and denial, and ultimately, its disavowal of its counterpart.9

Considering that the filmmakers never acknowledge that the film is a remake, disavowal of the source text is certainly part of the remaking process here. Although I agree with Wright, the film goes beyond mere mimicry in its translation of Hollywood-like effects for a Bollywood film. The film’s plot—the Indian gangsters taking over the Los Angeles (LA) underworld—can be seen as a metaphor for what the film is blatantly doing: remaking a Hollywood film, setting it in LA (the home of Hollywood), and doing so without acknowledging its influence. The Hollywood-izing attempt is very clearly there to attract audiences fed up with the usual way Bollywood tries to hail transnational audiences, hence the effort to make the film transnational not only in its diegesis but also in its production. This transnationalization is a symptom of the changes within the industry, the filmmaker’s understanding of changing audience desires, and the changes in the target audiences that prompt filmmakers to take these kinds of risks. In that way, the film is “ ‘seared’ by its immediate context” and “foregrounds a crisis of representation” between Indian and Western and Bollywood and Hollywood.10 Yiman Wang borrows the idea of searing from Walter Benjamin and expands it to argue that a film is imprinted by its geopolitical ambiguities and contradictions in an allegorical manner.11 Kaante is similarly imprinted by the conflict between older and newer cinematic forms in the transitional period where Bollywood is becoming corporatized and globalized. THE C O RP O R AT I Z AT I O N E FFE C T

Kaante exemplifies the beginning of changes within Bollywood in what is now being called as the post-liberalization period in India. The corporatization of the industry in 1998 started having an impact on films after 2000. This period has been affected by the growth in multiplex 76

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cinema and changes in how filmmakers understand their audience demographics. More Hollywood films started getting released in India because of the multiplexes that open up in urban and upscale areas. Legitimizing financing and industry and Bollywood’s subsequent attempts to transnationalize itself also attracted foreign companies such as Fox and Sony to invest in Bollywood productions. Although the industry is still not corporatized and controlled by media conglomerates in the same way as Hollywood, it maintains standards that allow for transnational productions. These changes have led to a shift in the kinds of films produced. Tejaswini Ganti argues that the multiplexes and international distribution of the films make more money, thereby undercutting the need to make an “All-India hit.”12 Instead, the filmmakers can target only the urban and overseas centers for their profits. The films that are produced do not need to appeal to rural or working-class audiences. The majority of film productions, therefore, increasingly incorporate a liberal use of English and tend to reflect urban elite tastes. These changes in the industry and its products amplify the degree of negotiation between the local and the global particularly as it pertains to cultural hegemony of national film industries such as Hollywood. At one level, the interest of Western global companies such as Fox and Sony indicate that Bollywood is a contender in the global market. Simultaneously, however, an uncritical validation of Western interests ignores how it recreates the hierarchy in which these companies, symbolizing Hollywood, are superior to Bollywood. Furthermore, economic control of production by powerful Western companies through mergers contain the ever-present threat of neocolonialism. Finally, the resultant impact on the form of the Hindi film and its disassociation with the masses refigures the local as not national but part of what Gustavo Esteva and Madhuri Prakash call the one-third world.13 Chandra Mohanty explains the validity of First World/North/West and Third World/South/East categorization as necessary to understand the history of colonization and its impact. This historical context is central to the ways in which Hollywood is a representative of Western cultural imperialism, and Bollywood is then in many ways what Wang calls a subaltern cinema that articulates its resistance by claiming global power and questioning Hollywood’s status as the only player.14 However, the transnational power of Bollywood makes it a participant in neocolonial regimes of global capitalism. M aking the Past P resent

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The simplistic association of Bollywood with Indianness fractures as it becomes representative of both the local and the global, where it simultaneously seeks to represent the local but thanks to its corporatization, largely represents the global one-third. At the same time, these changes in the industry also make it possible for experimentation by auteurs, enabling them to move away from inherited Bollywood codes and their ideological moorings in the idea of the nation. Directors such as Sriram Raghavan, Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap, and others have been making films that are considered as part of a niche cinema called hatke cinema. Meaning “alternate” or “different” cinema, hatke films are a little offbeat, often critical of social issues that mainstream filmmakers do not consider profitable, and that are unlike mainstream Bollywood cinema even though, industrially, they still are part of Bollywood and made possible by its circuits of production and reception. Ian Garwood, talking about the increase in songless Bollywood films, argues that “the boom in multiplex cinemas in India’s cities in recent years has made viable a ‘commercially successful parallel cinema’ whose ‘natural’ constituency is taken to be a new urban middle class.”15 Hatke cinema is part of popular cinema but tends to come closer to Western styles of filmmaking even though it is more grounded in local issues. Many hatke cinema directors are products of film schools, venerate certain known Indian and international directors, and are dedicated to the craft. Their films are often selected for international festivals and appeal to international cinematic communities.16 In fact, if Bollywood is defined as Ashish Rajadhyaksha defines it—that is, if Bollywood is both more than just cinema and also a subset of Indian cinema, and remains the “export lager” of Indian cinema—then hatke cinema, though decidedly dissimilar to the usual Bollywood productions because of its commitment to the art of film, is still squarely part of Bollywood cinema.17 Therefore, even though Manorama Six Feet Under and Johnny Gaddaar belong to the category of hatke cinema, the ways in which they borrow from mainstream Bollywood and their circulation in the international market as part of Bollywood requires that they should be analyzed as part of Bollywood even as they resist its hegemonic style. In addition to Kaante then, Manorama Six Feet Under and Johnny Gaddaar are examples of hybridity between Bollywood and Hollywood and can be seen as attempts at cross-overability into the Western market.18 78

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CI NE PHI L I A , I N T E RT E X T UA L I T Y, A N D PAST ICH E IN H ATKE CI N E M A

Tarantino’s response to Kaante is central to understanding this crossindustrial negotiation. In an interview at the LA film festival, Tarantino responded to the film: “Here I am watching a film that I’ve directed, and then it goes into each character’s background. And I am like Whoa! That’s something. . . . I LOVED IT. I think it was fabulous. Of the two rip offs I loved are Hong Kong’s ‘Too many ways to be number one’ and this one—‘KAANTE’.”19 Tarantino’s response is crucial here as an alternative interpretation of the unacknowledged Hindi remake, which has often been seen as an example of stealing and plagiarism. Tarantino’s pleasure at the remaking of his film can be attributed to the fact that his own films are cinematic homages to films that have influenced him. Reservoir Dogs is a pastiche of at least twenty-three known sources that Tarantino admires—one of which Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, which, David Dresser argues, is the direct precursor to Reservoir Dogs. A master at the genre of neo-noir, which is known for borrowing and pastiching, Tarantino celebrates the borrowing that is a widespread cinematic practice and even underwrites economic categories of all mainstream film industries, whether it is through genres, sequels, or adaptations. Tarantino’s position here needs further analysis for its location in this cross-cultural circulation from Hong Kong cinema to Hollywood, when he remakes City on Fire, and then from Hollywood to Bollywood, when his film is remade by Gupta. In both cases, he presents himself as the author and auteur. While discussing Tarantino’s Asia-philia in his films like Kill Bill, Leon Hunt argues that his cinephilic recreations are both reverent and aggressively territorial, and thus bear the mark of the colonizing oppressor.20 Kill Bill is highly citational and nods toward its sources even if they become an undifferentiated collage of cultural influences and end up revealing his orientalist cinephilia. As problematic as his cultural appropriation might be, Tarantino acknowledged his love for Asian cinemas in his later films, but despite close similarities in plot and even certain shots in the film, he initially rejected the claim that Reservoir Dogs was a remake of City on Fire. Instead, he and his fans emphasized the originality of Reservoir Dogs. His refusal to acknowledge influence is a move about power where Hollywood productions are viewed as superior and original in relation to non-Western cinema. M aking the Past P resent

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Kaante borrows the plot of Reservoir Dogs (which is the plot of City on Fire) but then embellishes it with more subplots and is therefore an adaptation. Tarantino’s benevolent attitude toward this remake, then, is double edged. At one level, it indicates his awareness of intertextuality and borrowings across cinematic borders. At the same time, though, his response is extremely problematic because he considers Kaante a film that he has directed. His refusal to admit to the influence of City on Fire on his own film and then to claim Kaante as his own reproduces the hierarchies of cultural imperialism that are at the center of remaking in a transnational context. Manorama Six Feet Under and Johnny Gaddaar hold very different relationships to Hollywood sources than Kaante does and therefore reveal different political responses to the transnational negotiations of power that remakes articulate. Both films are marked by cinephilic appropriations of noir and neo-noir aesthetics, although in markedly different ways. Manorama Six Feet Under strongly bears the influence of Polanski’s Chinatown and has a glimpse of Kiss Me Deadly. Johnny Gaddaar displays the combined influences of the genre of the neo-noir heist/caper film and the crime thrillers of past Hindi cinema. Both films are short, have a tight and linear storyline, and do not include any song and dance numbers. Although these characteristics make them more appealing to a Western audience and these films can be argued to be following a Hollywood style in their refusal to follow the Bollywood formula, they are quite different from the spectacle-ridden Hollywood style that Gupta tried to accomplish in Kaante. Moreover, both films foreground the relationship between the local and the global that have extra-diegetic implications. Manorama Six Feet Under eschews the Bollywood glitz and glamor of urban or diasporic life in favor of representing the issues of abuse and corruption in rural India. A review of Singh’s film on Rediff.com ends by celebrating the film as a remake: “Forget originality Jake, this is Chinatown. This is a noir tribute where fans of the original will have seen it all before, yet sit through this freshly-developed retelling with a smirk on their faces, the kind of smirk that understands why a Chivas and soda could work with daal-baati churma.”21 The smirk on the fans’ faces is possible only if they are familiar with Polanski’s film and the way in which it borrows from Hollywood and Bollywood cinemas. That Chivas whiskey and soda, which are Western, can work with dal-bati 80

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churma, a local dish from Rajasthan, indicates the hybrid seamlessness the film creates between the global and the local, and between Hollywood and Bollywood. The website for Manorama Six Feet Under characterizes the film as “an homage to the noir genre,” and the film strongly bears the influence of Polanski’s Chinatown in particular. The adaptations to the plot, the translation of the visual daylight-noir of Polanski, and the intertextual invocations establish the film as a loose remake, and more importantly, as a pastiche of noir. Multiple instances remind the viewer of Chinatown and Kiss Me Deadly, thus establishing Singh’s self-reflexive evocations of the genre. Unlike Kaante, in which the interruptions are related to the disjunctions created in bringing the Hollywood style to bear on the Bollywood style, Manorama Six Feet Under is marked by cinephilia through selfreflexive intertextuality. The film is also an homage to Polanski; Singh inserts a scene that indicates his love for and his debt to Polanski’s film: in Satyaveer’s home, Chinatown plays on a television in the background, specifically the nose-slitting scene where Polanski plays a cameo. The scene functions at multiple levels. In the remake, the plot detail is different—Satyaveer’s fingers are broken rather than his nose slit—but the insertion of this scene from Chinatown clinches his similarity with Polanski’s hero, Jake Gittes. Moreover, despite being an intertextual homage to Polanski’s film, this scene betrays Singh’s debt to Polanski himself. By showing these levels of intertextuality within the film, director Singh uses the presence of the auteur Polanski in his film to point his finger at what is not seen—himself as an auteur. Johnny Gaddaar revels in cross-cultural cinephilia as well. The opening shot of the film, discussed earlier, establishes Raghavan’s love for classic Hollywood noir and neo-noir. Raghavan, along with other wellknown hatke cinema directors such as Anurag Kashyap, worked under Ram Gopal Verma, who is known for making films in the Bombay noir genre. Johnny Gaddaar, however, evokes Hollywood noir through its visual style and combines that with the style of older Hindi cinema. Although Gupta used his cinephilia for neo-noir and Polanski to tell a story that is about a village in India, Raghavan’s cinephilia extends to Hollywood as well as to past Hindi cinema. The film constantly announces its intertextuality with numerous sources from both industries. Monika Mehta questions the hegemony of Western cinema (Hollywood in particular) M aking the Past P resent

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and suggests alternative transnational exchanges between India and other non-Western countries such as Israel through cinephilia, which she traces back to France.22 These factors are relevant to the remaking and pastiche in which Manorama Six Feet Under and Johnny Gaddaar are involved. Noir, as a genre, was belatedly recognized as such on the basis of French love for these particular Hollywood films, which already bore influences of German expressionism and Italian neorealism. Furthermore, French films like Godard’s Breathless are a pastiche of and homage to the genre. Therefore, noir is a genre that from its beginnings does not categorically belong to any one industry and is instead transnational. The cinephilia connected with noir in particular is also associated with auteurism. Manorama Six Feet Under and Johnny Gaddaar’s use of noir and neo-noir thus problematize neocolonial hierarchies because they indicate Hollywood as just one user of an international and intertextual genre. Moreover, given that noir privileges the director as auteur, these films give these filmmakers positions of authority over the genre even if they pay homage to their Western influences. Finally, both films emphasize the importance of the non-Western local in the context, the setting, and the past of Hindi cinema. As homages to noir, Polanski’s film and Singh’s version are marked by the sickness and decay of the system. Their noirish heroes, Jake Gittes and Satyaveer Singh, themselves flawed, try to fight the system but end up failing. Satyaveer Singh is a failed writer able to produce only one pulpy novel, reminding viewers of the pulp fiction roots of classic noir. Stylistically, too, the film translates Polanski’s noir. But diegetically, Manorama Six Feet Under adapts the story within Hindi cinema sensibilities—a small town in Rajasthan replaces Los Angeles, Satyaveer is given a family, the water crisis is transformed into drought and corruption in Rajasthan, and a theme of pedophilia is introduced. In Johnny Gaddaar, rather than remaking a film closely and retaining elements of a plot, Raghavan uses pastiche to equate his sources that are noir, neo-noir, Vijay Anand’s films, Swaroop’s Parwaana, the style of Hindi films from the 1970s, and James Hadley Chase’s pulp fiction. The film quotes from other films, in which scenes from still other films are often contained within screens that function as mise en abyme. It is a film overloaded with television screens that play Hindi films and Hollywood films: the characters continually reference and discuss other films; the noir hero Vikram gives a false name Johnny at a motel because 82

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Vijay Anand’s Johnny Mera Naam is playing on a television screen at that moment; and the central action of the film is borrowed from Parwaana, which Vikram happens to be watching while eating dinner. Johnny Gaddaar has a neo-noir visual style that exceeds the narrative motivation and adds a comedic strain to the corrupt and bleak world. For example, the expressionist use of the color red to indicate the cynical violence and the theme of betrayal often becomes ironic and parodic. Similarly, the wipe cuts, split screens, and numerous low-angled shots often draw attention away from rather than add to the diegetic impact of the scenes. They do, like much neo-noir, display love for film language— for the spectacle of editing and cinematography as connected with the genre—and therefore, they draw attention to the auteur. Like neo-noir, Johnny Gaddaar remembers its past and arguably traces its beginnings to the crime thrillers of Vijay Anand. It ignores and bypasses the Bombay noir produced by filmmakers like Ram Gopal Verma in the 1990s, however. Bombay noir represents the gritty Bombay underworld and uses the noir style to represent the city. Johnny Gaddaar keeps reminding the audience of the presence of the cities by zooming in on the signs that herald their names at airports or train stations, but the actual city does not really figure in the film. The interior shots present a world that is too bright and plastic. The exterior shots are murkier and more in line with the noir aesthetic, but even then it seems like the characters inhabit a hermetically sealed, even fake world. There is little connection between the world these characters inhabit and the larger world of the city. Furthermore, the comedic strain of the caper and the faux-ness of this world bring the film closer to the style of Guy Ritchie, whose films are an example of what Steve Chibnall calls “gangster light.” As opposed to heavy films, “Light” films “encourage a more distanced viewing position . . . where authenticity,” Chibnall claims, “is replaced by pastiche.”23 DISTA NCE D V I E WI N G

In remaking or pastiching neo-noir, all three films discussed here create a distanced viewing position for the audience. Therefore, perhaps Fredric Jameson’s critique of neo-noir can be extended to these films because the pastiche they present is emptied of space and time.24 But I prefer to use Richard Dyer’s approach to pastiche for the kind of work M aking the Past P resent

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the film is actually doing. For Dyer, pastiche imitates its idea of what it imitates and is critical because it makes obvious its imitation.25 Although Kaante may distance the viewer in trying to adopt the Hollywood style, which becomes excessive, it does not display its awareness of pitting together the two industrial codes of Hollywood and Bollywood. Manorama Six Feet Under creates self-reflexivity through intertextuality, and Johnny Gaddaar constantly plays with its audience’s awareness of Hindi cinema as well as of noir and neo-noir. Unlike noir, form in Johnny Gaddaar is not at the service of the narrative but instead often ruptures the narrative. In fact, in Johnny Gaddaar, the primary pleasures are those of intertextuality and pastiche rather than of narrative and immersion. Thus, at one level, these pleasures are very much a selfreflexive intellectual practice that break free of the ideological narrative constraints. But at another, they are sensory pleasures connected with cinephilia. Pastiche here provides the pleasures of repetition through cinephilia. Lalitha Gopalan lists multiple sources of influence in the film to exclaim, “How does one read a film that reads itself at every turn, at every twist pulling in a set of quotations that delights and frustrates a cinephile?”26 Although neo-noir potentially tends to draw viewers in an interpretive rather than immersive engagement with the film form, Johnny Gaddaar imposes and exponentially increases the spectatorial cerebral interactivity because, in its hyperaware references to local and international cinematic texts, it politicizes its borrowings within ideological contexts of cultural imperialism. However, it is not just a distanced position that is critical; instead it is affective. Johnny Gaddaar revels in love for all of its sources, and its pleasures lie in the visceral experiences these references invoke in the viewer; therefore the film is simultaneously about readinginterpreting and feeling. The act of reading is central to its experience and thus the film positions a viewer in simultaneous intellectual-reading and sensory-feeling position. The film is thus a cinephilic montage of quotations that, borrowing from Greg Singh, can be said to articulate affectively the subtleties and complexities of cinematic encounter between the viewer and the viewed.27 Singh argues elsewhere about the connection between cinephilia and affect: “the aspect of experience through memory and pleasure raises some interesting questions concerning the role of nostalgia in the mediation of affective responses.”28 The pleasures of repetition that Johnny Gaddaar provides to its audiences are mediated 84

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through nostalgia. The containment of many of these cinephilic instances within television screens remind the viewer viscerally about the experience of watching that film. It is that experience of watching past Hindi cinema, of being an Amitabh Bachchan fan, that take precedence over the stylistic citations that reference international neo-noir. The film, then, foregrounds not just the centrality of the films but also the history of watching those films. Dyer emphasizes throughout his book, “pastiche makes it possible to feel the historicity of our feelings.”29 Johnny Gaddaar invokes deep affect for the films it pastiches. The affective memory serves as a forceful reminder of the importance of older Hindi cinema when the newer forms (including that of Johnny Gaddaar) seem to be threatening its makeup. This use of pastiche then foregrounds the complex relationship between the newer emergent forms of contemporary Bollywood cinema and that of past popular Hindi cinema. Furthermore, Raghavan’s (and Singh’s) authorial intentionality is explicit in his cinephilic engagements with local and global texts of noir and crime films. Therefore, the pastiche he presents is a complex articulation of transnational cinematic flows and the position of Hindi cinema within it. It is a playful celebration of intertextual cinephilic influences; it is anxious about the form of emergent Bollywood that is seemingly moving closer to westernized forms; it is a solid acknowledgment of Hindi cinema’s distinction from, instead of incorporation within, the genre of globalized international noir; and it advances an argument in which past Hindi cinema is presented as equally valid, if not more so, than Western products as aesthetic and cinematic texts. N OTE S 1. James Hadley Chase is a British pulp fiction writer whose works were very popular in India. 2. The term “Bollywood” has a contentious history. I use it for the most part to indicate post-1990s Hindi cinema films. However, later in the chapter, I also complicate ideas of Bollywood to include the transnational and corporatized aspects of Hindi cinema, which is again a subset of Hindi cinema. 3. “Indianization” is a term used by Indian cinema scholars such as Thomas to explain the cultural makeover of Bollywood remakes. Tejaswini Ganti qualifies “Indianization” as “(H)Indianization” by discussing it in terms of filmmakers and audiences, which is discussed later in the chapter. See Rosie Thomas, “Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity,” Screen 26, no. 3–4 (1985): 116–131; see also Tejaswini Ganti, “And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited

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by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 281–300. 4. Most Hindi remakes, many of which were produced in the 1990s, borrow loose structure from their source texts, Indian-ize them if they are remakes of international or Hollywood cinema, and do not engage in a cinephilic relationship of reverence toward the source text. Remakes of Hollywood cinema such as Pyaar to Hona Hi Tha (Anees Bazmee, 1998) and Agnisakshi (Parto Ghosh, 1991), and so on not only translate the plot but also transform the cultural contexts so that the remake is attendant to issues that will be relevant to audiences of Hindi cinema. Pyaar to Hona Hi Tha adapts Lawrence Kasdan’s French Kiss (1995) within the genre of the Bollywood family films that deal with the Indian diaspora; Agnisakshi translates the issues of domestic abuse from Joseph Ruben’s Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) within the Indian context as well. Kaante is similar in its lack of acknowledgment of specific source texts but it is different because, though it does Indianize, at the same time it maintains and even exaggerates the Hollywood style through special effects and use of CGI in action sequences. 5. Ganti, “And Yet My Heart,” 281–283. 6. The trajectory of popular Hindi cinema since India’s independence reveals how it has participated in the ideological construction or critique of the nation, thus Thomas’s argument about Hindi cinema’s codes that are implicated in the national imaginary. In the 1990s, the popularity of family films that often dealt with the Indian diaspora reemphasized certain cultural codes of gender and family in the reformulation of Indianness. Post-2000 films, for the most part, moved away from this genre and the explicit invocation of Indianness. For further reading, see Sumita Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 7. See Caroline Durham, Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their American Remakes (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998). 8. “I Am Too Old to Be Wild,” Rediff Movies: Kaante Special, 2002, http://www. rediff.com/entertai/2002/dec/18dutt.htm. 9. Neelam Sidhar Wright, “ ‘Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.? . . . Indian!’: Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-Cultural Bollywood Remake,” Scope 15 (2009): 169. 10. Yiman Wang, Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood (Honolulu: Hawai‘i University Press, 2013), 11. 11. Wang, Remaking Chinese Cinema, 11. 12. Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 7. 13. Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 226–227. 14. See Wang, Remaking Chinese Cinema. 15. Ian Garwood, “The Songless Bollywood Film,” South Asian Popular Culture 4, no. 2 (2006): 170. Not to be confused with the Indian parallel cinema marked by the likes of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, these films nevertheless have certain similarities with them. The new hatke cinema songless films often do the rounds in the film festival circuits, such as those of Ray and Ghatak, which show their cross-cultural appeal and their potential to be crossover films. But unlike the parallel cinema filmmakers where the neorealist style of Ray or the disjunctive style of Ghatak was used in

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the service of social critique, hatke cinema remains a bit limited to the art and to the popular. 16. Garwood, “Songless Bollywood Film,” 170–173. 17. Quoted in Adrian M. Athique, “The ‘Crossover’ Audience: Mediated Multiculturalism and the Indian Film,” Continuum 22, no. 3 (2008): 299–311. Athique discusses Bollywood films as ambassadors of India’s global ambitions: By Rajadhyaksha’s definition, the Bollywood culture industry does not encompass India’s small art, or “parallel”, cinema nor the regional-language cinemas which constitute the bulk of film production on the subcontinent. Even as a sector of Hindi cinema, the Bollywood brand excludes the lowbudget comedies and vigilante films which constitute the majority of screenings. Instead, Bollywood is defined by the high-budget, saccharine, upper middle-class melodrama which represents a tongue-in-cheek repackaging of the masala movie within an affluent, nostalgic and highly exclusive view of Indian culture and society. These productions are consciously transnational and have been increasingly saturated with product placements for global consumer fashions and multinational sponsors. See Ronald Inden, “Transnational Class, Erotic Arcadia and Commercial Utopia in Hindi films,” in Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India, edited by Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher (New Delhi: Sage, 1999), 41–66; Ravinder Kaur, “Viewing the West through Bollywood: A Celluloid Occident in the Making,” Contemporary South Asia 11, no. 2 (2002): 199–209. So, if Bollywood is not Indian cinema per se, it might be adequately described as the export lager of Indian cinema (given that it is Bollywood productions that now dominate India’s film exports), thus becoming centrally positioned as the trademark Indian film industry. See Athique, “ ‘Crossover’ Audience.” 18. Fox producers at a conference (“What’s New in Indian Cinema?” June 2011, University of Westminster, London) ferociously argued that Bollywood films are so different from Hollywood that they will never be able to gain the attention of audiences brought up on Hollywood unless the form changes. The response to this suggestion was that Bollywood does not need to change to sell to the West because its popularity lies in its distinctive form, which is different from that of Hollywood. Popular Hindi cinema, including Bollywood, has enjoyed international success (in Africa, Russia, the Middle East, and so on) for years now and does not really need the Western mass audience (Nasreen Munni Kabeer). Although all this is true, some filmmakers do try to tap into the international markets without letting go of the domestic and diasporic markets. The rise of the multiplexes just makes it easier for filmmakers who want to sell Hollywood-ized Bollywood because their target audiences are presumably already familiar with Hollywood cinema. 19. Srinivas, “The Quentin Conversation,” Naachgana, September 23, 2007, http:// www.naachgaana.com/2007/09/23/the-quentin-conversation. 20. See Leon Hunt, “Asiaphilia, Asianisation and the Gatekeeper Auteur: Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson,” in East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, edited by Leon Hunt and Leun Wing-Fai, 220–236 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). 21. Raja Sen, “Manorama: A Well-Executed Thriller,” Rediff India Abroad, September 21, 2007, http://www.rediff.com/movies/2007/sep/21man.htm.

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22. Mehta traces the term “cinephilia” back to France in the 1950s and connects it with transatlantic passages between Europe and the United States. See Monika Mehta, “Reading Cinephilia in Kikar Ha-Halomot/Desperado Square, Viewing the Local and Transnational in Sangam/Confluence,” South Asian Popular Culture 4 no. 2 (2006): 148. 23. Steve Chibnall, “Travels in Ladland: The British Gangster Film Cycle 1998– 2001,” in The British Cinema Book, edited by Robert Murphy, 281–291 (London: British Film Institute, 2001). 24. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). 25. Richard Dyer, Pastiche (New York: Routledge, 2007), 124. 26. Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI, 2002), 506. 27. Greg Singh, Feeling Film: Affect and Authenticity in Popular Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2014), 12. 28. Greg Singh, “The Kitsch Affect; Or, Simulation, Nostalgia and the Authenticity of the Contemporary CGI Film,” in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, vol. 2, edited by Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 193. 29. Dyer, Pastiche, 130.

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PART II

Relocating Stardom

This section begins with a brief account of two key positions in star studies before discussing transnational stardom. It does so to underscore that the question of location is pertinent not only to the subfield of transnational stardom but also to theories of stardom. Hollywood has been the central location for theorizing the emergence and development of stardom. The frameworks and critical vocabulary on stardom that have emerged from this industrial location have occupied a prominent place in film and media studies. The initial scholarship on Hollywood stars approached this topic from semiotic, sociological, and economic perspectives, showing the cultural, ideological, and material implications of stardom.1 We offer here an outline of two valuable methodological lines of inquiry that have generated much discussion, debate, and scholarship. Richard Dyer’s Stars advanced semiotic analysis by inviting scholars to look beyond the screen to sites of production, marketing, and reception to examine the construction of a star image. Dyer explains that “[a] star image is made out of media texts that can be grouped together as promotion, publicity, films and criticism and commentaries.”2 In other words, a star image is a coauthored work produced by the industry, the star, media, and fans. Dyer’s later work reflects on how sexuality, gender, and race shape discourses of stardom in Hollywood, but he does not theorize how the national, transnational, or global affect stardom.3 89

Alongside and sometimes in opposition to Dyer’s framework, the materialist perspective argued that scholars needed to attend to the monies, technologies, and labor force involved in the production of stardom.4 According to Barry King, a key figure who has both supported and furthered this analysis, stars were a crucial part of a Hollywood studio system, which quickly discovered that certain actors could draw audiences, and then worked to harness and reproduce this lucrative attraction. Thus, stars and stardom became part of an industry logic. Film technology, marketing, and promotion have been mobilized to produce stars and stardom. A star performance, therefore, has not been simply a product of actor’s skill or labor, but also a coauthored work dependent on camera, editing, and short duration of shots. A star actor has been a laborer whose (limited) skills, physical attributes, and personality generated a performance as well as a commodity. Stars became vital to wooing audiences, film distributors, and film financiers. More recently, King’s work shows how digital platforms have spatialized and further commodified stardom. In an era of advanced capitalism, the star gives way to the celebrity who accrues fame through skillful marketing and presentation of self on digital and social media.5 In what ways are the contexts of A-list Hollywood productions and analyses of (white) American film stars and (white) American celebrities both generative and limiting? To what extent are the frameworks envisioned by Dyer and King able to cross over nation-state borders or even domestic boundaries? According to Dyer, the general image of stardom in Hollywood is a version of the “American dream, organized around the themes of consumption, success, and ordinariness. Throughout, however, there is an undertow that, as it were, ‘sours’ the dream. In addition, marriage, love, and sex are also constants.”6 The themes Dyer mentions are present in Bombay cinema, but the dyad of family-outsider has played a critical role both in defining star images and in structuring industrial logic.7 Much has been written about the superstars Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan’s success in the Bombay film industry despite the fact that they were outsiders, that they had no godfathers to launch them, that they were not part of informal industrial networks that paved their entries into films. More recently, the “self-made” iconoclast actress Kangana Rangnaut’s charge of nepotism against the established director-producer Karan Johar spurred a series about professionalism, fairness, equity, and family-friendship obligations in Bombay cinema. 90

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The importance of family to industrial logic is visible from the beginnings of Indian cinema. The much-revered Dada Phalke’s production Raja Harishchandra (1913) was a family production in multiple ways. Phalke used his money and pawned his wife’s jewelry to obtain monies for the film; his family members also starred in the film. Unlike in Hollywood, family and family lineage have a played a significant role in generating and maintaining the star system. In post-economic liberalization, the discourse of genealogy has become more forceful as a way of extending and maintaining the star system in the Bombay film industry.8 Family and social networks are also vital modes for organizing star discourses in South Korean media. Unlike Bombay cinema, where kinship and social connections are highlighted and mobilized, here the corporation adopts the role of parental figure that manages the star’s personal and professional life. While on screen, in stage shows, on photo shoots, or in advertisements, Hallyu stars might adopt rebellious, subversive, or ill-mannered personas, but their off-screen identities are carefully tailored and regulated to show respect for social and moral norms in South Korea. This divergence in their off- and on-screen personas enables their success at home and abroad. Aurality is also critical to stardom in both Bombay cinema and South Korean media. Whereas in Hollywood, stardom was primarily structured around the actor, in the context of Bombay cinema, the playback singer not only assisted in producing the “visual star” but also was a star in their own right. This context compels us to ask a few questions: Have discourses of consumption, sexuality, ordinariness, or the family-outsider dyad been as crucial to describing as well as creating the “aural” star? What technologies have been deployed to create the aural star’s performance? What have the contributions of musicians, composers, lyricists, sound recorders, and sound editors been to this performance? Given that King primarily speaks about visual technologies in constructing stardom, we might also ask how sound in multiple facets (music, dialogue, sound effects) structures a visual star’s performance. The presence of songs in Bombay cinema also compels us to think about new forms of labor as well as ties to music industries that have not played as prominent of a role in Hollywood’s development as a film industry. The aural also plays a crucial role in South Korean media. Entertainment agencies train and produce boy and girl bands and solo singers who release albums, perform in stage shows, and croon for K-dramas. R el o cating S tard o m

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Perhaps the most notable feature of the South Korean entertainment agencies is the production of multifaceted stars who sing, act, dance, and model so that they can work in music, film, television, and advertising. Moreover, promotions and publicity underscore that Hallyu stars learn words and short sentences in other languages so that they can greet and engage with their transnational fans. On a final note, although King speaks of the rise of the celebrity and the waning of the star, both fan and industrial discourses in Bombay cinema and South Korea media show that though celebrities have emerged, stars and stardom endure. In this digital era, performers delicately traverse the star-celebrity channels. Scholarship on transnational cinemas has emphasized the role of locations in shaping the production, distribution, and reception of stardom. Studies have pointed to traditions of performance as well as gestural and narrative codes in producing stars. This scholarship has focused on how stars become representatives and ambassadors of nations, showcasing select national features. National stars’ personas are not isolated but develop in relation to and in conversation with transnational industrial and cultural contexts. This is amply visible at film festivals, awards ceremonies, and interviews. The rich and vibrant scholarship examining film and media consumption in diverse locations, coproductions, global genres, remakes, film festivals, blockbusters, diasporic films, online streaming, and subtitling (to name just a few) has provided valuable insights on film as a transnational object. More recently, this scholarship has turned to consider the role of stardom in the production and dissemination of transnational cinema. In the process, it poses and pursues various questions: How do different industries regulate and produce transnational stardom? What are the functions of transnational stardom? Why and how do stars gain transnational fame at particular historical junctures? Who becomes a transnational star, and whose fame remains within local or domestic boundaries? How do industrial inequities structure the reach of stardom? How do transnational stars navigate the different and uneven scales—local, national, regional, global—and terrains—cultural, aesthetic, industrial, social, virtual? How do new technologies contain or propel transnational stardom? In the introduction to their edited collection, Transnational Stardom, Russell Meeuf and Raphael Raphael note that “stars continue to function as a kind of currency of cross-cultural exchange, the most visible 92

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(and visibly marketed) icons of the many transnational industries at work.”9 Their formulation alerts us that stars are simultaneously bearers of economic and cultural value. Later, as they call for moving beyond semiotic and discursive analyses to consider the “emotional and visceral appeal of stars in the context of globalization,” they also draw our attention to stars’ affective value.10 Given that our interests in media as fan-scholars has been nourished and fueled by stardom, we also wish to support such inquires with the caveat that these inquiries into affective appeals would be underdeveloped if they did not consider how corporations and industries mobilize and channels such emotions. Capitalism does not need to be totalizing. We can certainly think about the different valences of affective, cultural, and economic values, but we also need to think about the ways stars and celebrities are made available to us. The essays in this section explicitly and implicitly navigate the theoretically terrain outlined above. New lines of inquiry surface by positioning and reading them in relation to the arguments discussed. Heijin Lee examines what has been Hallyu’s most global cultural phenomenon to date, South Korean rapper PSY’s (Park Jae-sang’s) “Gangnam Style” tracing the complex trajectory of PSY’s musical stardom, and thereby bringing aurality to the fore as a key component of his fame. Lee’s contribution is an instructive reminder that transnational encounters involve tensions, affinities, and divisions. PSY attracts American listeners because his music incorporates African American musical styles, but his interviews also clarify his political stance against US militarism in South Korea. Unlike previous figures of Asian masculinity within the American imaginary, PSY has captivated Americans in ways that provoked both mimicry and parody. Lee thus both illuminates new ways of thinking about transnational and transcultural masculinities within the cultural milieu of the United States, and reminds us that the travels of Asian stars do not parallel the trajectories of white American stars. Her argument invites us to use gender as well as political inequities as vital lenses that shape the formation and reception of transnational stars. By reading PSY as a modern-day trickster who, at the height of his US success, bore witness to the militarist amnesia surrounding the United States and Korea vis-à-vis his anti-US military controversies, Lee’s essay underscores that stars do not simply function in economic or cultural spheres, they can actively embody, signify, and speak political value. R el o cating S tard o m

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Like Lee, Praseeda Gopinath explores the reconstruction of male stardom, pointing to how the male star is an agent rather than simply a cog in the wheel of the star system as described by King. Often in the context of film generally and star studies more specifically, the transnational is identified with coproductions or work in multiple industries. Gopinath’s essay reveals that in the contemporary era where ideas, images, and goods move swiftly along diverse platforms, stars do not need to move to another location to become transnational. Rather, the star’s local context is already engaged in and informed by transnational exchanges and interactions. In this vein, she closely examines Bombay film star Ranveer Singh’s star image, showing how transnational circuits of taste and masculinity generate a contradictory star narrative. These competing discourses simultaneously cast Singh as “vulgar” and “depraved” and as an “epitome” of high fashion, and “modern” sensibilities. Gopinath’s work intervenes in King’s arguments by showing that discourses of capitalism are not homogeneous. Instead, as the divergent responses to Singh illustrate, they encounter a fissured national space, divided along lines of class and gender as well as caste, ethnicity, and religion. Singh’s appropriation of and play with high fashion as well as his sophisticated staging of gender and sexuality off-screen shows his familiarity with elite cosmopolitan culture as well as his deftness at maneuvering the star-celebrity continuum. However, these proficient performances of what King calls “representation” and “presentation” are derisively dismissed by the middle class. This response to Singh is a consequence of a different, but perhaps, equally, coercive gendered taste culture, which views Singh’s cutting-edge performance as a failure of masculinity. Singh’s status as an industry outsider who does not know how to behave properly off-screen coupled with his on-screen persona as a vulnerable and incomplete man bolsters this reading. Akshaya Kumar invites us to situate male stardom in an industrial context. He examines the Bombay film industry’s recent efforts to move away from wooing Western audiences to consolidating its domestic base. Kumar’s astute analysis points to the parallels between domestic and international strategies to reach broader audiences; it shows that Bombay cinema’s strategies cannot be viewed only with respect to the transnational, but need also to take the domestic into account, given India’s very large and profitable domestic base. Moreover, his essay reminds us that the Indian national space is heterogeneous, filled with a 94

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variety of commercial cinemas, among which Bombay is one, and not necessarily always the most powerful one. Anticipating the discussion in the section, “Not Crossing Over,” Kumar point to the role of the regional in Bombay cinema’s current transformation. To entice domestic audiences, Bombay cinema turns to its regional rivals (and, at times, allies), the Tamil and Telugu cinemas, which have been far more successful at keeping their domestic base as well as extending their reach. Kumar shows that in Telugu and Tamil cinemas, the figure of the male star functions as supplement and at times, supplanted by the spectacular (special effects, locations, extravagant song sequences). As the mise en scène of Telugu and Telugu cinemas is adopted by Bombay cinema, the male star looms larger and the female star’s role is reduced, and at times, overtaken by “item girls” whose sensual performances in song sequences often threaten to overshadow the female star.11 Kumar’s essay underscores that the star system is gendered, thereby complicating King’s formulations. Moving our attention to the role of fans in constructing stars, Layoung Shin shows that though imitating male idols, South Korean female fans identify as queer. Shin’s work illustrates that fans are not simply passive consumers, and processes of identification do not follow a straight, normative path. In this case, the female fans’ queer gaze disrupts formation of male stardom, scattering, and multiplying desire in its wake. Moreover, Shin’s essay shows that queer cultures and communities are formed by and re-form local cultures, identities, and spaces; they do not simply mirror a homogenous, global gay culture. Often the local and the global are cast as binaries; however, in reading Shin’s essays, we can see that sites of culture are negotiated and contested in both local and global exchanges. All the essays add to and advance a dynamic discussion of gendered transnational stardom. N OTE S 1. Elena D’Amelio, “Stardom,” Oxford Bibliographies: Cinema and Media Studies, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo9780199791286-0060.xml. 2. Richard Dyer, Stars, 2nd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 60. 3. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (London: Routledge, 1990); White (London: Routledge, 1997); The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002).

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4. Barry King, “Articulating Stardom,” Screen 26, no. 5 (1985): 27–51; “Articulating Digital Stardom,” Celebrity Studies 2, no. 3 (2011): 247–262; “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Moral Economy of Pretending,” in A Companion to Celebrity edited by P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 315–332; “The Star and the Commodity: Notes Towards a Performance Theory of Stardom,” Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (1987): 145–161. 5. Barry King, “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form,” Velvet Light Trap No. 65 (2010): 7–19. 6. Dyer, Stars, 39. 7. Neepa Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 8. In addition to family discourses, political value has also organized industrial logic, stardom, and representation in India, especially Tamil and Telugu cinemas as shown by M. S. Pandian and S. V. Srinivas in their works. 9. Russell Meeuf and Raphael Raphael, introduction to Transnational Stardom: International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture, edited by Russell Meeuf and Raphael Raphael (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2. 10. Ibid., 6. 11. Akshaya Kumar develops a generative argument about female stardom in the following piece on item girls. “Item Number/Item Girl,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40 no. 2 (2017): 338–341.

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The Politics and Promises of “Gangnam Style” S. He i j i n L e e

During the second half of 2012, South Korean rapper PSY’s (Park Jae-sang’s) viral hit “Gangnam Style” set a world record for Most Liked YouTube Video, garnering more than four million likes and 1.5 billion views worldwide just that year.1 Such global notoriety saw PSY making guest appearances on mainstream American talk shows such as The Today Show and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Most notably, he closed The American Music Awards with a performance with American rap icon, MC Hammer. Indeed, PSY had managed to infiltrate US airwaves—and the homes of millions of Americans—in a way that no other Korean pop star has despite Hallyu’s pop cultural dominance in Asia over the last fifteen years. Although to some those six months and the endless repetition of “hey sexy lady” they brought with them seemed as if they would never end, in December of 2012 American media outlets interrupted our love affair with PSY by breaking news of his anti-American protest scandal. PSY, media outlets revealed, had been involved in anti-US military protests in both 2002 and 2004. To many Americans who had embraced his campy video and the horsey dance that goes along with it, the image of PSY as an angry protestor seemed incongruous with his comedic persona. Accordingly, media correspondents vocalized

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such reactions, Matt Lauer of The Today Show stating, for example, “It’s going to change people’s opinion of him, no question about it.”2 Just two months prior, PSY had appeared on the show, performing “Gangnam Style” not once but twice in front of a live audience in Times Square, the correspondents dancing alongside him onstage. Would these transgressions, media correspondents wondered, affect PSY’s popularity in the United States? Almost instantaneously, PSY issued an apology for his “deeply emotional reaction” against the US military.3 Despite this controversy, however, he went on to perform at the White House Christmas party and scored a coveted Super Bowl commercial worth upward of $4 million.4

PSY appears on The Today Show. Frame enlargement of NBC broadcast.

Although “Gangnam Style” may seem like a one-hit-wonder now, some years after the fact, this chapter reads the song’s momentary ubiquity and PSY’s global popularity through a transnational feminist cultural studies lens that seeks to recuperate PSY’s political power and significance for the Asian American community. PSY’s anti-American controversy may have seemed at odds with his comedic persona, but his political power as a cultural producer and a cultural product, I argue, lay in his ability to embody and illuminate such contradictions in a US context. These inconsistencies signify the ambivalent relationship between South Korea and the United States: PSY as a cultural phenomenon arose because of the imperial relationship between the two countries. Indeed, PSY’s cultural commentary and trajectory of success 98

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animates the relationship, one forged of and sedimented by the Cold War but deeply complicated by South Korea’s emerging status in the present global order as a capitalist “subempire.” What can we salvage from pop culture and what does our (guilty) pleasure have to do with politics? Using PSY as a transnational case study, this chapter attempts to answer these broad questions by first situating PSY within a framework of familiarity. Contrary to popular characterizations of him as strangely foreign, this essay situates him within the context of the US-Korea neocolonial relationship to contend that part of what prolonged his popularity was his affective familiarity. That is to say, PSY’s artistry in part is constituted from this geopolitical history. Understanding it as such helps illuminate the contours of US empire and how it travels through transnational channels of pop and pleasure. Then, after reading “Gangnam Style” as a social critique, this chapter returns to the anti-American controversy to propose that PSY is better understood as a modern-day trickster whose politics lie in the contradictions he illuminates. PSY’ s FA MI L I AR D I FFE R E N C E

In September of 2012, a Mother Jones article explained PSY’s popularity: “PSY is the ‘Asian man who makes it’ because he fits neatly into our pop cultural milieu wherein Asian men are either kung-fu fighters, Confucius-quoting clairvoyants, or the biggest geeks in high school.”5 The article further situates PSY among Asian male popular cultural figures such as Long Duk Dong and William Hung, the former having entered American consciousness as a foreign exchange student in the 1984 teen comedy, Sixteen Candles, and the latter beginning his fifteen minutes of fame in 2004 when he poorly but unabashedly sang “She Bangs” during an American Idol audition. Aside from highlighting US tendencies to racialize Asian men as laughable emasculated figures, these stereotypes also emphasize their foreignness. That is, the protracted racial, cultural, and gendered difference between the average Joe-next-door (read: white) and Long Duk Dong is precisely what causes us to laugh at him and others like him. PSY’s comedic appeal undoubtedly contributes to his popularity both in Korea and the United States, but such renderings not only reinforce these normalized understandings of Asian masculinity but also highlight his foreignness. In so doing, T he P o litics and P ro mises o f “ G angnam S tyle ”

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these renderings obscure the ways in which PSY’s artistry and career trajectory have been informed by the US–South Korea neocolonial relationship, thus creating an affect that is necessarily familiar and was directly responsible for his months’ long success in the United States. PSY’s video caught the eye of billions of viewers worldwide for its campy choreography, comedic style, and colorful visual qualities. What propelled him further was his ability to ride recognizably American codes of rap and dance, codes with which he became familiar while studying in the United States. From 1996 to 2000, PSY studied abroad for a secondary education, initially in business administration at Boston University. As he tells the story, he tricked his parents and used his tuition to instead attend the Berklee School of Music.6 During this time in Boston, he decided to become a rapper. While listening to rap on the radio, he realized that he could combine his comedic talents with his musical ones in this particularly American genre of music. That PSY was an international student is not unique. Korea sends the most students to the United Students after China and India, nearly seventy-five thousand each year.7 Considering the population disparities between China and India and South Korea, it becomes clear not only how many Korean students study in the United States but also how much money Koreans spend on US education in addition to the $15.6 billion every year they spend on English academies for Korean children.8 According to Christina Klein, “Ambivalent is an apt term to describe South Korea’s relationship with the United States. The two countries have been bound together for the past half-century through a network of political, economic, and military ties in a relationship that its supporters characterize as a close alliance and its critics as neocolonial.”9 As these figures indicate, education in the United States and inculcation into American ways of life, including the English language, are two of the ways in which the two countries continue to be bound together. Not only did PSY’s American education introduce him to the musical genre on which he would base a career, it also gave him a knowledge of American pop culture he capitalized on when he closed the 2012 American Music Awards with a performance with MC Hammer, arguably a dance, rap and pop icon. Unlike typical renderings of Asian men that focus on their difference, the PSY-Hammer collaboration legitimized PSY’s difference to an American audience by linking him 100

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and likening him across generations to another pop cultural icon who generated dance hits in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Just as PSY came to symbolize the democratizing possibilities of YouTube in 2012, media outlets lauded Asian superbloggers (and their social and cultural capital) as a testament to the democratization of the fashion industry enabled by the digital medium in the mid-2000s. In her book on Asian superbloggers and racialized fashion work, Minh-Ha Pham explains Asian superbloggers’ fraught position in the fashion industry: “They are exotic but not too exotic. They are different but legitimately and legibly so, because they are English-speakers; are cute (in appearance and work practice); and blog, live, shop, and fashion themselves in and through Western sites of culture and communication. They embody difference but one that is knowable, familiar, and thus legitimate.”10 Whether in reference to Asian superbloggers’ unprecedented influence or PSY’s YouTube success, Pham points out that such celebrations and ideas about acceptance actually rely on the very hierarchies they claim have disavowed. In other words, Asian superbloggers’ acceptance into the exclusive fashion world depended on their exhibiting and embodying a certain knowable or somehow familiar difference that, rather than disrupting or overturning the social order, actually reaffirmed it.

PSY performing with MC Hammer at the 2012 American Music Awards. Frame enlargement of ABC broadcast.

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Similarly, the performance orchestrated by Scooter Braun (with whom PSY signed an American record deal) and subsequent interviews about it, were “sites of Western culture and communication” in the construction of PSY’s familiar difference. PSY himself shaped the pairing as both natural and nostalgic. As PSY put it in the press conference after the awards show, “I practiced his moves 20 years ago so I’ve done that for 20 years.”11 In other words, PSY, as an imperial subject of the United States and a dancer to boot, had already been familiar with Hammer’s music and moves such that the coupling was not only nostalgic for American viewers but for PSY. For his part, Hammer grouped PSY as among the four solo artists who have been able to “shift the planet” through music and dance. The other three were James Brown, Michael Jackson, and Hammer himself.12 Such transnationally informed artistic shapings are the unintended consequences of US neocolonialism. According to Klein, US military presence in South Korea during the Cold War has had similar cinematic consequences. Namely, the Armed Forces Korea Network (AFKN-TV), the US military television network, served as a kind of training camp for a cohort of South Korean commercial auteurs who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s watching the network as alternative media to the repressive Park and Chun regimes. Although the network was intended for the viewership of US military personnel rather than for their own, Klein shows how watching shaped the cinematic thinking of contemporary Korean directors such as Bong Joon-ho. As Klein points out, “the cultural effects of AFKN sometimes took years to become visible, as the culture consumed by children found echoes in their cultural production as adults.”13 In this way, US military occupation has been part and parcel to the conceptual production of South Korean cinema. Just as the AFKN network, and the Hollywood films he watched because of it, informs Bong Joon-ho’s cinematic thinking, 1990s American hip-hop is a similar stylistic influence echoing through PSY’s musical sensibilities. The PSY-Hammer collaboration brings these echoes to the fore, illustrating how, despite mainstream characterizations of PSY as foreign, he has been inculcated into US pop culture. On stage, this takes place through dance.14 PSY and Hammer do not rap together. In fact, Hammer does not rap at all. It is through their bodily performances

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that the two men are compared and correlated. By placing our focus on their bodies, we are confronted squarely with their masculinities. Indeed, Hammer and PSY go head to head doing the same sexualized dance moves but in differently stylized ways. Their outfits in white and black suggest a complementary relationship emphasized by the end pose of the performance. Hammer with his hands up standing erect and PSY with his arms down together composing a capital H, suggest fluidity between the two, as if PSY is a contemporary iteration of Hammer.

PSY and MC Hammer forming an H at the 2012 American Music Awards. Frame enlargement of ABC broadcast.

If Asian male stereotypes are based on the protracted distance between Asian and white men, then this performance suggests only a sliver of distance between Asian and African American masculinities at least in the suspended moment of this finale performance at the American Music Awards. As Lisa Nakamura points out, whether it is in The Matrix trilogy or the selling of an IPod, proximity to blackness guarantees “the valuation of cool, particularly in representational practices that are feared to be dehumanizing.”15 Here, Nakamura refers to technology as the dehumanizing threat. Because Asian American men have been historically represented as so outside white male masculinity

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that they are aligned more with technology than humanity, Hammer’s “black cool” gives PSY not only visibility but also humanity in a space where Asian Americans have historically been invisible—on the musical stage of America’s social imaginary. In this performance and through others like it (the duo gave several repeat performances), PSY was able to defy American stereotypes of Asian men that place them outside sexuality and limit their physicality to martial arts. If PSY’s comedic visual elements and their likeness to the buffoons typically associated with Asian stereotypes initially piqued our interest in him, performances such as this were able to sustain our interest because he was able to challenge those expectations. To be sure, PSY is not the only Asian male in mainstream celebrity venues in recent years to bring new dimensions to American perceptions of Asian masculinity. But, as Rachel Joo notes in her book on the role of transnational sports in the making of a global Korea, although Asian male celebrity figures shape “contexts for Asian male sexuality in the United States that move beyond associations with weak, nerdy, and impotent men . . . the transnational dimensions of these masculinized representations present limited contexts for recognition by and with Asian American male subjects.”16 Like the Korean athletes of which Joo writes, PSY’s image was also “presented as ‘foreign’ ” and “this quality fails to assuage—and might even heighten—anxieties around the perpetual question of foreignness that plagues Asian American subjects.”17 As outlined, PSY’s foreignness is highlighted in discussions of his masculinity such that the two cannot be disentangled. Furthermore, because PSY’s physique falls outside the neoliberal “hard body” image, which has become the norm for not only Asian but also male celebrity figures worldwide, one can read his performance with MC Hammer as one that showcases his physicality alternatively, thus recoding his body as sexual through both dance and his proximity to blackness. PSY’s strategy of performing and collaborating with African American rap artists and positing them as his contemporaries evokes the historical affinities between Asian Americans and African Americans, who have looked to one another for alternatives to a cultural hegemony that cites whiteness as its only frame of reference.18 PSY and Hammer and then PSY and Snoop Dogg, with whom PSY released “Hangover” in June of 2014, are a part of a long legacy of Afro Asian cross-cultural conversations and transnational exchanges that 104

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can be traced back to Bruce Lee’s iconic and anticolonial and anticapitalist films. In her book on Afro Asian productions, Crystal Anderson argues that these were not simply cultural but as well political exchanges that prefigured themes of cross-cultural negotiation and global culture.19 In these collaborations, PSY’s global success as well as his familiar difference must be framed in the context of South Korea’s current status in the world economy. When PSY signed with Scooter Braun’s record label, the same label that made Justin Bieber famous, the label released a video of the two men toasting the occasion. As Braun narrates it, the two do a shot of soju (Korean liquor) to “mark this moment in history between our two great nations” (emphasis added).20 The moment Braun is referring to is not only PSY’s signing on to his label but also the agreement between them for PSY to “be the first Korean artist to break a big record in the United States.”21 The characterization of both the United States and South Korea as “great nations” would have been unthinkable just a generation ago. The US engagement with Korea began during the Korean War, the Forgotten War as it is often referred to in the United States, referencing the historical amnesia that surrounds the three-year conflict and the continued US military occupation. It is in this context and under the tutelage of the United States that South Korea has emerged from a neocolony to a capitalist subempire in its own right, as evidenced by its exploitation of cheap labor from Southeast Asia and Mexico.22 In the United States, South Korea’s subempire status coincides representationally with increasing television portrayals of Koreans such as Lost’s Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim and more recently, Hawaii Five-0’s Grace Park and The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun. Such portrayals of Koreans in general and Korean men in particular index South Korea’s new position in the global order. It is against this backdrop that the United States received PSY and within this context that Braun refers to “our two great nations.” Braun’s characterization is all the more salient to the popular cultural world given Korean pop culture’s global popularity. Dubbed the Hallyu (Korean Wave) by Chinese reporters in the late 1990s for its rippling popularity among Chinese teens, South Korea’s subempire status has been further solidified by its increasing popular cultural hegemony throughout Asia in particular but also to various degrees worldwide. T he P o litics and P ro mises o f “ G angnam S tyle ”

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Indeed, though global obsession with PSY’s particular music video and dance could not have been predicted, the groundwork was laid by South Korean entertainment companies, who leverage their stars’ pop music on social media sites as their primary platform. The proliferation of global social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have created what media outlets and Hallyu scholars alike are calling Hallyu 2.0, the contemporary iteration of Hallyu with K-pop and online gaming as its mainstays and teens and twenty-somethings at its center. Social media thus enables Korean entertainment companies to market and distribute Hallyu, and K-pop in particular, at an unprecedented mass level. As Hallyu scholars have noted, however, such strategies work in part because of Korean cultural products’ ability to engender both Western and Korean sensibilities as part of their unique appeal. For example, Klein has argued that filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, director of the 2006 blockbuster The Host, “reconfigures Hollywood’s conventions so that they become tools for grappling with Korean questions.”23 In a similar vein, PSY reconfigures the American cultural forms of rap and hip-hop dance to provide a visually and aurally appealing critique of materialism in his viral hit “Gangnam Style.” “G A NG NA M S T Y LE ” A S SO C I A L CR IT IQ U E

In The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form, literary scholar Jini Kim Watson analyzes what she calls “New Asian City literature and film,” fictional texts that foreground the complex realities and conflicts of third-world industrialization as well as the massive shift in urban forms such industrialization produced in Singapore, Seoul, and Taipei. Watson argues that the literary texts that compose the genre centralize the built environment. In so doing, they tell stories not just about the actual physical changes incurred in urban spaces but also about the competing ideologies and imaginaries catalyzing and signified in these changes. In her introduction, for example, Watson describes the plot of a 1978 South Korean novella, A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf, that tells the story of the three teenage children of a squatterdwelling family who stand to lose their home so that a high-rise apartment building can be built in its place. Watson explains that fictional arrangements of space and urban form, such as the image of the dwarf (the teenagers’ father) atop smokestacks, are profound because they “stage 106

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a constellation of profoundly changing social and spatial relationships,” which at its largest scale encompasses the new global economic system in which postcolonial Korea competes as an export manufacturer. Such fictional representations must be read neither for a one-to-one, transparent relationship to the city’s material spaces, nor as abstract, metaphorical textual inventions. As Balshaw and Kennedy write, more than simply tracing historical processes, “literary and visual representations of urbanism map the fears and fantasies of urban living, within which—through practices of reading and seeing—we all dwell.” 24

Like the novels, short stories, poetry, and film Watson includes in her study, PSY’s “Gangnam Style” video also centers the city and urban forms to illuminate a set of social relationships signified by the built environment at the center of the song—Gangnam. Whereas A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf comments on emerging class oppositions by highlighting the dwarf and his family as innocent bystanders of the onset of South Korean developmentalism and participation in the global economic system, “Gangnam Style” paints a picture of the materialism and continued class stratification resulting from such participation some thirty years later, thus depicting contemporary “fears and fantasies of urban living.” Gangnam is a small neighborhood in Seoul akin to the Beverly Hills of Korea, where 2.5 percent of Seoul’s population lives and yet produces 25 percent of its gross domestic product.25 High-fashion boutiques as well as high-end coffee shops, bars, and restaurants adorn its streets, which are frequented by Gangnam’s wealthy residents as well as passersby who stop in for the occasional foray in the luxurious lifestyles that Gangnam has to offer. Gangnam’s 430 cosmetic surgery clinics are also a conspicuous part of life there. Half of South Korea’s plastic surgery clinics are located in Seoul and most of them are concentrated in Gangnam—a fifteen-square-mile neighborhood.26 Cosmetic surgery is part and parcel of Gangnam style, particularly in a country with the highest rates of plastic surgery consumption per capita globally. Regardless of whether they can afford it, Gangnam residents, frequenters, and tourists play the part in a neighborhood that signifies the ultimate in South Korean social and economic mobility, where labels and looks matter. T he P o litics and P ro mises o f “ G angnam S tyle ”

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The style produced by the Gangnam neighborhood and displayed by its residents involves a performance of wealth, one that PSY’s “Gangnam Style” video satirizes through a defiance of expectation. The first scene, for instance, features him lying out on a beach being fanned by a beautiful woman.27 When the camera pans out, however, the viewer realizes he is lying in the middle of an unglamorous children’s park. In another scene, PSY appears to be dancing in a club. Once again, when the camera pans out, the viewer realizes that he is dancing on a tour bus with middle-aged ladies rather than the beautiful young women epitomizing Gangnam’s standards of beauty. In yet another scene, PSY meets the gorgeous lady of his dreams, her hair blowing in the wind. As the camera reveals, however, they are meeting in a subway station, which is not a glamorous location (or mode of transportation) of a person living the Gangnam life. Finally, PSY raps that he’s looking for a classy lady who can afford a relaxing cup of coffee, referring to the common stereotype that women will eat a $2 cup of noodles for lunch but then unflinchingly spend more than $5 on a Starbucks coffee to wash it down. In shots and lyrics such as these, PSY subtly references the failures of Gangnam style as well as aspirations to achieve it, as attested to by the

PSY enjoying a day at the “beach.” Frame enlargement of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” music video.

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fact that the average South Korean carries credit card debt worth 155 percent of their household income.28 PSY uses the music video genre to bring into sharp focus the ubiquitous desire of Koreans today to “keep up with the Joneses” or in this case, “the Kims.”29 PSY asks us to visually trust what is being shown only to reveal our expectations false. It is precisely the gap between our expectations about where we think he should be (the beach) and where he actually is (a children’s park) that makes us laugh. Expectations themselves are ideological. In each instance, PSY not only defies expectations but also exposes the absurdity of the ideologies shaping those expectations in the first place. Rather than the glossy depictions of high-class living found in advertisements, dramas or film, PSY’s video refracts reality through the absurdity of everyday life, exposing contradictions that are rarely if ever openly declared. In other words, PSY’s failure to “perform” wealth, status, and decorum in accordance with Gangnam’s luxurious style, exposes the “cruel optimism” through which South Koreans attach themselves to capitalist and materialist notions of “the good life.” If, in Lauren Berlant’s formulation, cruel optimism names the attachment to a problematic object that “is discovered to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic,” then PSY’s representational failure exposes just how fantastical and impossible such a life—signified by the $5 Starbucks coffee and realized through massive credit card debt—is for most South Koreans. 30 In so doing, he queers these attachments through the comedic quality of his failures to achieve them, scene after scene. 31 Indeed, PSY’s music video compels us to question South Koreans’ capitalist aspirations, which can be traced back to the Korean War, when US occupation of South Korea marked its entrance into the American empire and thus began the pedagogical project of instilling Koreans with the American Dream of capitalism. PSY’s video compels us to laugh at him and thus the contradictions so apparent in the disparities between his “Gangnam Style” and what is depicted visually. South Korea’s compressed modernity, however, has been no laughing matter for most Koreans. In 1997, South Korea faced an economic crisis because it had to default on its foreign debt. Although the International Monetary Fund bailed it out, the country was forced to restructure its economy and unemployment rates went from as low as 3 percent to 20 percent. 32 At the same time, the T he P o litics and P ro mises o f “ G angnam S tyle ”

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PSY partying at a “nightclub.” Frame enlargement of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” music video.

government also decreased spending in social services, leaving many people to fend for themselves in a fiercely competitive economic environment. In recent years, Korea has seen the highest rates of suicide of any industrialized nation and, more recently, the highest rates of elderly suicide, which have quadrupled among those sixty-five and older. 33 Confucian ideals mandate that Koreans sacrifice everything for their children’s success knowing that they will end their lives in their children’s care. However, South Korea’s “economic miracle” and the competitiveness of the high cost of living it has engendered have eroded such social contracts, creating a contradiction wherein South Korea is simultaneously praised as an economic and political superpower and yet is unable (or unwilling) to care properly for many of its citizens. That is, like PSY on the beach, things are not always what they seem. Ironically, however, PSY’s entrenchment in the Hallyu industry is itself contradictory to the critiques he makes. Although we can perhaps locate the origins of South Korean materialism in the American Dream of capitalism, Hallyu in its various genres—film, dramas, and pop music—enact aspirational Korean Dreams on the part of viewers in other locations, especially Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. 34 In bodily aesthetics, Korean cultural productions offer a standard of beauty deemed particularly Korean and associated with Korea’s 110

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seemingly successful forms of consumerist modernity. Korea’s medical tourism industry, for example, established in 2007, understands K-dramas and K-pop as its major advertisements. As a result, Hallyu fans travel across the world to Seoul for surgery to look just like their favorite Korean actors or pop stars, embarking on Hallyu tours during their recovery. 35 In fact, global advertisements are so successful that 30 percent of all cosmetic patients in Korea are Chinese, medical tourism generated a profit of $349 million in 2014, and Hallyu accounts for $4.8 billion in annual export revenue. 36 Thus, though “Gangnam Style” levies a critique of materialistic sensibilities in South Korea, the industry that gives PSY this platform is part and parcel to spreading similar longings for Gangnam style globally. In other words, Hallyu transnationally proliferates the promises of Gangnam style and the looks that signify such style on a global scale. PSY, THE MO DE R N -DAY T R I C K S T E R

PSY has built his career on the contradictions he embodies. At the same time that he has been framed as foreign in the social imagination of the United States, he can be understood as familiar vis-à-vis his ability to negotiate American popular cultural sensibilities. Although his song “Gangnam Style” and the millions it has generated are if South Korea’s pop culture industry, it critiques the exclusive neighborhood where those who profit from it likely reside (and PSY himself grew up). It is in the contradictions that PSY both embodies and illuminates that his political coherence emerges. I therefore propose that we can better understand PSY as a modern-day trickster. In his extensive study on trickster figures, Lewis Hyde describes a trickster as “a creative idiot . . . the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. . . . Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.”37 Like the trickster figures in indigenous folktales across the world, PSY elucidates contradictions, breaks binaries, and reconfigures boundaries. Nowhere was this more salient than in the anti-American controversy that punctuated the near end of his six-month stay in the United States. At the end of 2012, American media outlets broke a controversial story about the South Korean rapper. Unbeknownst to the American T he P o litics and P ro mises o f “ G angnam S tyle ”

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public until that point, PSY had participated in two protests against the US military presence in South Korea in 2002 and 2004. Sectors of the American public, fueled by American media outlets, were outraged. The Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie, for example, stated, “we love that song but I’ve got to tell you, there’s no excuse for what he said.”38 Guthrie was referring to PSY’s inflammatory lyrics in a rap song called “Dear American,” written by South Korean metal band N.EX.T., which allegedly included the lyrics: “Kill those f—ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives and those who ordered them to torture,” and going on to say, “Kill them all slowly and painfully,” as well as “daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers.”39 Until then, Americans had posited PSY as an example of social media’s ability to level the playing field and South Koreans upheld him as a national treasure, wondering which of his qualities could be and should be duplicated in the endeavor of creating more crossover K-pop artists.40 As discussed, however, such celebrations and ideas about acceptance actually rely on the hierarchies they claim have disavowed. Rather than disrupting or overturning the social order, these narratives ultimately reaffirm and re-entrench racialized geopolitical hierarchies because they are predicated on them. Returning to Pham’s articulation of the fine line between legitimate and illegitimate differences, “Because legitimate differences are conditionally bound by determinations of what is legitimate and what is illegitimate, the threat of becoming an illegitimate difference is a constitutive feature of being a legitimate difference. That is, legitimate and illegitimate differences are two ends of the same spectrum of difference.” Despite the fact that PSY and his camp attempted to make his difference more familiar or legitimate through his performance with MC Hammer, for instance, the anti-US military protest scandal was PSY’s inevitable de-legitimation. As Pham succinctly explains, “Racial aftertastes always follow from the taste for racial difference.”41 The aftertastes further soured because PSY was invited to perform for the Obama family at “Christmas in Washington,” an annual Christmas party held at the National Museum Building. With the anti-American scandal brewing, journalists weighed in on whether the Obama administration should have allowed him to perform. Indeed, some citizens even began a petition on whitehouse.gov. When the performance continued as planned, many bloggers across the country wrote of Obama 112

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as the “un-American president.”42 Before the performance, however, PSY issued an apology for his “deeply emotional reaction to the war in Iraq and the killing of two Korean schoolgirls that was part of the overall anti-war sentiment shared by others around the world at that time.”43 In his apology, PSY refers to the tragic deaths in 2002 of two fourteenyear-old middle school girls, Shim Mi-sun and Shin Hyo-soon, who were killed by a US military vehicle as they walked along the side of the road just ten miles outside of Seoul.44 The US military denied the Korean Ministry of Law’s request to transfer the case to the Korean courts, citing its claim to extraterritorial jurisdiction in cases of military operations validated by the Status of Force Agreement (SOFA). Subsequently, a US court-martial acquitted Sergeants Mark Walker and Fernando Nino of negligent homicide but paid civil damages to the families involved. On November 23, 2002, just days after the verdict was announced, five thousand Korean citizens gathered in the Gwanghwamun district, near the US embassy, in protest.45 A week after that, thirty thousand citizens gathered to hold Korea’s first large-scale candlelight vigil for the girls. Then, on December 7, fortythree candlelight vigils were held in forty-three cities across Korea. For the first time in Korean history, protestors demonstrated in front of the US embassy by breaking through the auxiliary police barricade. One hundred protestors tonsured themselves in front of the embassy as others urged US officials to apologize for the mishandling of the case. The vigils culminated on December 14, what protestors called Sovereignty Restoration Day, citizens in sixty-four cities and fifteen countries participating in the vigil. One hundred thousand Korean citizens participated in this final action.46 Although the goals of the campaign varied, leadership of the campaign pursued three central aims: first, that the US military hand the jurisdiction of the case to the South Korean courts; next, that the Korean and US governments amend the SOFA so that US soldiers who commit crimes are automatically tried in Korean courts; and, last, that then President George W. Bush publicly apologize for the girls’ deaths.47 Amending the SOFA took on particular salience given that fourteen thousand Korean protestors clashed with police in Seoul just two years prior with similar demands as a result of crimes committed by US soldiers and the environmental degradation caused by US military bombings and waste.48 Most egregiously, that year the Eighth US Army Division T he P o litics and P ro mises o f “ G angnam S tyle ”

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disposed of twenty gallons of toxic fluids, including formaldehyde, in the Han River, from which ten million people draw water for household use.49 The US military offered nothing more than an apology, which catalyzed environmental groups’ demands for the amendment of the SOFA to include stricter regulations of the US military’s environmental impacts.50 As mentioned, Klein has argued that filmmaker Bong Joon-ho “reconfigures Hollywood’s conventions so that they become tools for grappling with Korean questions.” Bong’s 2006 Korean blockbuster, The Host, remembers this incident by beginning with a scene featuring US military personnel dumping toxic chemicals into the Han River that mutate into a river monster that terrorizes Korean citizens. The protagonists of the film, a working class n’er-do-well and his family, must consistently evade the US military’s attempts to contain them after he was exposed to the river monster and his daughter captured by it. Korean negotiations of US military power and prolonged presence are thus the very “Korean questions” grappled with in Bong’s cultural productions. It was within this national context of outrage and protest that PSY and other celebrities performed protest songs demanding the amendment of the SOFA. On stage with several other celebrities, his face painted in gold and wearing a red jumpsuit, PSY threw a small tank to the ground, smashing it with a mic stand while chanting anti-US military slogans.51 Celebrities took to the stage again in 2004 when the US military and US–South Korea relations were again under public scrutiny after an Islamist group held Korean missionary Kim Sun-il hostage to demand that the South Korean government cancel its plans to send three thousand troops to support the US war in Iraq.52 When the Korean government refused to cooperate, the group released a video that aired on Al Jazeera featuring a masked executioner that decapitated Kim Sun-il. The video included the following statement: “Korean citizens, you were warned, your hands were the ones who killed him. Enough lies, enough cheatings. Your soldiers are here not for the sake of Iraqis, but for cursed America.”53 Amid bomb threats to Korean mosques and protests against Muslim extremists, anti-US military protestors (including PSY) also took the opportunity to call into question not only the extremists but also then Korean President Roh Mu-hyun and the US military.54 It was at a protest concert during this time that PSY along with other Korean pop contemporaries rapped the infamous lyrics to “Dear American.” 114

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US media coverage of the controversy obscures not only these details but also the prolonged US military occupation of South Korea, glossing over these facts and the very real political motivations of South Korean protestors and PSY in order to vilify PSY, in some cases even labeling him a terrorist sympathizer.55 Significantly, however, PSY never really apologizes for protesting, characterizing his actions as a “deeply emotional reaction.” His apology instead focuses on the language he used, calling it “inflammatory and inappropriate.” Reading between the lines makes it clear that PSY, ever the master of words, offers an extensive apology but never says “I’m sorry” for my position or political practice. According to Hyde, “trickster . . . brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight.”56 On the one hand, in his song “Gangnam Style,” PSY draws attention to the contradictions of global capitalism in South Korea. On the other, in his apology, PSY brings into sharp focus the neocolonial distinction generally hidden in US renderings of itself. PSY could not try to continue his global success without issuing a statement and the US ability to elicit an apologetic response highlights its continued global power, especially in the marketplace. Like the mischievous and seductive foxes in Korean folktales, PSY’s political past and pop present when read together shed light on how our pleasures are underwritten by political histories and collisions. Just as tricksters mirror relations of power within specific cultural milieus, PSY provides us with insights into the persisting legacies of neocolonialism and militarism as they travel through transnational channels of pop and pleasure. In Korean folktales, the mystical fox is neither good nor evil but instead a shape shifter that changes depending on the circumstances and the individual it encounters.57 Like tricksters in other indigenous cultures, Korean foxes are tempters, testers of resolve, and depending on how one receives them, moral compasses. Whether meeting a fox is strange or ordinary, to encounter one is to encounter one’s reflection. Indeed, PSY shape shifted through the demands of the global marketplace attempting to balance his political past with his global pop present. The reemergence of his political persona seems unlikely in the near future, given that his once subcultural status in South Korea has been replaced with the role of Hallyu’s global ambassador. Still, how we read, remember, and receive this fable of global ubiquity depends on us. T he P o litics and P ro mises o f “ G angnam S tyle ”

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For Asian Pacific Islander American communities, PSY not only provides us with great pleasure but also reflects back to us that a spirit of political commitment and protest can continue to persist even if we are doing the horsey dance. N OTE S 1. By 2014, “Gangnam Style” surpassed 2,147,483,647 views, forcing YouTube to reset its counter from a 32-bit to 64-bit ledger (more than nine quintillion). PSY also held the record for most overall views and most views in a day—thirty-eight million—for “Gentleman,” his 2014 follow-up to “Gangnam Style.” See CBC News, “PSY’s Gangnam Style breaks the limit of YouTube’s Video Counter,” December 4, 2014, http: //www.cbc.ca/news/arts/PSY-s-gangnam-style-breaks-the-limit-of-youtube-s-video -counter-1.2860186. 2. Kyle Drennen, “NBC Rushes to Obama’s Defense: President Had ‘No Say Over’ PSY Performing at Christmas Concert,” NewsBusters, December 11, 2012, http:// www.newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2012/12/11/nbc-rushes-obamas-defensepresident-had-no-say-over-PSY-performing-chr. 3. James Montgomery, “Exclusive: PSY Apologizes for ‘Inflammatory and Inappropriate’ Anti-American Lyrics,” MTV News, December 12, 2012, http://www.mtv.com /news/1698546/PSY-apology-anti-american-lyrics. 4. Examiner, “PSY scores again: Rapper debuts starring role in Superbowl ad,” January 9, 2013. 5. Deanna Pan, “Is ‘Gangnam Style’ a Hit because of Our Asian Stereotypes?” Mother Jones, September 24, 2012, http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/09 /gangnam-style-asian-masculinity%20. 6. YouTube, “[tvN]Paik Jiyeon’s People Inside—PSY (ENG SUB),” 43:06, October 4, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KmG8Gnzbxc. PSY returned to Korea before obtaining a degree from either university. 7. Institute of International Education, “Open Doors 2011: International Student Enrollment Increased by 5 Percent in 2010/11,” press release, November 14, 2011, http://www.iie.org/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/Press-Center/Press-Releases/2011 /2011–11–14-Open-Doors-International-Students. 8. Joohee Cho, “English Is the Golden Tongue for S. Koreans,” Washington Post, July 2, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/07/01 /AR2007070101259.html. 9. Christina Klein, “Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema, or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho,” American Quarterly 60 (2008): 874. 10. Minh-Ha T. Pham, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender and the Work of Personal Style Blogging (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 69. 11. YouTube, “PSY, MC Hammer American Music Awards Moment Courtesy of Bieber Braun,” 2:24, November 19, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMo44 FNpSPM. 12. Ibid. 13. Christina Klein, “The AFKN Nexus: US Military Broadcasting and New Korean Cinema,” Transnational Cinemas 3, no. 1 (2012): 22. 116

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14. BisnesCetakBaju, “Gangnam Style—PSY ft. MC Hammer [American Music Awards 2012] HD Full,” 4.44, YouTube, November 12, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ck6i3HtktaY. 15. Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007), 113. 16. Rachel Joo, Transnational Sport: Gender, Media and Global Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 22. 17. Ibid. 18. Vijay Prashad offers a groundbreaking analysis of these affinities and the cultural porousness they engender in Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). 19. Crystal Anderson, Beyond the Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Production (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015). 20. YouTube, “Public Announcement—Scooter Braun Regarding PSY,” 1:23, September 3, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOn3aWDHlsE. Soju was the highest-selling alcoholic beverage in the world in 2013, topping Drink International’s annual list of best-selling global spirits in large part due to PSY’s endorsement of Chamisul, a leading brand of the liquor. See Norman Miller, “Soju: the most popular booze in the world,” The Guardian, December 2, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/ lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/dec/02/soju-popular-booze-world-south-korea. 21. Ibid. 22. See Jin-Kyung Lee, Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 23. Klein, “Why American Studies,” 873. 24. Jini Kim Watson, The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 9. 25. Jay Gillette, “Korea’s Gangnam District of Seoul Wins 2008 ‘Intelligent Community of the Year,’ ” Network World, May 19, 2008, https://www.networkworld.com/ article/2279683/lan-wan/korea-s-gangnam-district-of-seoul-wins-2008–intelligent -community-of-the-year-.html. 26. Seoul Touch Up, “Why the Beauty Belt in Seoul?” https://www.seoultouchup .com/why-the-beauty-belt-in-seoul/. 27. YouTube, “PSY—Gangnam Style (강남스타일) M/V,” 4:12, July 15, 2012, https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0. 28. Yoo Choonsik, “Analysis: South Korea’s Reckless Consumers Edge Towards Debt,” Reuters, August 25, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/25/us-koreaeconomy-debt-idUSTRE77O4JU20110825. 29. Although most mainstream media outlets reported on “Gangnam Styles” record-breaking views and PSY’s campy video, most did not offer an analysis of his lyrics or the video. Max Fisher’s The Atlantic article and Suk Jong Hong’s interpretation of the video on Aljazeera English’s The Stream were two exceptions that offered insightful analyses. See Max Fisher, “Gangnam Style Dissected: The Subversive Message with South Korea’s Music Video Sensation,” The Atlantic, August 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/gangnam-style-dissected-the-subversivemessage-within-south-koreas-music-video-sensation/261462/; see also Aljazeera English, “K-pop Diplomacy,” 34:53, You Tube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYt8 13fDWTw&feature=youtu.be. 30. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” in The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 94. T he P o litics and P ro mises o f “ G angnam S tyle ”

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31. See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 32. Jesook Song, “Family Breakdown and Invisible Homeless Women: Neoliberal Governance During the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea, 1997–2001,” Positions 14, no. 1 (2006): 40–42. 33. Choe Sang-Hun, “As Families Change, Korea’s Elderly Are Turning to Suicide,” New York Times, February 16, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/world/asia/in -korea-changes-in-society-and-family-dynamics-drive-rise-in-elderly-suicides.html. 34. Sharon Heijin Lee, “The (Geo)Politics of Beauty: Race, Transnationalism and Neoliberalism in South Korean Beauty Culture” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2012). 35. Ibid. 36. Bae Ji-sook, “Cosmetic Surgery Emerges as Export Product,” KoreaToday, January 27, 2010; Peng Qian, “South Korea’s Medical Tourism Revenue Slips Amid Growing Malpractice,” Xinhuanet.com, February 10, 2015; International Medical Travel Journal: News, “South Korea: Korea Increases Number of International Patients,” June 4, 2014, http://www.imtj.com/news/?entryid82=442510; Kyung Hyun Kim, “Indexing Korean Popular Culture,” in The Korean Pop Culture Reader, edited by Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 2. 37. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 7. 38. Drennen, “NBC Rushes to Obama’s Defense.” 39. This translation comes from an anonymous source from CNN’s iReport site. Professional interpreters suggest that this first and widespread translation attributes added hostility to the lyrics but also that the original lyrics are unclear because of language, genre, and the difficulties of translating across cultures. A more accurate translation is “The——despicable Western women and men who tortured Iraqi war prisoners and Dog——despicable Western women and men who gave orders to torture Their daughter, mother, daughter-in-law, father the big-nose, kill all Very slowly kill, painfully kill.” Max Fisher, “Controversy over PSY’s Anti-American Lyrics Might Be Based on Shoddy Translation,” Washington Post, December 11, 2012, https://www .washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/12/11/controversy-over-PSYs-anti -american-lyrics-might-be-based-on-shoddy-translation. 40. Such nationalist praise of “Gangnam Style” continues today. Most recently, a giant bronze sculpture of hands holding the reigns doing the horsey dance was erected in the Gangnam district in anticipation of annual celebrations each July to commemorate the song’s landmark role in bringing Korean culture to the world. See Korea Times, “ ‘Gangnam Style’ Returns as a Landmark Bronze Sculpture,” April 16, 2016, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/culture/2016/04/386_202720.html. 41. Pham, Asians Wear Clothes, 68, 64. 42. The petition was eventually pulled from the website because it violated the terms of participation. See Brian Anthony Hernandez, “White House Deletes Petition Amidst PSY’s Anti-American Rap Controversy,” Mashable, December 7, 2012, http:// ma shable.com/2012/12/07/ps y-a nt i-a mer ica n-rap-wh ite-hou se-pet it ion /#hLVMSRXKiEqH; Geoffrey Grider, “Obama Invites Anti-American Rapper PSY to Sing at White House Christmas Party,” Now the End Begins, December 10, 2012, http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/obama-invites-anti-american-rapper-PSY-to -sing-at-white-house-christmas-party.

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43. PSY’s full apology included these words: As a proud South Korean who was educated in the United States and lived there for a very significant part of my life, I understand the sacrifices American servicemen and women have made to protect freedom and democracy in my country and around the world. The song I was featured in—from eight years ago—was part of a deeply emotional reaction to the war in Iraq and the killing of two innocent Korean civilians that was part of the overall antiwar sentiment shared by others around the world at that time. While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted. I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused anyone by those words.   I have been honored to perform in front of American soldiers in recent months—including an appearance on the Jay Leno show specifically for them—and I hope they and all Americans can accept my apology. While it’s important we express our opinions, I deeply regret the inflammatory and inappropriate language I used to do so. In my music I try to give people a release, a reason to smile. I have learned that though music, our universal language we can all come together as a culture of humanity and I hope that you will accept my apology. (Montgomery, “Exclusive: PSY Apologizes”) 44. Don Kirk, “Koreans Protest US Military’s Handling of a Fatal Accident,” New York Times, August 4, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/world/koreans -protest-us-military-s-handling-of-a-fatal-accident.html. 45. Global Nonviolent Action Database, “South Koreans Protest against the Mishandling of the Deaths of Two Korean Students Caused by U.S. Army, 2002–2004,” http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/south-koreans-protest-against-mishandling -deaths-two-korean-students-caused-us-army-2002-200. 46. Ibid. This campaign is also notable for its use of net activism. Net savvy activists organized the Netizen’s National Commission on the Killings of Two Middle School Girls (NNCK), which comprised seventy related website leaders and members. Through the committee, net organizers provided nonviolence guidelines for actions, advocated the boycott of US products, and publicized their actions. 47. Ibid. 48. Los Angeles Times, “Thousands in S. Korea Protest U.S.,” July 26, 2000, http: //articles.latimes.com/2000/jul/26/news/mn-59376. 49. Green Korea United, “The Eighth US Army Division Discharged Toxic Fluid (Formaldehyde) into the Han River,” September 1, 2002, http://green-korea.tistory. com/74. 50. Ibid. The SOFA was amended in 2001 (the second time after the 1991 amendments) in response to environmental concerns as well as criminal prosecution of US soldiers. According to these changes, Korea is allowed, among other things, to maintain custody of the accused or to have earlier transfer of custody over certain heinous crimes. See Yougjin Jung and Jun-Shik Hwang, “Where Does Inequality Come From? An Analysis of the Korea-United States Status of Forces Agreement,” American University International Law Review 18, no. 5 (2003): 1103–1144. For more on the Korea SOFA, see Jimmy H. Koo, “The Uncomfortable SOFA: Anti-American Sentiments in

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South Korea and the U.S.-South Korea Status of Forces Agreement,” American University National Security Law Brief 1, no. 1 (2011): 103–115. 51. PSY’s management company pulled footage of these performances from YouTube almost as soon as the controversy erupted. I therefore have not viewed the footage myself but rely on descriptions given in newspaper articles. See Bobby McGill, “Exclusive: PSY’s Anti-American Protesting Past?” November 28, 2012, cited in Max Fisher, “Gangnam Nationalism,” Washington Post, December 7, 2012, https: //www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/12/07/gangnam-nationalism -why-psys-anti-american-rap-shouldnt-surprise-you. 52. The deployment was to make South Korea the third largest source of foreign troops after the United States and Britain. See James Brooke, “The Reach of War: South Korea; Hostage’s Death Unleashes Mixed Emotions Back Home,” New York Times, June 24, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/world/the-reach-of-war -south-korea-hostage-s-death-unleashes-mixed-emotions-back-home.html. 53. McGill, “PSY’s Anti-American Protesting Past?” 54. Brooke, “Reach of War.” 55. Cate Meighan, “Gangnam Style PSY: Terrorist Sympathizer Suggests Killing Americans—Apologizes When Discovered (Video),” Celeb Dirty Laundry, December 9, 2012, http://www.celebdirtylaundry.com/2012/gangnam-style-PSY-killing-americans-apologizes-sings-dear-american-1207/. 56. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 7. 57. Christine J. Hong, Identity, Youth, and Gender in the Korean American Christian Church (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 8.

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6

Ranveer Singh’s “Chichorapan” Habitus, Masculinity, and Stardom Pr a se e da G o p i n a th

At the party celebrating GQ India’s Best Dressed, 2015, Ranveer Singh, declared the magazine’s best dressed man for the year, showed up wearing Muppet pajamas, an orange, striped dressing gown, fluffy slippers in the shape of Sylvester, the cartoon cat from Loony Toons, a cane, a top hat, sunglasses (at night), and a T-shirt announcing “No Fucks To Give.” This was read as quintessential Singh, excoriated and glorified in equal measure by the media and on social media. The following day, every entertainment news outlet led with a piece about Singh’s clothes while reporting on the party that was crowded with celebrities. Singh’s carefully calibrated statement works on various levels: at its most obvious, it is a good-humored defiant response to the many criticisms leveled against his often adventurous, high-fashion sartorial experiments; it is a glorious sending up of the very idea of sartorial expectations for middleand upper-class men as circulated by the magazine at its own party; it subverts the ideas of decorum implicit in Bollywood stardom; it focuses attention on his confidence, brashness, and eccentricity as he punctures classed, cosmopolitan ideas of good taste and good behavior; and, finally, it denotes neoliberal “American” ideas of stardom, of in-yourface individualism. Meanwhile, the awards party itself along with its representation in the televisual, print, internet, and social media foregrounds, the multiplying platforms on which star masculinity is created 121

and circulated in a new media age in India. This chapter examines Ranveer Singh’s on- and off-screen star masculinity within the structures of specifically transnational circuits of taste, middle-class identity formation, masculinity, and neoliberal values of individualism. STA RD O M A N D SUB J E C T H OO D

I pause here to offer short explications of both contemporary AmericanHollywood ideas of stardom that Singh adapted as well as the structure of neoliberal subjecthood within which he crafts his gendered stardom. I locate Singh’s calibrated star persona within Barry King’s recent theorization of stardom-celebrity, in which he argues that stardom coalesces with celebrity as a consequence of neoliberal shifts and the proliferation of media as well as new media platforms. He makes the distinction between stardom and celebrity but points out that digital and media technologies increasingly blend the two. Here, the star embodies “representativeness because his or her persona remains implicated in a relationship of standing for a collective process,” whereas the celebrity is crafted through “presentation techniques and technologies that are by definition self-centered.”1 King points out that that stars increasingly modulate between two positions: “as a star representing some collective experience or as a celebrity demonstrating his or her unique creativity and popularity,” or often as a mixture of both.2 The star’s life is the constantly watched life, which becomes a part of their ever-expanding professional and commodified life. For the star, being the perennial object of the camera’s gaze necessitates constant performance and the creation of personas in and through multiple technologies of image production. In the case of Singh, he mobilizes both national and transnational haute couture frenziedly captured by the paparazzi and posted on his Instagram account by his stylist. In his interviews, on his Twitter account, and his commercials, all of which he micromanages, he adroitly deploys the language of advertising and the affect of emotional authenticity to craft a distinctive masculine celebrity-stardom in Bollywood. Along with films, which still function as the primary medium for the creation of his star persona, the multiple media forms (both old and new) become sites where he represents the collective experience of the postliberalization aspirational cosmopolitan man. At the same time, though, in and through these new forms, he constructs his own unique antiestablishment, 122

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individualistic celebrity identity, which rubs against an older national bourgeois habitus. Indeed, Ranveer Singh’s male stardom exemplifies how transnational Hollywood-inflected ideas of star celebrity transmute and are transmuted by local and national discourses of class, culture, and taste. The adaptation of the Hollywood star celebrity form intersects with neoliberal discourses of subjecthood. In broad strokes, the ideal neoliberal subject is a product of the laissez-faire, rationalist, market-driven nation-state. They emerge when neoliberal ideology moves from being a political-economic rationality to a mode of governmentality, of selfregulation and self-monitoring, that operates across social spheres.3 Neoliberalism constructs “individuals as entrepreneurial actors who are rational, calculating and self-regulating.4 Driven by competition, shaped by the commodities they consume, the constantly changing individual believes that autonomy and choice are the driving force of subjecthood.5 They believe that they exist divorced from structure, external pressures, and constraints. Thus the exercise of rational choice shapes a successful life and a failed life is a consequence of bad choices and the inability to self-regulate and reinvent. Singh’s larger-than-life flamboyant persona is often described by the media and on social media by the derogatory Hindi-Urdu term chichora or its more euphemistic synonyms.6 Although the term, gendered masculine, is itself rude and déclassé, it also dismissively denotes someone who is déclassé. It means many things: vulgar, depraved, over-the-top, loud, and shameful, but what ties all of these adjectives together is that such behavior is seen as indecorous, counter to the expected etiquette of the mannered bourgeoisie. In a Daily News and Analysis (DNA) interview with star Deepika Padukone, the reporter Sarita Tanwar says that Ranveer Singh has been described as “a monkey on steroids and jaahil” (uneducated or illiterate), another classed term. These terms have only been used to describe Singh, a self-confessed outsider in a still nepotistic—though slowly changing—industry. Singh’s outsider status is important in this context. This term would never be used to describe someone who emerges from within the ranks of producers, actors, directors, and scriptwriters. What makes the circulation of these phrases and terms noteworthy is that Singh is seen as someone who does not quite belong to the insular and incestuous elite space of Bollywood stardom. When read within the “North Indian urban” bourgeois R anveer S ingh ’ s “ C hich o rapan ”

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frames of masculine etiquette and the star expectations of Bollywood, his masculinity is uncouth, apparently vulgar, lacking in decorum, “illiterate.” His clothes are outrageous; his antics are attention-seeking, over-the-top, a desperate plea to be noticed, to be loved, to be a star. The creation, circulation, and reception of taste and masculinity here has three layers. First, Singh’s star persona and style are read as chichora and over-the-top. Next, the same star persona is also read as being at the cutting edge of American-transnational neoliberal star-celebrity masculinities. Last, Singh as an individual and star is actually a product of the upper middle class: he has a college degree from an American university, paid for by his parents, and his fluency in English mark him as distinctly elite. These layers in Ranveer Singh’s star persona were evident in his presentation at the 2015 Indian Today Conclave, an annual event held by a respected national political magazine to which elite professionals and national newsmakers in various fields are invited. Singh’s eccentric and personal fanboy tour of Bollywood complete with mimicry, lip-sync performances, and dances was backed by a professionally done PowerPoint presentation. He combined unabashed and uninhibited filmi (slang for the histrionics and the over-the-top entertainment of Hindi cinema) performances with a potted intellectual history of Hindi film, the result of extensive interviews with Bollywood directors, producers, scriptwriters, and actors. In effect, Singh combined the déclassé with the urbane and cosmopolitan. The presentation became an occasion for him to concretize his star-celebrity persona as someone who straddles the cosmopolitan and the brash parvenu. It is another platform for what David Marshall describes as a “form of productive performance of a public self.” 7 Audiences responded accordingly, acknowledging the simultaneous seriousness and filminess of his endeavor. Controversial gossipy commentator Shobha De remarks on his infamous “brash,” “attention-seeking,” “exhibitionistic,” “loud,” “ridiculously dressed” side. As noted earlier, however, these traits—when read within the Hollywoodinflected transnational circuits of celebrity, stardom, and masculinity— are characteristic of a hyper-individualistic, fashion-forward, cosmopolitan neoliberal man. He seems firmly entrenched within these transnational circuits, even as a segment of the bourgeoisie interprets him within purportedly national, or regional urban ideals. At the same time, De also notes with approval that “Beyond the swagger was substance. Beyond 124

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the sharp suit was a thinking, alert, energetic mind. In a flash—Ranveer had transformed himself from a rakish Bollywood caricature to a polished brand ambassador representing the future of Bollywood.”8 Here he is representative of the good, educated, urbane Indian middle-class man as he should be, as he has always been. He is also uniquely Ranveer Singh: loud, filmi, substantive, well spoken, and authentic. NE W MI D D L E C L A S S

Ranveer Singh as star celebrity, then, represents the fluidity of both masculine praxis and taste within an imagined middle-class masculinity. Simultaneously, he represents the coming class, that is, the lower classes that are increasingly seen as the part of the new middle class; the new transnational hyper-individualist man of the middle class; as well as the more familiar articulate, understated, sophisticated bourgeois man. I explore each version separately. The middle class, or perhaps more accurately, the middle classes in contemporary India are a complex multiregional, multicaste, multireligious phenomena. It is pertinent to ask whether something called a national middle class even exists, inflected as it is by caste, region, religion, language, and even gradations between and within cities. And yet, as Leela Fernandez points out, the idea of the middle class has acquired more cultural, political, economic weight in postliberalization India. It embodies India’s transition to a neoliberal nation: the new middle class delineates itself from the middle class of the past as well as the lower classes of the present. Indeed, as D. L. Sheth argues, “to be a part of the middle is to express oneself through consumption, and to establish one’s identity as being distinct from lower classes through a set of cultural markers that proclaim one’s ‘good taste’ and style.”9 The cultural markers also overlap with linguistic markers. As mentioned, fluency in and comfort with English become the ultimate symbols of status, privilege, and cultural capital. In the new imagined middle class, as a consequence of rapid influx of wealth and singular importance of consumerism, the borders of good taste and style become both elastic and more rigorously policed. However, what denotes either of these elusive qualities is obviously more complex than consciously held beliefs. In his theorization of the classed practices of distinction and exclusion among the French bourgeoisie, Pierre Bourdieu argues for “an immediate R anveer S ingh ’ s “ C hich o rapan ”

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adherence, at the deepest level of the habitus, to the tastes and distastes, sympathies and aversions, fantasies and phobias, which more than declared opinions, forge the unconscious unity of a class.”10 Taste, then, is deeply entrenched in unconsciously held feelings and sympathies and encoded into the habitus. For Amita Bavaskar and Raka Ray, these “attitudes and beliefs,” which “adhere to one’s habitus” are “class dispositions.”11 In the case of the Indian middle classes, these class dispositions are spliced with structures of caste, region, and gender. These dispositions, though, are infused with emotion. Bourdieu’s habitus allows us to focus on the fact that the apparently intellectual and rational exercise of discernment of taste is always already an emotional one. This is particularly interesting when it comes to attitudes toward stars and celebrities, as they come to embody dominant aspirational ideals of good taste and style in a particular cultural moment.12 The virulent dismissiveness of Singh’s fashion and temperament reflect the perceived attacks on imagined established habitus of the bourgeois man. And yet, the celebration of Singh as a fashion maven and new man, the GQ award being a case in point, reflects the changes in the habitus of the urban bourgeois man. In the postliberalized Indian economy, where global capitalist and commodity flows foreground the shifting valences of the invented Indian middle class, the incompleteness of “the project of being middle class” also becomes obvious.13 New entrants, who might have the material resources, attempt to acquire the cultural capital in order to belong to the perceived superior social segment. This is true of members from other socially marginalized groups, who in the process of becoming middle class, not only bring new segments of the middle class into being, but also reconfigure the dimensions of middle-class subjectivity and identity. For instance, as Roger Jeffery, Patricia Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey’s work on the rural rich Jats in Haryana demonstrates, the newly acquired wealth of the young Jat men enables the ownership of the status-granting commodities, but that does not necessarily confer a middle-class identity.14 They might be denied entry to the class category, as they do not inhabit the cultural, social, and linguistic structures of the extant middle class. Alternatively, their presence necessarily alters what it means to be middle class. The so-called uncouth facet of Singh’s off-screen persona and his many on-screen characters speak precisely to this faction: the newly arrived, 126

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confident, yet mocked young man who aspires to be middle class. I hasten to add here that this representation does not extend to the lower castes among the lower classes. Although Singh as an individual is a “Bandraboy” (a posh neighborhood of Bombay), in possession of a college degree and an eloquence that sets him apart from quite a few of his more “in” Bollywood peers, he is supposedly jahil and chichora because of his apparent déclassé affect. More emphatically, in his on-screen roles, Bittoo in Band Baaja Baarat (2010), Ram in Goliyon Ka Raasleela, Ram-Leela (2013), Dev in Kill Dil (2014), and even Bikram in Gunday (2014), that propelled him into stardom, he embodies the lower-class man seeking entrance to middle-class respectability or wealth, or a man who hovers between classes. In his first starring role that made him into an overnight star, he played Bittoo Sharma, the son of a Haryana sugarcane farmer who fulfills his dream of going to college in Delhi. For a North Indian–Delhi audience, Bittoo’s name or “B-IDOUBLE T- DOUBLE O” invokes a down-homey lower-middle-classness. Both Bittoo’s status and his aspirations are already invoked in his name. In an early scene, when his father comes to collect him (along with the new tractor), he refuses to go back. He climbs on to the ledge of the second floor veranda of his dorm, and says, “I’ll die but I am not going to cut cane” (Mar jaaonga, magar ganne nahi katoonga) (Band Baaja Baaraat). In an effort to escape what he sees as a circumscribed rural life, he persuades his father that he’s going to become a wedding planner. Interestingly, his father, in keeping with his rural background, does not know what this fancy new job is, and when he does understand, points out that arranging weddings is “a woman’s job.” The profession of wedding planner, a by-product of the status-conscious middle and upper classes, is a new consumer-culture driven middle-class profession, one that is ambiguous in terms of its classed and educational expectations even as it disrupts gendered expectations. Bittoo’s (and his partner Shruti’s) professional aspirations and entrepreneurial spirit represent the coming classes as they seek to break into the exclusive spaces of the elite. Bittoo’s rural-urban, loudmouthed, street-smart masculinity is represented with sympathy, indulgence, and respect. Although he loses a little of his naïveté, the narrative does not smooth out his rough edges to fit him in among the elites whose marriages he arranges. He proudly displays both his and Shruti’s lower-middle-class identity or Janakpuri R anveer S ingh ’ s “ C hich o rapan ”

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Chaap (Seal) instead of hiding it (Janak Puri is a respectable lower-middleclass neighborhood in Delhi that was most resolutely not posh). Indeed location as identity is a through-line in the film, Shruti and Bittoo constantly call each other by their place of origin—Janak Puri and Sahranpur—a warning and a reminder to never forget where they have come from, what they stand for, and how far they have come. Similarly, as Dev, a baby-faced assassin in a Tarantino-infused masala film, whose henna-tinged hair is worn in an unbecoming bowl cut, Singh embodies the lower-class orphan aspiring to be cool. In several instances, Dev either attempts to speak in English, replete with mispronunciations, or nods knowingly at English spoken to him. Even as he falls in love with a rich girl who has all the cultural and financial capital he lacks, no montage reveals his suddenly becoming sophisticated and losing his class behaviors. Dev enters the ranks of the respectable, wearing a suit and tidying his hair, yet retains his relationship with his assassin friend and maintains his affect. There is no Pip-like transformation. At the end of both films, Singh’s characters craft a new middle-class masculine identity, retaining their earlier style, language, and demeanor and in the process shifting the terms of an imagined middle-class masculinity. In most of his early films, he plays loveable rogues, of different shades of “loud, cheap, and flamboyant,” the original script descriptors for his character, Ram in Ram-Leela.15 SHI F TI NG DY N A M I C S O F H E T E ROSEX UAL RO M AN CE

While shifting the terrain of middle-class masculinities, Singh’s characters also share an interesting dynamic with the women they love. Loud, cheap, and flamboyant would presume patriarchal masculine practices, but Dev, Bittoo, and Ram do not follow the heteronormative script. Although they are assertive and confident, aware of their appeal to women, Dev is perhaps the naïve exception to the rule, they defer to the women in their lives. Their narrative arcs are shaped and altered by their encounter with powerful and confident women, not in terms of the cinematic romantic trope of how the love of a good woman changes the hero, but rather in ways that disrupt the conventional gender scripts of mainstream representation of heterosexual romance, whether in Bollywood or elsewhere. In Band Baaja Baaraat, Bittoo says of Shruti, “Aadmi banaya usne mujhe, kaam-dhande pe lagaya usne” (She made a 128

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man of me, she gave me a job). Indeed, Bittoo initially defers to Shruti in all professional matters because she is the one with the professional expertise. It is a partnership of equals, but Shruti is the one who makes it happen: Bittoo transforms from feckless college student to entrepreneur, from boy to man, because of Shruti’s maturity, business acumen, and enterprise. Interestingly, gendered conventions are overturned at the most quotidian of levels, and hence the subversion is all the more radical for it. Bittoo, while embodying the stereotypical Dilli-ka-launda (Delhi boy)—with his promiscuity, roving eye, somewhat uncouth good-hearted dude-bro ways—is also shown as the nurturer. He makes the tea, a task that by some unwritten rule always falls to the woman; the tea-making becomes particularly noteworthy when he points out the anomaly of Shruti making tea, who, again, defying expectations, makes bad tea, “gand chai.” He is the one who is more familiar with the kitchen, a point that the film foregrounds when Shruti has to ask Bittoo the location of the milk and tea in the office kitchen. Bittoo is also the one who makes sure that they eat and that Shruti especially eats on time. Once again, the making, or in this case, ordering of food, the reminder to eat, in a normative, patriarchal world are all considered the inherent preserve of women, but here it is Bittoo who ensures that Shruti is well fed at all times. The film’s casual subversion of this most “normal” of gendered behaviors ties in with the reconfiguration of straight romance and normative ideas of middle-class urban masculinity and femininity. Singh’s ability to simultaneously embody the dichotomy of heteronormative hypermasculinity and its subversion is a consistent feature of his performance. As the man-child assassin, Dev, Singh continues his practice of playing someone from the lower rungs of society. However, his character and performance unravel the expectations of the professional assassin. Dev is joyous, loveable, naïve, and extremely vulnerable, even as he gleefully shoots down “targets” and violently assaults them. Moreover, the naïveté and vulnerability—evident in his relationship with his adoptive gangster-father, who treats Dev like a favorite child even as he expects the undying fealty of a feudal employee, and his “best friend,” Tutu, for whom Dev is beloved baby brother—becomes even more explicit in his relationship with Disha. In a break-up scene that follows Disha’s discovery of his murderous profession, she, sternfaced and stoic, clinically ends the relationship while Dev cries. The R anveer S ingh ’ s “ C hich o rapan ”

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filmic narrative makes the power dynamic obvious, when she, seated at the table in her home, tells Dev to sit after he, anxious and miserable walks in, awaiting her judgment. She speaks while he remains silent: “Is rishtey mein jo tera hai, tu rakh le, jo mera tha, woh main chod chuki hoon . . . Maine jo bolna tha who bol diya, agar thumhe kuch kehna hai, woh main sunna nahi chahti” (What was yours in this relationship, you may keep, I have given up what was mine, there is no us anymore. I have said what I had to say, and I don’t want to hear what you have to say) (Kill Dil). As Disha speaks, the shot-reverse-shot allows the viewer to see their expressions but with an obscured obstacle in the middle of the frame (a vase, a wall-hanging signifying separation and misunderstanding): Disha is icy and cold in her betrayed anger; Dev’s face slowly crumples, childlike, as he starts to cry. His face, framed by his bowl-cut hair and bangs hanging over his eyes, becomes even more childlike and hurt as he tearfully absorbs her anger and pain. She cries only after he has left. The power in this scene is with Disha. Within the patriarchal conventions of mainstream Hindi film romance, the man, though in the wrong, would have declared his undying love and raged at her narrow-minded privilege, and she would have magically seen the error of her ways and flung herself crying into his arms. In deliberate contrast, Singh’s Dev does not do anything to take back the power in the situation. When Disha refuses to look at him, he accepts her judgment and walks away. He makes no righteous manly attempt to make her see his point of view. This is in sharp contrast to other crying heroes, most notably Shah Rukh Khan, whose cinematic masculinity and stardom were underwritten by his ability to cry. But Khan’s characters always emerge triumphant after their tears, and his characters end up reinforcing a softer patriarchal status quo; the same cannot be said of Singh’s characters. They are vulnerable, and in their vulnerability, especially in relation to the female beloved, the patriarchally structured gender binary is deliberately disrupted. The reworking of cinematic masculinity continues even in fairy-taleesque small-town realms infused with violence, family feuds, and sex. In Goliyon Ka Raasleela, Ram-Leela, the narrative is set in the storybook Romeo-and-Juliet landscape of warring Gujarati gun-running families. Virile and hypermasculine Ram, “whose masculinity can be vouched by any girl” (meri mardangi ke baare mein aap gaanv ki kisi bhi ladki se puchlo, report achi milegi), while in a confrontation with 130

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his erstwhile love and wife, Leela, accedes to the righteousness of her strident, aggressive argument (Ram-Leela). The body language in the scene is compelling: as the two face each other across a low table, Leela leans forward, her eyes ablaze, and stridently condemns him for his failure to fight for their marriage; in response, Ram, who had been lounging confidently, drops his gaze, rounds his shoulders, and shrinks into himself. Leela is powerful and confrontational; Ram, teary-eyed, is guilty and ashamed. He leaves the room, ceding the field of battle to Leela. It is a powerful, disruptive scene: the confrontation occurs in a public forum, in front of the leaders of the city who have called the meeting to reconcile the warring families, headed by Ram and Leela respectively. Singh’s men do not emerge triumphant in relation to the women they love, and more often than not they do not have the upper hand: this particular gender dynamic is unusual for romances in Hindi cinema. The deliberate scripting of a feminist, less patriarchally structured masculinity is evident in Singh’s off-screen persona as well, manifest in his well-known yet unacknowledged romantic relationship, not to mention in his obsessively photographed sartorial ventures. Uniquely Ranveer Singh the celebrity, the self-confessed “best boyfriend you could have,” he also is Singh the star who embodies the Indian neoliberal, feminist man. For the last five years, he has been in a rumored relationship with Deepika Padukone, the biggest female star in Bollywood. She is not only more famous and popular, but also the bigger earner of the two. This is an unusual turn of affairs for Bollywood. He publicly celebrates her ambition, her acting prowess, and her stardom. When he speaks of her, it is less about her beauty and more about her work ethic, her drive, and her accomplishments. In many ways, they redefine the idea of star couple in Bollywood, by embodying feminism in practice: they are respectful of each other’s independence, individuality, ambition, and craft. S T YL E F USI O N

His notorious sartorial adventurousness, with which I began this essay, is an integral component of his pushing the boundaries of bourgeois masculinity and the establishment of his persona. More than any other star, Ranveer Singh is indelibly associated with fashion risks, which disrupts sexist and homophobic stereotypes about fashion. In 2015, he was on every conceivable Most Stylish list on various media platforms.16 R anveer S ingh ’ s “ C hich o rapan ”

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Although being stylish and wearing designer-wear is now a must for Bollywood celebrities, he shifts the relationship between masculine stardom and fashion. Fashion is less about function and more about form, expression, and fluidity. Most recently, while promoting the epic historical, romantic melodrama Bajirao Mastani, which has become one of the year’s most successful Bollywood films, Singh was seen in various types of skirts. He wore a long lehenga (traditional long skirt) with a bandhgala, and kohl-lined eyes—part of designer Anju Modi’s eighteenth-century-Maratha-inspired ethnic couture. Modi was also the costume designer for Bajirao Mastani. For the Glamour Magazine awards (where he won for most stylish actor), he wore a two-piece jacket with a skirt-chudidar combination designed for him by designer Arjun Saluja. Through it all, he sported his shaved head and shendi (authentic Brahmin ponytail), earrings, and kohl-lined eyes, all of which he had for his role as the historical Bajirao Peshwa. It was a deliberate and explicit commingling of the masculine and the feminine. Indeed, Ranveer’s appearances blended genders. His clothes were a deliberate fusion of different ethnic style designs—such as long kurtas, flowing kediyas, tight chudidars, loose salwars, and the Mundu—fused with Chinese, Japanese, and Western lines and cuts. Singh was the emblem of sartorial sophistication, bringing together the hypermasculine and the feminine as well as Western, South Asian, and East Asian aesthetics.17 In the process, he constructs a self that is the cutting edge of sophistication (and is simultaneously read as chichora). Fashion, then, becomes an important medium through which he embodies a new Indian middle-class masculinity produced within Hollywood and transnational networks of celebrity and taste. His avantgarde fashion tastes are a combination of his urban class location, his American education, and a product of the transnational circulation of elite fashions and attitudes. As befits his advertising background, his deployment of fashion is strategic and self-aware. His use of fashion signals his thoughtfulness, attention to the processes of star-making, and ambition. As he says, “Style is an external expression. It is how you express yourself.”18 He has also referred to his style as “whimsical and individualistic.”19 He uses fashion to set himself apart from other actors in the industry, as a calling card of his individuality, his nonconformity, and his newness.20 In this, Singh is a new type of star celebrity and a new type of man, but he also, tellingly, compares himself with Lady Gaga.21 132

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Like Gaga, Singh is “always performing and always aware [of his] audience.” He too “embraces the way a near-constant viewership” can be used to his advantage.22 Adapting Lady Gaga’s sartorial theatricality and her strategic engagements with the fusion of stardom and celebrity, he remakes himself as an unconventional disruptive agent who challenges masculine norms as well as social norms. Unlike Lady Gaga’s outlandish, one-of-a-kind outfits, Singh’s clothes are either Indian or international off-the-ramp couture: Rohit Bal, Masaba, Sabyasachi, Rahul Khanna and Rohit Gandhi, Arjun Saluja, Hermes, Chanel, Dior, Gucci, and Prada. His use of high fashion, transnational or otherwise, is part of a multipronged strategy to establish himself as a star-actor who is unwilling to adhere to status-quo ideas of conservative respectability. He is the first and only mainstream Bollywood actor to endorse condoms, reinforcing his image as neoliberal, cosmopolitan man who is iconoclastic and hyper-individualistic, crystallizing his star-celebrity persona. This is another instance of Singh situating himself within a more expansive frame of taste and tone, more in line with the young American star-celebrity writers, actors, singers such as Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island Collective, and young Indian satirists and comedians such as All India Bakchod and Kanan Gill (more on this later) than his Bollywood peers. Although Bollywood stars have no problems shilling for anything from paints to undergarments, condom advertisements are considered sleazy and taboo. Singh insisted that it was time to “normali[ze]” the conversation about sex, as something natural and fun.23 The commercial for Durex, an extended video with Singh dancing, singing, and rapping in Hinglish about the joys of safe sex, was first uploaded on the internet. It is a comedic, self-deprecatory, fun music video (where the name of the product is not even mentioned) masquerading as an advertisement. He sings about loving this crazy feeling, even as conservative society tells him that love is a crime: “I love it, this feeling / It’s crazy / ye kya nasha hai / par Zaalim zamana kahe / Mohabbat ek saza hai!” The hook of the song is catchy, exhorting “lovers all over the world” that “When you have a great sex / You do the Rex,” a dance step Singh indulges in whenever he has great sex in the advertisement.24 The main singer is a vibrant, happy, yet self-deprecatory Singh. The refrain is sung by a female voice, Singh excitedly assenting or being shy in parentheses: “Wow that was good (hai na), / You blew me away (Uffo) / It was amazing (I know) / I feel great.”25 The song normalizes R anveer S ingh ’ s “ C hich o rapan ”

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female sexuality and female desire, even as the video, unfortunately, features scantily clad women dancing with Singh. It is the woman who enjoys having sex; she vocalizes her pleasure and compliments him; Singh is just very happy at having pleased her. As in fashion and his India Times presentation, he constructs his persona of the nonconformist, subversive, masculine star celebrity. Singh as new feminist man is evident in the advertisement. More important, the tone of, and idea for, the ad is rooted in Singh’s viewing of Lonely Island’s “I just had sex,” a musical digital short on Saturday Night Live (aired December 19, 2010).26 The comic song is a rap, pop, R&B number, which celebrates the experience in the title. It’s a nonsensical self-deprecatory yet joyous celebration of having had sex, of being grateful to the girl in question for letting the happy boy-man “put [his] penis” inside her, even if, among other things, all he did was “cry” through the “best 30 seconds of [his] life.” The song is silly and farcical, where the joke is on the men singing, and yet endearing for exactly that reason. The men in the video, and as with Singh in the Durex ad, are the antitheses to the iconic heteronormative, patriarchal, conquering sexy playboy. STA R P E RS O N A

Singh’s iconoclastic star persona is built on an adoption and adaptations of certain American affects and genres for an Indian middle-class audience. He was part of All India Bakchod or AIB’s Roast. AIB is a well-known Indian comedy collective whose many astute satirical videos of Indian middle-class life have millions of views on YouTube. The Roast was AIB and Singh’s attempt to bring the form of insult comedy, a common enough comedy genre in the United States to an Indian audience. Replete with colorism, fat-shaming, slut-shaming, and puerile jokes about sex, all of which seem to be integral components of insult comedy, the roast is about humiliating and cutting down to size the guest of honor, the roastee. The genre repudiates veneration of famous people, respectability, good manners, and ideas of decorum. The show itself was a success in terms of both the tickets sold and the views the uploaded video got, but it also triggered a massive outcry, so much so that AIB has been taken to court under India’s archaic laws for obscenity and for “causing offense to women.” The outcry is based on those bourgeois ideas of decorum and sexual respectability that the genre 134

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denigrates.27 The controversy became the center of a free speech debate. AIB and Singh (among others) were either celebrated as the cutting edge of comedic raillery and crusaders of free speech or denigrated as ill-mannered, classless, perverted degenerates. In any case, it was a consequence of adapting an American genre of comedy to the Indian middle class. Singh is unique among his peers in incorporating this kind of American celebrity affect and transnational verve to create his star masculinity. Fully cognizant of himself as a persona and as a brand, in true neoliberal star-celebrity fashion, Singh has created a “unique and distinctive identity” across multiple platforms and through multiple media, including advertisements, comedy videos, presentations, award ceremonies, and fashion.28 Singh’s serial performances across various sites, then, begin to produce a “blended public persona,” a public self that is distinctive yet representative, amalgamating celebrity and star (Marshall). Bollywood stars in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century have been fully participatory in creating their own stardom, but Singh is one of the few who has leveraged the idea of singular brand with such careful deliberation through multiple media. He speaks in pithy, yet nuanced statements almost intuitively crafted to be eminently quotable. As Nihit Bhave notes, “[he is] a man who weighs his words but also makes them sound spontaneous, a man who knows what he’s selling and why.” The statement not only draws attention to the care with which Singh speaks, but also alludes to his advertising background and self-awareness in crafting and projecting his off-screen persona. His often-repeated narrative of struggle, of being an industry outsider who ran from pillar to post with his portfolio hoping for a shot at acting, accentuates the narrative of individualism, ambition, and work ethic underpinning every aspect of his masculine star persona. In addition, what makes Ranveer Singh significant and relatable as new Bollywood star is that his star masculinity signifies the changing habitus of the imagined middle class. His star text represents multiple aspects of the idea of the middle-class man: the parvenu, the transnational trendsetter, and the neoliberal and ambitious man. He speaks to the gradual erosion in heteronormative, patriarchal representations of masculinity that demand the hero should always be in control, that he must always emerge triumphant, that he must “be a man,” an erosion that manifests in his off-screen star-celebrity persona as well. R anveer S ingh ’ s “ C hich o rapan ”

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N OTE S 1. Barry King, “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Moral Economy of Pretending,” in A Companion to Celebrity, edited by P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 325. 2. Ibid., 326. 3. See Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990). 4. Rosalind Gill, “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times,” Subjectivity 25 (2008): 442. 5. Anne Phoenix, “Neoliberalism and Masculinity: Racialization and the Contradiction of Schooling for 11–14 Year-Olds,” Youth and Society 36, no. 2 (December 2003): 229. 6. For instance, Krittika, “15 Brands or Products that Describe Ranveer Singh Oh-So-Perfectly,” AkkarBakkar, n.d.; see also Smejal Rajani, “Kamaal R. Khan Calls Ranveer Singh Chichora Actor,” India, June 1, 2015, http://www.india.com/showbiz /kamaal-r-khan-calls-ranveer-singh-chichora-actor-for-dil-dhadakne-do-403702/. Although Kamaal Khan, self-styled film critic and actor, deliberately courts controversy for the sake of attention and notoriety, much of what he tweets ends up circulating in the entertainment media. 7. P. David Marshall, “Seriality and Persona,” M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture, 17, no. 3 (2014), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal /article/view/802. 8. See Shobha De, “Ranveer Singh Is Like Chicken Manchurian,” NDTV.com, June 25, 2015, https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/ranveer-singh-cant-pull-off-a-govinda -nor-should-he-775160. 9. D. L. Sheth, “Secularisation of Caste and Making of New Middle-Class,” Economic and Political Weekly 34–35 (1999): 2503. 10. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 77. 11. Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, introduction to Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (London: Routledge, 2011), 14. 12. For instance, Shah Rukh Khan’s meteoric rise to transnational male stardom reflected the collective aspirational desire to be cosmopolitan, elite, urbane, sophisticated, appropriately feeling, and desirable. That he redefines middle-class masculinity on screen to be feeling, vulnerable, and unabashedly sensuous while retaining its heteronormative privilege within traditional patriarchal family structures captures the shifting gender and sexual politics of the newly minted post-liberalization Indian middle classes. I am, of course, speaking in broad strokes here, but SRK’s onscreen and off-screen persona spoke to the “attitudes,” “beliefs” or “class dispositions,” and habitus of the liberalizing aspirational Indian middle classes. 13. Baviskar and Ray, introduction, 19. 14. Roger Jeffery, Patricia Jeffery, and Craig Jeffrey, “Are Rich Rural Jats MiddleClass?” in Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Class, edited by Amita Bavaskar and Raka Ray (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 140–166. 15. See 6:42 minute mark of Eros Now, “Goliyon Ka Raasleela Ram-Leela: Making of the Film,” YouTube, December 1, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoUIYkjlNbA. 16. Fashion blogs and websites dedicated thousands of words to his style. Every new outfit worn at a promotional event, an awards ceremony, or even at the airport is 136

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breathlessly reported on in the newspapers. This special relationship to fashion and his fame for taking fashion risks prompted Adidas Originals to name him their brand ambassador, their first in India. There is even a dedicated website to his style, Ranveer’s Armoire, diligently researched and maintained by a committed fan and self-confessed fashionista. 17. On the one hand, it seems ridiculous to point out that Singh blurs the gender binary by wearing haute couture interpretations of different types of traditional Indian wear, which always already looked androgynous within the perspective of the internalized colonizer-Westerner. At the same time, those clothes do not make it to the front pages of English-language magazines because they are not seen as modern; nor are they accepted as appropriate manly clothes by a respectable bourgeois audience. Furthermore, these were not traditional clothes, but rather high-fashion, off-the-ramp clothes. More important, most of Singh’s clothes, such as the lehenga and long skirts are deemed feminine, and his choice to wear them is deliberate and subversive, even as it is fashionably cutting-edge and “hipster.” 18. Indian Express, “Ranveer Singh: People Should Express Themselves without Filter [sic],” February 21, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment /bollywood/ranveer-singh-deepika-padukone-amitabh-bachchan-news-style-news. 19. Udita Jhunjhunwalaa, “Ranveer Singh on the Time Amitabh Bachchan Did Not Approve of His Outfit,” Vogue.com, June 2, 2017, http://www.vogue.in/content/ranveer -singh-on-the-time-amitabh-bachchan-did-not-approve-of-his-outfit/#in-vivienne -westwood. 20. This particular instrumentality of fashion for Ranveer Singh in the creation of his stardom has not gone unnoticed. In one of the more recent articles dedicated to Singh and fashion, Namrata Zakaria points out, “Ranveer Singh is an absolute original. He has used fashion to get himself noticed. His getup is his business card, mood board and his identity.” That he carefully crafts (with the help of his stylist, Nitasha Gaurav) and carries off with swagger and panache outfits from the conservative to the outlandish signals his confidence as a man and star-celebrity, and his versatility as an actor. 21. Anushka Manchandani, “Ranveer Singh Reveals His Most Embarrassing Fashion Moment,” MissMalini.com, December 21, 2015, https://www.missmalini.com/2015/12 /21/watch-ranveer-singh-reveals-his-most-embarrassing-fashion-moment. 22. Amber L. Davisson, Lady Gaga and the Remaking of Celebrity Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2013), 5. 23. Times of India, “Ranveer Singh’s Latest Rap Has Sexy New Twist,” April 24, 2014, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/ Ranveer-Singhs-latest-rap-Ranveer-Singh-to-endorse-condom-Ranveer-Singh-aboutintimacy/articleshow/34117540.cms. 24. DurexIndia, “Do the Rex Featuring Ranveer Singh Durex Ad,” YouTube, April 23, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1qEnquUFjw. 25. DurexIndia, “Do the Rex.” 26. The video was uploaded to YouTube on December 18, 2010. It has been viewed nearly 243 million times. 27. See Financial Express, “AIB Roast Video Taken Down from YouTube, Makers Defend show,” February 4, 2015; see also “Another FIR to Be Registered against AIB Knockout,” February 12, 2015. 28. Namrata Zakaria, “A King Among Men,” Mumbai Mirror, December 29, 2015, http://www.mumbaimirror.com/columns/columnists/namrata-zakaria/A-King -Among-Men/articleshow/50360186.cms. R anveer S ingh ’ s “ C hich o rapan ”

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7

Consolidating Bollywood Spectacularity without Stardom Akshay a Kumar

This chapter analyzes the competing logics of consolidation that serve or resist Bollywood. In so doing, it takes into account the crossover potential of spectacularity, the auto-advertising potential of stardom, the differential capacities of industries working with varying scales of budget, and the potential reach of consolidating forces coming from the West and the Indian film industries of the southern states. The consolidation I try to grapple with is not necessarily the outcome of a worked-out design, but an effect of how capital, territoriality, and visuality unentangle themselves from one constellation to move to another in an intensely contested arena of film production. Mapping power and pleasure across popular industries, the globalizing Bollywood could be understood as an industrial complex at a crossroad, assailed by large capital and choice of directions it could take to consolidate further. I argue first that Bollywood has moved away from its desire to consolidate its prowess in the West, and has realized the compelling advantages of consolidating the domestic market, particularly that in the south; second, that the transregional traffic between north and south is not dissimilar from the transnational traffic toward and from the West, to the extent that the vector along which the crossover happens also enables territorial consolidation in the opposite direction; and, third, in an industry as deterministically trapped in the figure of the star, 138

spectacularity has emerged as a solution to consolidate in spite of the constraints of stardom. Some recent interest in the rise of Bollywood as an industry with increasing global prowess aside, it can hardly be overlooked that the last two decades have seen a parallel rise of Hollywood within the Indian film exhibition market, not necessarily registered with the same alertness.1 Study of this interpenetration deserves a nuanced analytical approach. Has Bollywood found any success in actually offering itself as an aesthetic alternative to Hollywood within the international market? Or is it only that an international audience has been made aware of an alternative industrial product. This chapter argues that appending Bollywood to the international cinema portfolio draws on the globalizing impulses of capital, in much the same way as in the case of international cuisines. This is no way threatens to destabilize the growing immensity of Hollywood. There is no denying, however, that the stakes on Bollywood have become international. Such stakes make a claim upon the foreign and unfamiliar object of curiosity via the act of “making familiar.” Bollywood, as a result of this process, has been added to the international portfolios in a reductive but familiar form. In fact, one could argue that Bollywood is nothing but this conveniently familiarized subset of Indian, actually Hindi, cinema. This unrepresentative product packaging is then supported by the branding mechanisms that operate via a persistent, permanent essence of the product—sentimentality. In his magnificent essay on the foundational aspects of Bollywood, Madhava Prasad notes the centrality of a “permanent identity,” more or less anchored by the diaspora.2 But this stable identity at the same time makes an otherwise complicated behemoth of film industries familiar in conveniently comprehensible terms. The intelligibility of Bollywood, then, revolves around its extravagant song and dance routines, in which large families or entire neighborhoods are seen to be celebrating, and the epic melodramas overloaded with sentimentality. These signifiers only hold together the international imagination of Bollywood, the terms on which it has been made sense of. What purpose does this limited intelligibility serve? At the diasporic end, this intelligibility ruptures the separation of the spheres of cultural activity. At the production end, it brings Hollywood studios into Hindi film production and distribution. At the level of increasingly globalizing cultural vocabulary—of which the internet may be the preeminent site—it creates a seamlessness C o ns o lidating B o lly w o o d

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necessary for the traffic between industrial complexes. At the elite end, an exclusive interest in Hollywood has persisted within metropolitan India for a long time, owing primarily to the fact that only large cities could access the Hollywood content easily. As Bollywood’s international footprint and production sophistication gradually rescued it from being considered “downmarket” since the late 1990s, the segregation and exclusivity of the domains was reduced. Indeed, the rigid distinctions between the cultural commodities also melt away, as a general principle, in liquid modernity.3 Also, the same impulse of globalization that compelled the world to know Bollywood better also made it imperative that even small-town India became aware of Hollywood. Just as Bollywood was reduced to its sentimental capacities internationally, the acceptability of Hollywood in the Indian market grew immensely via special effects, logically sound screenplays, and more believable action sequences. The key sites of this process of assimilation included the internet, satellite television, informal disk markets, and the multiplex mall. Unlike in the twentieth century, the circulation of Hollywood content in all these circuits made it available not only to the upper classes of metropolitan India, but also and even in small towns. Indeed, much of this shift was also related to the increasing familiarity with the English language across India—an effect of the vast variety of jobs made available by the service economy, particularly in the information technology sector. Soon enough, the Hollywood content gained immense popularity via action films dubbed in regional languages, even in the decrepit single-screen theaters that could no longer play recent Hindi releases. The consolidation of the exhibition markets with the arrival of digital distribution—particularly UFO Moviez, India’s largest digital cinema distribution network—further consolidated the scattered single-screen economy with the metropolitan multiplexes. Hollywood as well as Bollywood releases could now find exhibition much more widely. I do not attempt to establish the specifics of this process here as much as highlight the increasing relevance of Hollywood within the exhibition trade. This compels us to concede that attention must be paid to the asynchronous aspirations and trajectories of film production and exhibition. Although exhibition markets are not necessarily interested in distinguishing the cultural locations of the content, production markets necessarily build on those very distinctions.4 As the arrival of the multiplex 140

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mall put immense commercial pressure on the film exhibition economy across the country, and changed the fundamental character of power distribution within the film economy, the reorganization of exhibition and the rising penetration of Hollywood in India were connected to the postliberalization economic policies.5 Bollywood, then, was also shaped by the gradual rise of Hollywood within its erstwhile captive market. TH E “SPE CTAC U L A R ” A S A C RO S S OV E R FOR M Bollywood now avoids clashing with any major Hollywood film while deciding a release date. The Avengers wiped out Tezz. The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man practically saw no competition. No major Hindi films are planned on weeks when biggies such as Skyfall and The Hobbit open. — M URLI C HHATWANI , DISTRIBUTION

HEAD ,

D AR M EDIA 6

In percentage terms, Hollywood still poses no major threat to the dominance of the mainstream Bollywood fare in India. However, when pitched appropriately in key segments, the big-budget sci-fi and superhero films—Iron Man (2008), Spider-Man and Batman films, 2012 (2009), Avatar (2009) and so on—and much of Hollywood action cinema— Bond films, Mission Impossible series, Terminator series and The Avengers (2012)—are increasingly gaining ground. As was the case with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), more than half the prints released in the market are often regular 2D prints, or prints dubbed in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu. The 3D English variants released in the metropolitan centers no longer dominate, and in several instances are released with English subtitles on the original English prints.7 What deserves our attention, then, is that such blockbusters loaded with action and special effects are what enable Hollywood to penetrate the Indian market significantly. As carriers of massive capital, these blockbusters showcase and feed into the various fantasies of the globalizing present. In this spectacular present, the distinctions across industries melt down. Instead, the spectacular appears to have become a robust crossover form. In other words, it is by deploying the framework of spectacular blockbusters that Hindi film economy regenerated itself. The new audiovisual constellation that Bollywood thrives on draws on the spectacular to offer itself as an alternative to Hollywood. Why does this crossover not C o ns o lidating B o lly w o o d

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compromise the autonomy of Bollywood, possibly also resulting in devastating concessions it can ill afford? The answer lies in one of the key logics of territorial distribution across Indian cinemas. Unable to directly take on the capital-intensive frame of Hollywood, Bollywood has become increasingly dependent on its auto-advertising agents—male stars. Some very sharply insightful literature has established how the alignment of stardom with languagebased film industries in southern India was key to their identification as such and to their resultant consolidation of the linguistic territory.8 Against the growing prowess of Hollywood, Bollywood has deployed similar logics to draw and sustain boundaries. It is important to understand how the distinctions between the industries, their production values, and stardom operate here. Beginning at the turn to this century, as the multiplexes raised the cost of film tickets beyond a threshold and slashed the average runtimes by about thirty minutes, the distinctions between big-budget star vehicles and relatively low-budget films not featuring any big stars became both widely identifiable and crucial to the decision whether to watch a film in theaters or on television or personal computers at home. One of the reasons the spectacular Hollywood productions could hold onto their market is that their bigger budgets and sophisticated special effects could justify a viewing in the theaters; Hollywood spectaculars were often considered worth spending money over. In this divided exhibition economy, struggling with crumbling urban infrastructures and higher costs of living, the spectacular form could become a crossover form because it could sustain the rationale as to why infrastructures should be negotiated to cross over into the theaters. Only the big-budget Hindi films featuring major stars, and a much higher screen penetration, could compete within this new Bollywood economy—not only against the might of Hollywood but also within the saturated annual calendar of heavy-duty releases—primarily Hindi, but increasingly a few south Indian films pitched aggressively across India, most notably Rajinikant films and Baahubali: The Beginning (2015). Most of the production houses now depend on such major releases to balance their portfolio against a variety of smaller budget films. This means that the male stars around whose figure such major releases are planned end up holding an undue advantage in the contemporary Bollywood economy. The packaging of stardom, therefore, holds the key to the 142

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orientation of the film commodity. It determines the commercial territories the star is repurposed to enjoin, breach, consolidate, or conquer. TR A NSNATI O N A L V E R S U S T R A N S R E G IO N AL : PACKAG I NG S TA R D O M

The popularity of Bollywood in the affluent parts of the West has emerged on account of its easy identification with a few male stars as well as the reduction of Indian cinemas to the permanent essence of sentimentality. A few stray exceptions such as Taal and Yaadein aside, the brand Bollywood has been most closely associated in the international market with Shahrukh Khan. Khan’s successful run in the 2000s (Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Kal Ho Na Ho, for example) were a few expensive melodramas, which crystallized the association. Not only were these films populated by characters either settled in the West or returning from there, they also routinely referred to the previous set of films via moments of blatant promotion of the production company. The aural often took precedence over the visual in establishing this cinephilic continuity.9 This channel of transnational traffic, instead of being genuinely international, was limited to western India—the state of Punjab, specifically—and the United States and United Kingdom, drawing on the historical migration from Punjab to the developed economies and the resultant transnational sensibilities. The patriotic or religious motifs would often be invoked to elide over the cultural complexities, just as the sentimentality is deployed to offset the affective complexities of familial relationships and traumas of immigration. This transnational aesthetic was deployed to package Bollywood as an interface, making intelligible via contraction the vastness of India. Khan, to put it somewhat crudely, became the mascot of this branding. His overt and audacious sentimentality would challenge the staid civility of the Western self-styling. Even as they revealed the “inner essence” of the animated Indian, these films showcased a possible meeting ground of sentimental geographies. This project was not to last forever, though. The inability to consolidate any significant and reliable market for Bollywood outside India had in the meantime also caused severe damages to the market within India. The cultural insularity of the NRI films was only compensated by the screen presence of the major stars. Therefore, although the big-budget C o ns o lidating B o lly w o o d

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films were often successful, it is the second or third rung of stars who were unable to work the module in their favor. The gradual rise of comedies and action cinema within Bollywood, on the other hand, worked to the advantage of the bulk of productions that became more viable. This is the phase in which alternative domestic geographies, of which the small town became the most prominent, became a viable filmic commodity, as I discuss in detail elsewhere.10 In the Western market, however, the visibility of Bollywood may have increased significantly, but it does not necessarily translate into capital returns. The significant hold of Netflix, other online platforms, and pirate networks also takes a big bite off the pie, which is why the overseas market may remain an important addition to its domestic counterpart but does not go much further than that. Some of the highest grossers yet, at the box office overseas, are indeed the biggest grossers at the domestic box office. In fact, the list almost entirely films featuring three most popular Khans of Bollywood—Aamir, Salman, and Shahrukh.11 As we go closer to the mid-range releases featuring other stars, the numbers are rarely that impressive. The films only earn a fraction of their worldwide gross from overseas markets.12 What can we, then, say about the negotiation between the two dominant inflections of Bollywood—transnational and transregional? Perhaps the primary task is to unpack this binary and assess the relationship from outside the analytic. The commercial orientation of Bollywood may appear to have moved from the transnational to the transregional, but the actual dynamics are much more entangled. The two inflections may not be adversaries. After the widening of the transnational market via the many diasporas of South Asian descent, the acceptability of Bollywood rose sharply after the turn to the twenty-first century thanks to relatively slicker productions. But this acceptability may have had little to do with the direct identification offered by the nonresident Indian protagonists of the expensive melodramas. What the sustained relevance of Bollywood in the overseas market has showed, through the decline of not only diasporic narratives but also foreign settings, is that the transnational appeal of Bollywood was not because of actual representative mappings of the transnational traffic, as was popularly believed. Once the appeal was routed through the transnational interests, however, it was entirely possible to consolidate it using multiple strategies. A more transregional orientation, tying 144

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together distribution territories in the north and south, may then be a more significant move. Conventionally, the territories in the west tend to be more integrated with the north, given that both dominate the production center in Mumbai. The territories in the south, on the other hand, tend to slip out of Bollywood’s grasp because Telugu and Tamil language industries are themselves formidable. The crucial frontier for the Mumbai-based industry, then, is commercial penetration into the south. As the overall returns from the domestic market have grown in the last decade, the film business has shifted primarily toward increasing market consolidation. Three major strands could be identified among recent Bollywood blockbusters. First is the remake of a Tamil or Telugu blockbuster, such as Wanted (2009) and Rowdy Rathore (2012). The successful action-comedy films from the southern industries, when remade in Hindi with a major action star, fuse together two logics of popularity. This model has repeatedly delivered blockbusters, particularly those directed by Prabhu Deva. Second is, rather than remaking a southern hit, fusing the aesthetic form of action cinemas from the south with a star-specific vocabulary of Bollywood. This category draws its idiomatic foundations from the south and the artifice from the north. Vital to the borrowed idiom was a very high-shot density packed into fast-edited action sequences, adorned with “reverberation effects.”13 Rohit Shetty’s films, particularly Singham (2011), Bol Bachchan (2012), Chennai Express (2013), and Singham Returns (2014), represent the category best. Over here, heavy-duty action sequences mark the climax and the bulk of the narrative arc passes through comic routines. The fusion of different idioms produces a cumulative effect of code-mixing and self-referencing. The mise-en-scene and rapid cuts deployed in the editing of films in both categories make them formally resonant. A third category of films successfully able to consolidate the film market come from Rajkumar Hirani—Munnabhai MBBS (2003), Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006), 3 Idiots (2009), and PK (2014). In these “issue-based” blockbusters, Hirani blends a conscientious tonality, to tackle specific social issues, with the melodramatic form. Although pitched more as comedies, Hirani’s films do not attempt any blending with idioms borrowed from the south. Instead the awakening of the social conscience, as alerted by a major star, remains the project via which he forges the consolidation of territories. The star plays a vital role in the packaging of all three categories though. After Wanted (2009), Bollywood was infiltrated by the sudden C o ns o lidating B o lly w o o d

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rise of action stars such as Salman Khan, Ajay Devgan, Akshay Kumar, who had to rebrand themselves as such. Beefed-up bodies showcasing their muscularity and engaging in often absurd fast-edited action sequences took over the entire terrain of blockbusters to the extent that Shahrukh Khan was also compelled to repurpose his branding from sentimentality toward action in Chennai Express (2013). Hirani’s Munnabhai comedies also revolved around reconfiguring the star-text of Sanjay Dutt from action genres into message-oriented comedies. Hirani’s later films with Aamir Khan also featured him in quasi-pedagogic roles, and Khan is widely acknowledged as a star with moral surplus.14 Without adequate star packaging none of these blockbusters, one could argue, would have gone as far as they did. One of the steady features of the recent Hindi blockbuster economy, therefore, has been its dependence on the southern blockbuster. Since about 2010, this has only become too obvious in the number of southern remakes in the big-budget productions. This indeed has to do with the south being considered a safe test case for Bollywood to invest large capital into productions, but it has also decisively brought back action cinema as a shared formal topography across the north and south. In the process, competing sovereignties of action cinema, predicated as they are upon the fan figure as the addressee of sovereign assertions made by the star, have further reinforced territorial divisions of the film market.15 Southern film industries’ fleet of stars has been a formidable force of industrial-territorial consolidation; at the same time, however, these stars have lacked scalability across territories. As forces of provincially inflected, coded, and performed resistance against the flattening imperatives of globalization, the stars enable and sustain long-term loyalties and commercial viability, as manifested particularly in Tamil and Telugu cinema. As the noise about Bollywood’s transnational exploits in the West faded, what emerged was the Hindi cinema’s search for solidarity and exchange with Tamil and Telugu film industries. These two southern industries have simultaneously had an expanding presence in the international market; but, more important, they also benefit by selling remake rights to Hindi film producers, or in some cases by also producing a remake with Bollywood stars. In this way, the Hindi film industry was able to buy the raw material from the south, add value to it by mounting other features, and then monetize it over a much larger market, including the south. 146

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Two problems are therefore worth pointing out as to why the expansion within domestic market came to acquire decisive prominence. One, the sentimental packaging of major stars attending to the diaspora held no decisive advantage over action films with a provincial inflection. Although the latter may lose some edge in the overseas market, they stood to gain substantially more within the domestic market. Two, borrowing the existing vocabulary of big-budget action-comedies prevalent in the south gave Bollywood significant advantage within the domestic market beyond the metropolitan audiences and multiplex malls. If the overseas market continued to almost entirely depend on the Indian diaspora, the cross-class consolidation possible within the domestic market could still bring many more within the fold and clinch genuine monetary advantage. Any careful statistical analysis of the boxoffice data could establish how increasingly provincial inflections of Hindi blockbusters such as Dangal (2016), Sultan (2016), and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) have led to substantial increase in domestic earnings. These films do not forego the overseas market as much as they believe that the diaspora will only follow the domestic trend. The emergence of the blockbuster as a response to the industrial might of Hollywood, and the simultaneous emergence of southern blockbusters featuring Rajinikant, resonates with S. V. Srinivas’s formulation that the blockbuster is a film that “travels beyond the traditional distribution and exhibition circuits.”16 He says this in relation to south Indian cinema, but it alerts us to the fact that the force of capital and labor mounted on the blockbuster is meant to unleash a force against the existing territorial boundaries. Srinivas traces the earlier signs of the regional blockbuster to the early 1990s in response to the scarce availability of major stars, but the penetration of southern cinema within the north was limited to either fringe theaters as dubbed reruns or television. It was only with Rajinikant’s Sivaji: The Boss (2009) that a simultaneous Hindi release was possible. No other star could make a bid for such a massive upgrading of the dubbed south Indian blockbuster from fringe exhibition economy to multiplex malls. This is the barrier eventually broken by spectacularity, realizing at least a two decade old transregional bid of the southern industries. How does this industrial transaction across “regional” industries within India reorient our discussion on Bollywood’s permanent sentimentality? How does the reorientation diminish, contradict or amplify C o ns o lidating B o lly w o o d

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the sentimentality brand? Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) offers a crucial intervention and helps us understand the dynamics better. THE VE RSI O N S O F B A A HU B A L I   . . .

Baahubali . . . became the highest-grossing Indian film within India and third highest globally. More interestingly, however, it is the first south Indian film to gross more than `600 billion worldwide and the first film dubbed in Hindi to gross more than `100 billion.17 It registered the highest opening and opening weekend for an Indian film at the US box office, at a per screen average collection of $17,000, second behind Minions.18 But it may be useful to remember that Baahubali . . . is not a Bollywood film. The film was simultaneously made in Telugu and Tamil, then dubbed into Hindi and Malayalam, even though all the versions released simultaneously. These numbers are cumulative for all versions. The film narrates the story of an ancient kingdom of Mahishmati where two brothers eventually clash for the control of the kingdom. A drowning infant, to save whose life the mother sacrifices her own, is rescued by a couple who belong to a tribe living within the kingdom. The background of the infant is gradually revealed to the audience. Growing up enchanted by the mountains and spurred by curiosity and courage, the boy (Shivudu) makes a daring journey from the valley, climbing up the waterfall and further into the nearby mountains. He finds himself smitten by a rebel (Avantika) whose cause he willingly takes up, only to find his own story entangled in the battle raging there. He saves the trapped and enslaved queen, later revealed to be his true mother (Devasena). Then he learns about his benevolent and righteous father (Amarendra Baahubali), and the conspiracy hatched by his uncle (Bhallaladeva), which led to his murder. The film leaves the actual story of the murder of elder Baahubali on hold, to be told elaborately in the second part. Far more than the plot itself, however, the film had a remarkable impact through its visual effects and the scale of natural landscape. The muscularity of its protagonists was indeed in proportion to the scale of the landscape. One of the film’s primary ambitions, then, appears to be spectacularity; it follows from the absurdity that blockbuster action films deploy to stage the major stars, but renders it on a much higher scale that could only be achieved via digital manipulation. The film boasts nearly 90 percent CGI work that accounts 148

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for 2,500 VFX shots. Majority of the work done involved brining to life the 1,500 feet mystical waterfall, creating enormous mountains and the kingdom of Mahishmati, with its massive temples and courtyards.19 Baahubali . . . is a film that begins with an ambition of scale and then goes on to render it in the flesh of CGI as well as biological muscularity. The plot only takes the audience back to an order aspired to in the present but rendered in the past. It serves well here to quote at length from a commentary, by an Indian blogger from the United States, that tears open the fault lines, which Baahubali . . . could glide across, and consolidate to its favor. L1:  I heard it is very good. War scenes are awesome! L2:  Yes, too bad the Hindi version isn’t playing in Seattle. L1: My roommate told me to watch the original version only. That is why I booked tickets for the Tamil one. Plus there will be subtitles anyway. I wanted to tell them, but another guy standing in front of them turned around and did it, “Madam, this is the Telugu version. Not Tamil.” . . . The ladies were silent for a bit. And then, L2: What was his problem? There will be subtitles no. What difference does it make? It’s Sauth only no? Anyway, Telugu is which state? L1:  Kerala I think. . . . I had met enough of these kind of people in my life and they don’t bother me as much as they used to. From “All south heroes are fat and old” to “Rajni is that ugly Kannad hero right?” to “Mallu movies are all porn” to “Pokiri is the remake of Wanted!” to “Telugu films are all about flying Scorpios and flying people.” . . . [E]veryone claims that Baahubali is their own. AP [Andhra Pradesh] and Telangana say it’s a Telugu film. Karnataka, TN [Tamilnadu] and Kerala say it’s a South Indian film. North India says it’s an Indian film. . . . For Bollywood it is a [wakeup] call. One which tells them they are not the entire Indian film industry. That a man from the “Sauth only no” can make a film far bigger than they can ever dream of, and without having superstars, without doing guest roles on CID, without being molested by transvestites on Comedy Nights with Kapil for publicity, still achieve incredible success. For India it is a moment of immense pride. We’ll never be able to make the money a Hollywood film makes. But we too can make spectacular epic films, and we can make them entertaining.20

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I have no personal stake in the sentimental charge of this commentary, but it is important to understand the antagonisms it draws on. The success of Baahubali . . . is unprecedented to the extent that no south Indian film has ever staked a more powerful claim to represent Indian cinema. Its dominance has indeed offered the plausibility that although a north Indian film’s commercial prowess may have reached a saturation point, if the claim for consolidating territories were to be made from within the south, it could go further in its ambition. Evidently, Baahubali . . . did not set the overseas market abuzz as much as it consolidated the domestic one. Its success in the Hindi film market may not be as resounding as that of the Hindi blockbusters, but it broke a barrier of imagination nonetheless. Since the economy of anticipation was far better consolidated around the film, its sequel went much further, particularly in the overseas market. Also, a south Indian film’s claim within the north Indian market is nowhere near the saturation point. The stereotypes identified do not suggest a permanent antagonism between regions as much as they reveal the ignorance that the north could afford and the south could not. Hindi films’ visibility in the south goes a long way back in time; their marketing and distribution operate on a national scale regardless of the limitations. The southern films have been relatively invisible in the north, except as remakes. On one hand, Baahubali . . . has broken through that order; on the other, its success has meant that beyond that veil of ignorance lie vast green pastures of monetary returns. When put together, these factors alert us to the possibility that the industrial complex of Bollywood could gain more ground by absorbing challenges from its outside. In other words, the apparent phase of conceding trade ground to industries outside Mumbai does not necessarily compromise the strength and preeminence of Bollywood. It is only after this phase of consolidation, even if from the outside and toward the benefit of competing industrial units, that Bollywood could take over the consolidated territory via its claim to having more capital. This may appear to be an instrumental misreading obliterating the antagonisms discussed, but such a process would not be dissimilar to the processes by which Hollywood came to consolidate its gains within the Bollywood territory, as discussed. But, of course, just as Hollywood and Bollywood had to offer themselves via a reductive essence—that of spectacularity and sentimentality respectively—the cinemas from the south would 150

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also be compelled to pitch themselves in a certain way to make themselves intelligible as well as alluring. This goes somewhat against the conventional logic of territoriality that film industries deploy to their favor. The primary axis of identification that industries offer operates via stardom. The films from the north and south remain lucrative to audiences across divides only to a limited extent. This is because the lack of popular investment in stars from elsewhere becomes a major constraint for the commercial outgrowth of any Indian film industry. The only star to have exceeded this problem may be Rajinikant, whose films, particularly after Sivaji: The Boss (2007), consistently make vital gains in the north. But of course, this has a great deal to do with the packaging of his stardom, which has brought him such dividends only toward the end of his career.21 By no means could this be taken as a sustainable commercial model, let alone a recipe for consolidation of territories. Baahubali . . . , on the other hand, resolves this obstacle by offering an aesthetic resolution that could be drawn on further to gradually consolidate the territories. Its ambition to popularity renders its scale as a compensation for the absence of a “universal” star such as Rajinikant. This indeed alerts us to the possibility that the star may also be a corporeal rendering of scale; if that scale could be achieved otherwise, then it could offset the problem of prevailing over the territorialities rendered in stardom. This chapter navigates through the quest for crossovers among large film industries, which then are reconstituted or contracted to gain further trade ground. The idea of Bollywood itself emerges from a contraction of the formal and thematic diversity of Indian cinemas and counterbalanced by the expansion of the merchandise that constitutes the culture industry Rajadhyaksha identifies in the process of Bollywood-ization.22 The tentative interpenetration of industrial markets, I argue, is a process that predates the consolidation of an expanded market within which both the competing industries could make a claim to much larger capital returns on investment. This chapter shows that the understanding of the recent great strides Bollywood has made globally may overlook that Hollywood has made similar strides in the domestic Indian market without taking into account the enormity of informal transactions. This process of transnational exchange, however, has been overshadowed lately by the transregional possibilities explored via the C o ns o lidating B o lly w o o d

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increasing integration of the exhibition sector. Borrowing the formal and thematic vocabulary from the southern industries has paid rich dividends to Bollywood, at least since 2009. The arrival of Baahubali . . . is then a landmark to the extent that the push for consolidation has now been led from the south. For the first time since Roja (1992) perhaps, a south Indian film dubbed in Hindi has had a significant impact and made enormous commercial gains, unimaginable until quite recently. These events, I argue, should be seen as moments of crossing over that do not challenge nearly as much as they consolidate. In fact, the acceptability of dubbing itself can be seen as a vital indicator of consolidation. Central to stardom, after all, is the sovereign voice of authority; the out-of-sync character of the dubbed voice discredits even the most far-fetched scenario of forging new alliances. Only in a rendering such as Baahubali . . . , speaking through its graphical scale and the staged interplay between digital and biological corporealities, could the dubbed voice be reconciled. As a number of films from across the industrial portfolio of Indian cinemas increasingly shuffle across the spectrum of digital corporealities, we are likely to see the emergence of several vocabularies of crossing over. The centrality of scale and spectacularity may yet be here to stay. The various inflections of locality—vernacular, regional, or national—that often appear to consolidate their autonomy, and also pursue their own globalisms, may not be above being reduced to mere catchment circuits feeding back into their counterparts driven by far bigger magnitudes of capital. N OTE S 1. Derek Bose, Brand Bollywood: A New Global Entertainment Order (New Delhi: Sage, 2006); Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004); Rajinder Dudrah, Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema (London: Routledge, 2012); Rachel Dwyer and Jerry Pinto, eds., Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011); Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (New Delhi: Sage, 2005); Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, Global Bollywood (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 2. M. Madhava Prasad, “This Thing Called Bollywood,” India Seminar 525, May 2003, http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525/525%20madhava%20prasad.htm. 3. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). 4. See P. Radhika, “Economy, Politics, Culture Industry Case Studies of the Kannada and Bhojpuri Culture Industires,” Asian Culture Industries (blog), July 2012,

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http://asiancultureindustries.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/economy-politics-culture -industry-case-studies-of-the-kannada-and-bhojpuri-culture-industires-dr-radhika -p.pdf. 5. Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill, The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure (New York: Routledge, 2010); Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Akshaya Kumar, “Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural Economy of North-Indian Small-Town Nostalgia in the Indian Multiplex,” South Asian Popular Culture 11, no. 1 (2013): 61–74. 6. See Vinayak Chakravorty, “Hollywood Rising: The Success of the New Batman and Spider-Man Flicks Proves Hollywood Is Bigger than Ever in India,” Daily Mail, August 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2183396 /Hollywood-rising-The-success-new-Spider-Man-Batman-flicks-proves-Hollywood-bigger-India.html. 7. Chakravorty, “Hollywood Rising”; Gaurav Dubey, “Hollywood Movies That Took the Indian Box Office by Storm!” Mid-Day, April 2015, http://www.mid-day. com/articles/hollywood-movies-that-took-the-indian-box-office-by-storm/16157161. 8. Prasad, “This Thing Called Bollywood”; S. V. Srinivas, Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema (Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black, 2013). 9. Monika Mehta, “DVD Compilations of Hindi Film Songs: (Re)shuffling Sound, Stardom, and Cinephilia,” South Asian Popular Culture 10, no. 3 (2012): 237–248. 10. Kumar, “Provincialising Bollywood?” 11. See Koimoi, “Bollywood’s Top Worldwide Earners | Gross Business of over 200 Crores,” Koimoi, April 2017, http://www.koimoi.com/box-office-verdict-bollywoods -top-worldwide-grossers/. 12. Much of my understanding is drawn from a tracking of data available at Bollywood Hungama, “Category: Box Office Overseas,” http://www.bollywoodhungama .com/box-office/overseas. 13. For a discussion, see Akshaya Kumar, “Provincialising Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema and the Vernacularisation of North Indian Media” (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2015), 102. 14. See Akshaya Kumar, “Satyamev Jayate: Return of the Star as a Sacrificial Figure,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37, no. 2 (2014): 239–254. 15. See Akshaya Kumar, “Animated Visualities and Competing Sovereignties: The Formal Dwellings of Hindi Cinema,” Social Text 35, no. 3 (2017): 41–70. 16. S. V. Srinivas, “Rajinikant and the ‘Regional Blockbuster,’ ” Working Papers of the Chicago Tamil Forum—Politics of Media, Media of Politics (May 19–21, 2016), Version 12.15.2016, 3. 17. Rob Cain, “Oops . . . ‘PK’ Is Not Actually India’s Top-Grossing Movie Ever,” Forbes, August 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2015/08/14/oops-pk-is-not -actually-indias-top-grossing-movie-ever. 18. IANS, “Here’s Why SS Rajamouli ‘Baahubali’ Is India’s Biggest Blockbuster,” Indian Express, July 2015, http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/regional/ heres-why-ss-rajamouli-baahubali-is-indias-biggest-blockbuster/. 19. Sidharth Iyer, “Srinivas Mohan Believes ‘Baahubali’ Is the New Benchmark for Visual Effects in Indian Cinema,” Graphic Slate, July 2015, http://www.thegraphicslate .com/vfx-sfx/people-vfx-sfx/srinivas-mohan-believes-baahubali-is-the-new-benchmark -for-visual-effects-in-indian-cinema/2015/07; iDream Telugu Movies, “The Magic Of

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Baahubali Decoded—Pete Draper’s Exclusive Interview on Its Visual Effects # 17,” YouTube, September 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JfFIpyQUGc&ab_ channel=iDreamMovies. 20. Kidney Sheldon, “Baahubali–Not a  Review,” Wordpress, July 2015, https: //ydeepak.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/baahubali-not-a-review/. 21. See Prasad, “This Thing Called Bollywood.” 22. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 23–39.

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8

Imitating Flower Boy Stars K-pop Male Stars and Assembling New Female Masculinity in South Korea L ayo u n g Sh i n

As many scholars and the authors in other chapters have shown, with vigorous government support and the new perspective that cultural products could be profitable, the South Korean (Korea) media gained more influence and popularity among Koreans, particularly after the 1997 economic crisis.1 This is quite a big shift on the Korean cultural map, given that until the 1980s the alternative cultural products created by student activists, progressives, and leftists were more popular among youth. At that time, youth identified more as producers of resistant alternative culture than as consumers of popular culture. However, in the 1990s, youth actively started to consume pop culture and identify themselves as fans of stars.2 In particular, alongside the rapid industrialization of pop music and emergence of teenagers as consumers, a star system developed that targeted teenage women. Combined with the concurrent development of the internet, the emergence of stardom created huge fandom among young women. They were often, however, criticized and mocked by adults and their male peers, labeled ppasuni, a derogatory slang term for teenage female fans.3 However, the fan activities of teenage women in Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s can be read as the explosion of teenage women’s desire to express sexuality and subversion, similar to the possibilities 155

Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs find in teenage women’s Beatlemania fan activities in the United States in the 1960s.4 Young female fans in South Korea began to express their desire through forms of active production and reinterpretation of pop culture, moving beyond simple consumption of industry-manufactured products. Products created through active fandom include fanfic (fiction written by fans with their favorite stars as main characters; often, they depict boy-band members in same-sex romantic relationships) and fan-art (art works that depict the stars), new texts popularized and shared among teenage women on the internet. In particular, fanfic, which can be considered a male homosexual romance genre, became very popular among fans. Thus, whereas previous generations have enjoyed heterosexual romance novels and comic books produced by professional writers in Korea or in translation from the West and Japan, the teenage women I met during the early 2000s, the fans of pop stars, most often read this new genre of homosexual romance regardless of their sexual identity.5 Fancos, a shortened form of fancostume play, is another form of active fandom that emerged among young women in Korea in the late 1990s amid the development of the commercial star system, the huge popularity of boy-band groups, and the growth of active fandom culture among young women. When boy bands produced by the commercial star system, such as H.O.T. (1996–2001), gained enormous popularity among teenage girls, rather than just cheering for their favorite stars, some young women began cutting their hair short, wearing young men’s clothing to emulate the boy bands’ male singers, and creating performance festivals where they staged the singers’ performances. This led to the emergence of fancos communities, which are made up of fancospers, or cospers (who perform costume plays), staff (who help fancospers in making costumes and dressing them up) and the fans of fancospers. By the early 2000s, concerts and festivals featuring fancos were a regular phenomenon in the Seoul area.6 Although it emerged from fandom, in imitating popular boy-band singers, fancos is a kind of drag show, highlighting the performance of masculinity by females. It further involves bodily changes and performances that can have an effect on performers’ identities. In other words, fancos is a constantly enacted process of embodiment, different from other forms of fandom activities; performers wear costumes of male 156

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singers on stage, but often also embody these costumes in their hairstyles, gestures, speaking styles, word choices, and smoking habits, which are not readily taken off, even after shows, as I explain throughout the chapter. In addition, although participating in nongender normative crossdressing activities, many fancospers dated each other and started identifying as iban.7 This does not mean that all fancospers self-identify as iban, given that some participants identify as straight. However, because it was so common for two women to date in this community, and many fancos members identified as iban, fancos came to be considered an iban subcultural group. One of my informants, Kyumin, for instance, told me about a popular idea of fancos being equivalent to iban: “There is an assumption among fancospers that fancospers are all iban without doubt. Actually it’s true. So once they begin fancos, they start to say, ‘I like women. I love women’ and become iban. So, you know, groups or communities share their ideas and beliefs. Same here. There is a belief that all the members here are iban.” Therefore, beyond passive consumption of popular culture, fancos produces new representations of self in everyday life, motivating the participants to question the meaning of gender and sexuality. As an unexpected result, fancos, which originated from consuming Korean pop culture, came to play a role as a queer community for young women. It lies outside mainstream LGBT movements and commercial spaces for gay men and lesbians. Although other factors, such as the influence of LGBT activism and the development of internet technology, cannot be disregarded as contributing to the increased visibility of homosexuality in Korea, I argue that fandom subcultures such as fancos, combined with female masculinity and same-sex relationships between members, contributed significantly to the construction of homosexuality as an identity and community for young women during the early 2000s. The case of fancos, thus, provides an alternative perspective on the development of homosexuality as an identity and community in Korea, which is closely related with local Korean pop culture rather than based in the influence of Western media. To show how these young Korean women’s masculinity and subjectformation as iban is closely interrelated with local media, K-pop, rather than LGBT texts or media produced in the West, I first situate fancos in the historical continuum of female masculinity, particularly regarding I mitating F l o w er B oy S tars

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the performance of Gukgeuk, which shows the existence of female erotic relations even before the introduction of Western concepts of homosexuality in Korea; second, introduce yaoi and fanfic as more influential, relative to West-produced media, as texts of homosexual identity for young women in South Korea; third, discuss the changing ideals of gender in Korean mainstream media and the intersection of fantasy and reality in the creation of the “right” kinds of models of masculinity; and, last, explore the ways in which embodied masculinity and continued misrecognition as male among young women leads to their questioning their identification in terms of gender and sexuality and to the construction of queer community. F E MA L E M A S C U L I N I T Y A N D FE M AL E-O N LY T H EAT ER I N HI STORY

Though still rare, historical studies of queer Korea have begun recovering the history of female masculinity and female same-sex sexuality in Korea.8 Among other cases, the tradition of female-only troupes in Korea, exemplified in the genre gukgeuk, provides historical precedence for fancos, in that both cultural practices consist of female-only theater, performance, and gender crossing. Gukgeuk is a popular drama, a sort of changgeuk (traditional Korean opera) performed entirely by women, and it became very popular during the 1950s, though interest rapidly declined during the modernization process and the correspondent devaluation of both tradition and women in the 1960s.9 As Jennifer Robertson has shown with the case of Japanese all-female Takarazuka troupes, the Korean female gukgeuk also functioned as “an inclusive social club that cultivated and bolstered intimate bonds between women.”10 Jihye Kim claims, The Confucian gender ideology, which stresses the strict separation of the sexes, and conservative notions of sexuality encouraged Gukgeuk actors to seek and to intensify their affinity with women. . . . It produced a possibility to extend gender transgression and homoerotic aspects on stage to everyday life. . . . Also since the fan and star relationships in the female Gukgeuk were exclusively formed among women . . . it increased intimacy between women.11

Constructed exclusively by women who perform both men’s and women’s roles, and attracting enthusiastic female fans, fancos quite 158

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closely resembles the culture of female gukgeuk in its intimacy and homoerotic aspects. For instance, I found that some fancos teams were so popular that they had their own fans and fan clubs. My informants Orange, Namu and Tangkong, for instance, were passionate fans of V fancos team. They attended all their events and organized a V team fan club, by creating an online community and making fan signs together. I accompanied them to a fancos event in 2002, where we sat together in front of the stage and competed to shout V team’s name more loudly than other teams’ fans. Each fan also had her own favorite members in each team. For example, Namu was a fan of Minwoo from V team. When I asked Namu how she became so into Minwoo, she said, “I just fell in love with her at first glance” (cheonnune banhada). This is an expression of love and eroticism and shows how fancos stands in Korea, in the “larger intergenerational matrix,” in the words of Jennifer Cole.12 Both all-female Gukgeuk and fancos include the performance of female masculinity and intense same-sex erotic feelings in all-female venues where pop culture is celebrated and performed: changgeuk in the 1950s and K-pop boy group music in the 2000s. Situating fancos as the descendant of female gukgeuk in Korea challenges the concept of “global gay,” which emphasizes the effects of globalization and global media in the construction of queer identities and communities in non-Western societies, thus implying that lesbian and gay identities are growing globally homogenized and thus replacing indigenous identities.13 As numerous queer scholars have argued, this global gay concept not only fails to grasp historical facts, but also obscures unique local meanings of sexualities.14 It also has the potential to classify samesex practices in the non-West as backward or premodern.15 This chapter therefore contextualizes female masculinity and same-sex sexuality among young women in fancos in the intergenerational matrix of Korean culture of gender and sexuality and further seeks to show the primary influence of Korean local pop culture in its distinctive formation. FA NF I C A ND YAO I R AT H E R T H A N W E ST ER N M EDIA AS HO M O SE X UA L I T Y T E X T S

Queer studies in Korea have tried to explain the relationship between the emergence of current forms of lesbian and gay male identity, community, and activism and the influence of the West. Reflecting lesbian I mitating F l o w er B oy S tars

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and gay movements in the 1990s and early 2000s in Korea, Dong-jin Seo, for instance, argues that they were based on the concept of human rights, influenced by international nongovernmental organizations such as the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Committee and the UN Human Rights Committee.16 He also argues that “globalized sexuality” and consumerism are other features of gay and lesbian discourses in Korea.17 He states that the “identity of sexual minority groups in Korea in most cases imitates gay and lesbians in the United States and the West.”18 However, Seo does not consider these trends as simply the result of Westernization. Although the Western terms helped identify people who engaged in same-sex sexuality and other types of nonnormative gender expressions as a specific group in need of political recognition, the terms themselves do not accurately represent what same-sex relations mean in the Korean context. John Cho further points out the important role of consumer spaces for gay men in constructing their culture in the 1990s, but argues that this does not simply signify the “homogenization” or “Westernization” of Korean LGBTs’ understanding of themselves. Cho focuses on the particularities in terms of visibility and coming out for Korean gay men and lesbians, which “challenge the Westernized model of the ‘out and proud’ gay man and lesbian.”19 Although both Seo and Cho are careful to point out the place-specific aspects of global media and consumerism’s influence in gay men’s culture and LGBT movement in Korea, both note the undeniable relations with the West in both local LGBT movements and in the “Westernised gay consumer spaces.”20 On the other hand, in my case study with young queer-identified women in fancos, Western influences, in terms of the discourse of human rights or commercialized spaces, seem very minor if they do exist, particularly in my first field research during the early 2000s. For example, during my second fieldwork research in 2012 and 2013, I asked my informants whether they had opportunities to watch any films or television shows depicting homosexuality, and a few mentioned the USproduced show L-Word. However, in 2002 and 2003, when the depiction of lesbians and gay men in media was less common, even in the United States, few of my informants were watching such LGBT media. Rather, their exposure to depictions of homosexuality came from reading and writing fanfic and yaoi.21 One of my informants, Hea-youn, for instance, told me about fanfic, when I asked whether she had encountered LGBT 160

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media: “There is a kind of novel. Fanfic. After reading fanfic, I realized that there is homosexuality. Then while talking with my friends, I came to know more specifically about iban.” As this interview shows, almost all of my informants in the early 2000s were aware of fanfic, most read them voraciously, and others actually wrote them. Academic studies of fanfic and teenage iban also commonly acknowledge fanfic as the primary media depicting representations of homosexuality for teenage women.22 According to Jee-young Shin, many youth in Korea, up to 45.4 percent, encounter homosexuality through fanfic.23 It is therefore important to point out that locally produced fan-made media, fanfic, not Western media, was more influential in the construction of forms and ideas of homosexuality among young women in Korea at the time. M O D E L I NG A F T E R T H E M A S CULI N I T Y O F MAL E P O P STA R S

In addition, as a productive fandom activity, fancos complicates the rigid gender binary. In 2003, fancos teams numbered about 1,500 and about 80 percent of them were male-singer teams. When young women participate in fancos, cutting their hair short in the so-called kalmeori (blade hair) marks the beginning of performing as male singers. Fancospers also borrowed male singers’ hip-hop style, which includes big T-shirts and pants and later became representative fancos style. The style was welcomed by cospers, not only because it was what male singers actually wear, but also because it hid the female body contours. They also used fictive masculine names to complement their masculine appearance. For instance, Hyeok and Min, which commonly appear in male names, were popular fancos nicknames: for example, Jeong-hyeok and Si-hyeok, and Jong-min and Kyu-min, to mention a few. Male-singer cospers also used appellations normally used by males, such as Hyeong or Nuna, rather than Oppa or Eonni, and masculine ways of speaking in other linguistic expressions. Such masculinity in fancos is closely related with the changes in popular culture and the images of the stars in Korea. In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the star system produced by mainstream entertainment companies started introducing new, nontraditional images of male and female singers. Female singers started to appear not only I mitating F l o w er B oy S tars

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as “cute” but also as “sexy,” for instance. On the other hand, as the singers became younger, “cute” and “pretty” men, with slender bodies, bold make up and androgynous fashion, became a popular style for idol boy group members. A new term, kkonminam (flower-handsome men), or “pan-East Asian soft masculinity,” came to be widely used beginning in the late 1990s.24 One newspaper, for example, reported on this transformation under the title Beautiful Men Wear Make Up: The Era of “Flower” Men: “an increasing number of men these days put on ‘make-up’ instead of building their muscle.”25 This does not mean, of course, the complete replacement of one image with another; as Cornwall and Lindisfarne argue, masculinity does not exist in a unitary form, but in diverse standards.26 But it suggests a cultural shift in contemporary Korean society, expanding the scope of the model of masculinity. This shift, ironically, made it easier for fancospers to model themselves after male rather than female singers. Whereas the dominant standard of female beauty requires extreme thinness and doll-like facial features to look like idol female group singers, they explained, it is a simpler process to become a “flower” boy: cutting one’s hair short is often enough. Junghyuk makes this clear: “I am not pretty. But people say I am handsome. When I’m considered as a girl, I’m just normal looking. But if people look at me as a boy, I am a pretty handsome boy.” This shows how the expansion of masculinity to include soft and “pretty” makes it possible for young women to identify with masculinity more easily. Modeling after flower masculinity, however, does not simply rise from the desire to imitate masculinity per se or to be a man or look like a man. When I asked their reason for doing fancos, most first answered that it helps the teenage women feel confident and proud as well as be adored and loved by others. That is, the feeling of becoming a star was the motivation for performing like male stars. Standing on stage, listening to their names being chanted by other girls was often cited as their main reason to get into fancos. My main informant Junghyuk, seventeen years old at the time, for instance, was enormously popular as a fancosper; she is tall and good looking, with a short stylish haircut and flower-boy group fashion, and has both a good sense of humor and leadership skills. However, in everyday life, she dropped out of high school because her family was poor, 162

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relying solely on the income of her single mother. So she was working in part time jobs in bars or coffee shops during the week. She said she is “nothing” in her everyday life, but she sees herself differently in fancos. Her popularity and other girls’ cheers led her to feel positively about herself. Confidence is a word Junghyuk often used when she talked about fancos. She said, I can stand on the stage. On the stage I can show what I’ve practiced and introduce myself and be recognized by others. I can have the stage prepared for me. I’m nothing. You know? I’m not a celebrity. Nothing. But when I stand on the stage, I can hear the screams. I like it. I like to hear the girls call my name and to be in the spotlight on the stage. We can regain confidence by doing fancos. Even with my one step on the stage, other girls scream, “Junghyuk!”, “Cool!” like this. They make me feel I am something.

Their embrace of boy bands’ masculinity is therefore more related with being popular and recognized by other young women, thus making them stars among women. Furthermore, the experience gained in fancos led not only to pride but also to the power to endure everyday life. Junghyuk continued: So when I am about to start something new like a new part time job, now I am different. I tell myself, “Okay, you can enjoy this job just like you enjoy fancos. People here [in the fancos community] like you, when you perform well. You can do the same in other places too. People will like you in this new job as well if you do your best.” This is a kind of self-confidence. The only difference between here and there is that I am alone in everyday life while I am not in fancos.

As this interview shows, through fancos, the young women experienced their identity transforming from fan to star, from imitator to interpreter, from nothing to someone, from neglected to recognized. In regard to the political aspect of drag, Rosalind Morris asks, “Is drag really a performance about gender?”27 She argues that “class, the star system, and beauty are all objects of identification in professional crossdressing, and the oppositions at play have as much to do with the nature of the gaze and with the signifying power of visible surfaces as with gender.”28 Drawing on this insight and the interviews with my I mitating F l o w er B oy S tars

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informants in Korea, I argue that fancos as drag has to do with young women’s desire to feel pride, confidence, autonomy, and empowerment in their everyday lives. E MB O D I E D M A S C U LI N I T Y A N D LESBIAN V ISIBIL IT Y

This new interpretation of fancos as drag tells us that this unexpected result—female masculinity—came out of the enormous popularity of Korean pop culture among young women and their desire to be popular and feel confidence. In their embrace of masculinity, they challenge the categories of gender and sexual identity in gender-normative and heteronormative society. First, the fancospers do not fall into rigid binary categories of gender. For example, most commonly experienced the confusion of others in public places due to their gender-ambiguous style, which Judith Halberstam calls the “Bathroom Problem.”29 Eunbin said, “When I come out from a lady’s room, people stop at the entrance to check out the sign whether it is for women or men.” Junghyuk also had the experience of startling women in public when she enters the women’s bathroom. To some extent, such situations were shared as humorous stories rather than upsetting experiences. Junghyuk said she just looks at herself in a mirror and says to herself, “Do I really look like men that much?” Other fancospers also shared those experiences of misrecognition like heroic episodes. With such continuous recognition of the ambiguity of gender categories, fancospers started to consider the meaning of gender, even though the initial purpose of performing masculinity was not concern about their gendered image. Judith Halberstam discusses the effects of misrecognition: “When gender-ambiguous children are constantly challenged about their gender identity, the chain of misrecognitions can actually produce a new recognition: in other words, to be constantly mistaken for a boy, for many tomboys, can contribute to the production of a masculine identity.”30 More important, the effect of the “wearing” of masculinity by young women is that it makes the existence of lesbians or iban more visible in Korean society in general. Halberstam continues to say that the masculinity of women leads to the visibility of lesbians, through what he calls the “butch stereotype,” which “both makes lesbianism visible and yet seems to make it visible in nonlesbian terms: that is to say, the butch makes 164

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lesbianism readable in the register of masculinity, and it actually collaborates with the mainstream notion that lesbians cannot be feminine.”31 Because fancospers perform masculinity, based on the butch stereotype in society, the young women in fancos have become visible and “readable” as lesbian or iban. The stereotype is produced through both the actuality that almost all fancospers are iban and the butch stereotype that equates female masculinity with lesbian identity. Either way, fancospers’ masculinity has made visible the existence of lesbians among young women and in society in general. The visibility has had two effects in the everyday lives of these young women: one has been to increase “discipline and punishment” against them, and the other has been to make it easier for potential fancospers and other female ibans to find and join the iban community. First, it led some young fancospers to experience discrimination and harsh backlash among their peers. The cospers who enrolled in gendermixed schools in particular, compared with others in girls’ schools, reported that they were humiliated and scoffed at by their male classmates. As Bobby said, “When I go to a lady’s room, guys shout at me ‘why are you going there?’ and they laugh.” Sihyuk told a similar story: “In physical education class, when I was in the line of female students, they made fun of me, ‘what are you doing there? That’s not your line. Come here [to the boys’ line].’ ” Even some teachers started to recognize the young women’s short hairstyle as the sign of lesbian identity. Jinshil, for instance, told me her experience when she was attending a Seoul Youth Center at age fifteen: “The teacher [social worker in the Youth Center] asked me, ‘Why is your hair so short?’ I just answered, ‘Because it is uncomfortable to dance with long hair.’ Then he continued to ask, ‘Why is it uncomfortable?’ Then he directly asked me, ‘Are you rejeu?’ I was so upset and answered, ‘Yes I am, so what?’ Then all the teachers came out to see me.” Rejeu is a shortened of lesbian and is often used to designate someone as lesbian in a denigrating way. Jinshil’s experience shows that the recognition of lesbian identity through one’s nonnormative appearance, such as short hair on young women, has increased and, in many cases, leads the young women to experience humiliating remarks and discrimination. The stereotype, however, does not have only negative effects. As Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis note, this visibility, in spite of increasing the risks of harassment against them, also makes it possible I mitating F l o w er B oy S tars

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for lesbians to find each other and thereby reduce their feelings of alienation.32 In other words, the specific style of fancospers’ masculinity has made their existence as iban visible, thus attracting more iban-identified young women to join. Therefore, my informants insisted on the liberating role of a fancos community, because there is no reason to hide their same-sex desire. Junghyuk said, “I can confidently say that I am dating with a girl here. ‘This is my girlfriend.’ ‘We are dating.’ We can post our pictures of kissing on our website without hesitation. For us, alienated from the other world, fancos is the only place that we can openly speak out that we are iban.” In sum, the young women started their fancos activities as fans of Korean pop stars, when K-pop became the most popular form of culture among young women, starting in the late 1990s. Embodying masculinity as a fan, however, led them to question their gender and sexual identity, finally creating an independent female queer youth community and subculture, fancos. Examining fancos reveals the crucial role of local (Korean) rather than Western media representations of gender and sexuality in emerging forms of sexual desires, identities, and communities among young queer women in Korea, thus challenging the global gay model. It further suggests the importance of looking at the historical context to better understand the transformation of nonnormative genders and same-sex sexuality within specific localities. My examination of fancos further reveals that not only mainstream (both global and local) media, but also fandom itself as an independent medium is crucial in the construction of queer identity and community, because their model of masculinity and scripts of same-sex sexuality are produced through both mainstream media and fanfiction and participation in fancos. N OTE S 1. This sudden burgeoning of Korean popular culture is partly in response to the government’s changed policy toward cultural industry. According to Kang Nae-hui, cultural industry came to be considered as the new strong profitable area in 1990s Korean capitalism. See Sinjayujuuiwa munhwa: Nodong sahoeeseo munhwa sahoero (Neoliberalism and Culture: From Labor Society to Cultural Society) (Seoul: Munhwa gwahaksa, 2000). 2. Kang, Sinjayujuuiwa munhwa, 277–278. 3. Music experts, columnists, and male fans of rock music called the young women who are fans of idol group singers “brainless,” saying the female fans “don’t

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know anything about music, but like those singers only because of their look.” See Choi Jimin, “Geudeureun wae munhuijuneul sileohaneunga?” (Why Do They Hate Moon Hee-joon?), Ohmynews, January 31, 2003, http://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_ Web/view/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A000010515. 4. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1992), 84–105. 5. Um Yunsu, “Romaenseu munhwareul tonghae bon yeogosaengui seongui sahoehwae gwanhan yeongu” (Study on Socialization of Sexuality of Girls’ High School Students through Romance Culture) (master’s thesis, Ewha Womans University, 1997). 6. For instance, E.Y.E and IF, the small organizations voluntarily created by young women in their teens and early twenties, started fancos events in the early 2000s. Other fancos event clubs (Fan-Hermes, Norabolka, We Are the One, BNB, and others) increased in number and popularity. Since 2002, fancos events have also been organized by “professional” agencies (ROCA and Cos-Muvi), owned by male “adults” who have access to well-known show industry and equipment, making the festivals more attractive and appealing. 7. The term iban was coined by queer subjects to refer to themselves positively and was popularly used by young queer women in the early 2000s. I use the term iban in most cases, respecting the preference of my informants. 8. Lee Haesol, “Hanguk rejeubieon ingwon undongsa” (History of Lesbian Human Rights Movement in Korea), in Hangug yeoseong ingwon undongsa (Korean Women’s Human Rights Movement History), edited by Hangung yeoseongui jeonhwa (Seoul: Hanwool, 1999), 359–403; Chun Eun-jung, “Nado namja cheoreom sarabogetda” (I Will Try to Live Like a Man), in 20 segi yeoseong sageonsa (Twentieth-Century History of Women), edited by Women History Study Group Gilbak sesang (Seoul: Yeoseong sinmunsa, 2001), 39–49; Park Chung-ae, “Yeojareul saranghan yeoja (Women Who Loved Women),” in 20 segi yeoseong sageonsa, 100–108; Kim Ilran, “Dareun sesang ikgi” (Read Different World: Female and Male Transvestites in 1960s Korea), in Jendeoui chaeneoreul dollyeora (Turn the Channel of Gender), edited by Queer Theory Cultural Studies Meeting WIG (Seoul: Saram saenggak, 2008); KwonKim Hyun-young, “Namjang-yeoja/namja/namjaingan-ui uimiwa namseongseong yeongu bangbeob” (The Meaning of Women Wearing Men’s Clothes/Men/ Male Human and Methodology in Research of Masculinity), in Namseongseong gwa jendeo (Masculinity and Gender), edited by KwonKim, Han, Jung, and Ruin (Seoul: Jaeum gwa moeum, 2011), 35–62; Cha Min-jung, “1920–30 nyeondae byeontae jeog seksyueolliti e daehan damlon yeongu” (A study on the “deviant” sexuality in colonized Korea 1920–30) (master’s thesis, Ewha Women’s University, 2011); Iseo, “Eonni jeo dalnalalo” (Sister to the Moon: Baekammul and Girl Students’ Culture in 1910– 1930s), Kwieo inmun japji ppira (2012), 142–164. 9. Baek Hyeon-mi, “1950 nyeondae yeoseong gukkeug ui seong jeongchiseong” (Sexual Politics of Female Gukkeug during the 1950s in Korea), Hangung geugyesul yeongu 12 (2000): 153–182; “1950 nyeondae yeoseong gukgeuk ui danche hwaldong gwa soetoe gwajeong e daehan yeongu” (A Study on the Troupe Activity and the Declining Process of 1950s Female Gukgeuk), Hanguk yeoseonghak 27, no. 2 (2011): 1–33; Kim Jihye, “1950 nyeondae yeoseong gukgeuk gongdongche ui dongseong chinmilseong e gwanhan yeongu” (A Study on Intimacy between Women in 1950s Female Gukgeuk Community), Hanguk yeoseonghak 26, no. 1 (2010): 97–126.

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10. Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Kim Jihye, “1950 nyeondae,” 125. 11. Kim Jihye, “1950 nyeondae,” 125. 12. Jennifer Cole, “Fresh Contact in Tamatave, Madagascar: Sex, Money, and Intergenerational Transformation,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 4 (2004): 575. 13. Dennis Altman, “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” Social Text 14, no. 3 (1996): 424. 14. Sasika Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya, “Globalization, Sexuality, and Silences: Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in an Asian Context,” in Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, edited by Sasika Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–22; Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Dissident Sexualities/Alternative Globalisms,” in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, edited by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1–10. 15. Lisa Rofel, “Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in China,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 5, no. 4 (1999): 451–474. 16. Dong-Jin Seo, “Ingwon, simingwon geurigo seksyueolliti hangugui seongjeok sosuja undonggwa jeongchihag” (Human Rights, Citizenship, and Sexuality), Gyeongje wa sahoe 67 (2005): 66–87. 17. Dennis Altman, “Sexuality and Globalization,” Sexuality Research & Social Policy 1, no. 1 (2004): 63–68. 18. Seo, “Ingwon,” 75. 19. Cho, “Gei namseongui,” 402. 20. John Cho, “Faceless Things: Korean Gay Men, Internet, and Sexual Citizenship” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011), 8. 21. Yaoi is a Japanese word created to ridicule amateur comic books for their lack of quality that later came to designate comics depicting male same-sex sexuality. This word came to be used in Korea without translation to refer to comic books of male same-sex romantic and sexual relationships. 22. See Kim Min-jeong, “Sipdae yeoseong munhwa roseo paenpik yeongu” (Study of Fanfic as a Women’s Cyber Subculture) (MA thesis, Ewha Womans University, 2003); Kim Yeongnan, “Sangdam eul tonghae bon cheongsonyeon ui dongseongae siltae mit taedo” (Reality and Attitudes of Homosexuality among Adolescents Studied through Counseling), in Dongseongae, pyohyeon ui jayu wa cheongsonyeon e gwanhan toronhoe (Discussion about Homosexuality: Freedom of Expression and Adolescence), organized by Youth Commission under Prime Minister of South Korea, April 29, 2003; Chun Geuna, “Dongseongae pyohyeonmul i cheongsonyeon ui seong uisik e michin yeonghyang” (Influence of Homosexuality Media on the Idea of Sexuality of Adolescents), in Dongseongae, pyohyeon ui jayu wa cheongsonyeon e gwanhan toronhoe; Yoo Ju-yeon, “Jung haksaeng ui dongseongaejeok eumnanmul jeopchok jeongdo wa dongseongae hyeomo jeok mit gojeong gwannyeom gwaui gwangye” (Study on the Relationships among the Contact Frequency of Homosexual Lewd Materials, Homophobia, and Prejudice of Adolescents) (master’s thesis, Seoul Women’s University, 2004); Shin Young-hui, “10 dae yeoseong iban munhwa e dae han yeoseonghak jeok yeongu” (Feminist Research on Teenage Female Iban Culture: Youth Culture and Construction of Sexuality in Daegu Area) (master’s thesis, Gyemyeong University, 2005); Han Che-yun, “Cheongsonyeon dongseongaeja e daehan ihae wa sahoejeok jiji bangan”

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(Understanding and Ways to Support Queer Youth), in Dongseongae, pyohyeon ui jayu wa cheongsonyeon e gwanhan toronhoe. 23. Jee-young Shin, “Male Homosexuality in the King and the Clown: Hybrid Construction and Contested Meanings,” Journal of Korean Studies 18 (2013): 101. 24. Sun Jung, Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-pop Idols (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). 25. Jungsun Kim, “Sin sedae sin pungsok: Hwajanghaneun namja ga areumdapda” (Men Who Wear Make-up Are Beautiful: The Era of Flower Men), Kyunghyang shinmun, 2003. 26. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (London: Routledge, 1994). 27. Rosalind C. Morris, “All Made Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1995): 583. 28. Ibid., 583–584. 29. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 20–29. 30. Ibid., 19. 31. Ibid., 177. 32. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993).

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PART III

(Not) Crossing Over

With the success of Bombay films such as Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), as well as diasporic films such as Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) in the UK and US markets, the “crossover film” moniker began to surface in industrial and media rhetoric both in India and abroad. Crossover hit has been used to describe global moneymakers such Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002), and House of Flying Daggers (2004). More recently, bilingual Spanish-English films produced by Nala Studios, films focused on African American communities, as well Koreandirected films Stoker (2013) and Snowpiercer (2014) have been labeled crossovers. The dynamic and prolific adaptations of music, graphic novels, dramas, and films among Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan as well as the movement of stars within the media industries of East Asia highlights important regional crossovers. In Beyond Bollywood: Cultural Politics of South Asian Films, Jigna Desai invokes the term crossover to alert us to the pursuit of white audiences for black British cultural productions. Crossing over, Desai observes, does not simply refer to market expansion, but also to a move from a minor or niche market to the majority market. If what propels these films is a desire for financial success via a quest for white audiences, 171

then the tastes and desires of black audiences “become secondary.” Crossover “assumes that there are certain audiences that are commensurate with communities and demographic populations.” The logic of capitalist diversification segments national viewers into easily categorized and target-friendly markets that consume multicultural fare. In this process, while black British are made visible, political questions that animated black cultural productions marginalized.1 In Crossover Cinema: Cross-Cultural Film from Production to Reception, Sukhmani Khorana relocates the term from the site of distribution to production to recuperate its political promise as well as the inequities that shape its availability: “it is the site of cross-cultural conceptualization and production that is taken as the principal foundation and that then leads to the textual hybridity and wide-ranging audience appeal . . . creating a film that is not conventionally grounded in a single national/cultural/generic source.”2 Khorana emphasizes that this cinema is not restricted to an art house category, nor is it bound to finding a Western viewership. Instead, it “is forged from multiple cultural affiliations and eventually appeals to a range of viewing communities.” Within Khorana’s theoretical scaffolding, crossover films and viewership are situated within the contemporary moment; Adrian Athique broadens this time frame to historicize and place audiences at varied locations and times in a comparative dialogue. In doing so, he can ask why and how it is that the current interest of anglophone audiences in Bombay cinema has “larger implications for the way in which the Indian industry functions” whereas the tastes of earlier and current transnational audiences of Bombay cinema located in the former Soviet Union, West Asia, and Africa did not generate such concern or enthusiasm about the prospect of crossing over.3 Thus, like Desai, Athique invites us to consider the differential valuing of global audiences. The works discussed previously focus on transnational spaces. S. V. Srinivas’s “Rajnikanth and the ‘Regional Blockbuster’ ” productively turns our attention to the region as a valuable site for theorizing the crossover. Srinivas explores the production and emergence of the regional blockbuster in Tamil and Telugu cinemas, which have been Bombay cinema’s competitors and at times partners: [the blockbuster] is a big budget film in which below-the-line costs are high. Typically, these expenses are incurred to create spectacle sets, visual effects,

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prosthetic make-up, extras, etc.). Whether or not the film features a major male star, production qualities are high and story, narrative and genre innovation are to be expected. . . . The rise of the blockbuster was predicated on the availability of markets beyond state/language borders, with dubbing into other Indian languages playing a major role.4

Along with dubbing, digital projections, and the centralization of exhibition, the mushrooming of television as well as the skyrocketing distribution and exhibition costs of big-budget Bombay films facilitated the emergence of the regional blockbuster. As these films cross traditional market boundaries at home and abroad, they challenge both Bombay cinema’s and Hollywood’s hegemonic status. Later in this book, Solee Shin uncovers the overlapping and competing trajectories of popular East Asian music. Her work points to region as a significant spatial and industrial configuration for examining the media traffic among Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan. The essays in this section extend our understanding of crossover cinema. Kristin Rudisill shows how, as British identity expands to include but also capitalize on South Asian popular culture, diasporic South Asians have strategically linked and delinked Indian identity to popular culture to create marketable brands and careers. By examining the lives of three successful South Asian choreographers, Rudisill contributes a new lens through which to view Bombay and Tamil cinemas’ movement, one that is angled toward the ways in which the diaspora not only participates in but also makes strategic use of homeland culture. She shows that our understanding of Bollywood as crossover cannot be confined to film because the “Bollywood brand extends far beyond the production and consumption of feature films.”5 Even as the voracious multicultural industry, with the Indian state and industries often as collaborators, seeks to appropriate Bollywood and its offshoots as a part of exotic India, Rudisill shows that these dance schools have made Bollywood routines legitimate and desirable. This acceptance, as she explains, has both material and affective effects as it produces new schools, choreographers as well as a sense of pride and affection for Bollywood dance. Rudisill draws our attention to the diversity as well as the uneven nature of cultural flows from India by interviewing both Bollywood and Tamil choreographers. While Bollywood as a brand name is recognized within both diasporic and nondiasporic communities ( N ot ) C ro ssing Over

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in Britain, Tamil cinema does not command the same legibility or attraction. However, the recent, stupendous successes of the regional blockbusters Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali: The Conclusion (2017) in both domestic and international markets invite us to mull over the possible repositioning of Telugu and Tamil cinemas from their regional status to national and global competitors. Like Rudisill, Samhita Sunya broadens our conception of crossover by focusing on the relationship between cinema and its ancillary economies as well as the role of the state. She brings Hallyu and Bollywood’s globality together to examine the convergence of tourism with the cinematic lens. Although cine-tourism is not new, by examining Anurag Basu’s 2006 film Gangster which was shot on location in Seoul, Sunya illuminates how cine-tourism, guided by private interests, has set its sights on Asian markets and audiences for not only foreign investment but also cultural exchange. She foregrounds the role of the state in generating these cultural exchanges. The state facilitates such crossovers via trade treaties, tax breaks, and removal of red tape (permissions to shoot at locations). Sunya’s essay thus underscores that the crossover needs to be situated within broader logics of the state and the industry as a key element in trade, tourism, and a quest for new markets. Bombay superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s appointment in 2009 as an honorary ambassador to South Korea to foster tourism between India and Korea is worth noting. In 2014, he was chosen as Indian goodwill ambassador to South Korea to pave the way for South Korean conglomerates. Sunya’s essay shows that the crossover is not simply an attempt to locate and please a Western audience, one that re-inscribes a hierarchical EastWest paradigm. Rather, in the contemporary world where many Asian countries are powerful players in the global arena, the crossover becomes a mechanism for forging multiple cultural, political, and economic ties. Scholars note that though crossover is often used to define nonHollywood productions, it is never or only rarely invoked to describe Hollywood’s search for fresh markets. Thus, Valerie Soe offers important analytical and political opportunity to reflect on Hollywood crossovers. Soe illustrates how much-loved and admired male stars such as Rain, Choi Min-sik, Lee Byung-hun, and Song Kang-ho have been slotted in Hollywood genres reserved for Asian male actors, namely, action, martial arts, and gangster films. This categorization underscores 174

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Hollywood’s orientalism and racism, but it is also worthwhile to consider how Hollywood’s benefits from the presence of these stars so that we can see them not simply as puppets of Hollywood, but also as powerful, transnational performers. Hollywood efforts to recruit these stars needs to be situated within a wider context of global media where Hollywood is under pressure internally from television, internet content, and distributors such as Netflix as well as global challengers such as Korea and India. In this context, Hollywood’s employment of these stars, whose body of work spans music, drama, and films and whose vast fan following would have investors salivating, should be seen as a critical industrial move to draw financiers and audiences. Soe rightly notes that Hallyu’s popularity combined with Hollywood’s increased interest in Asian markets might expand the range of roles that Korean actors play in Hollywood film. Soe’s argument recalls an earlier moment in Hollywood history. In the 1950s, its reign threatened by the rise of television in the United States, Hollywood turned its attention to the international market and began producing “international films” that offered more complex (albeit, at time still racist and Orientalist) representations of Asians. Here, the term “crossover” enables us to examine Hollywood’s industrial partnerships, and in the process provincialize its international forays. This section ends with Jane Park’s counterintuitive analysis of remakes that do not cross over. Park investigates the unsuccessful Hollywood and Bombay remakes of Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo (“My Sassy Girl,” 2001) alongside the lucrative Korean original. She unpacks Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo, arguing that the film successfully reworks Hollywood’s profitable and popular romantic comedy genre. However, neither its Hollywood nor Bombay remakes were able to repeat the original’s success. Thus, Park’s work invites us to consider the limits of cultural translation and identification. Park’s work is generative because it highlights multiple crossovers, which include the transformation of the romantic comedy genre, the Hollywood remake, and the Bollywood remake. Both the remake and genre are industrial strategies for copying and reproducing successful formulas in domestic and international contexts.6 As such, they are critical sites for contemplating the crossover as they attempt to cash in on the potential of the successful original or moneymaking formula by reproducing it in another industrial context. Remake and genre as crossover undertake a delicate balancing act as ( N ot ) C ro ssing Over

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they promise their audiences something new (story, new technology, locations) without drastically altering the old (creating song sequences for Bombay films). Remake as industrial tactic has been effectively employed by Hollywood for many years to restrict crossovers. Hollywood often signed remake contracts that would ensure that it had full rights so that the original could not be exhibited on domestic screens. N OTE S 1. Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004), 63. 2. Sukhmani Khorana, ed., Crossover Cinema: Cross-Cultural Film from Production to Reception (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3. 3. Adrian Athique, “The ‘Crossover’ Audience: Mediated Multiculturalism and the Indian Film,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22, no. 3 (2008): 299. 4. S. V. Srinivas, “Rajinikanth and the ‘Regional Blockbuster,’” Working Papers of the Chicago Tamil Forum 3 (2016): 10–11. 5. Athique, “ ‘Crossover’ Audience,” 301; see also Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Bollywoodization of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 25–39. 6. Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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Expanding Diasporic Identity through Bollywood Dance in London Kr i ste n R u di si l l

London is a vibrant center for Bollywood dance, boasting at least twenty companies and many more private teachers currently offering classes and performances. Since the early 2000s, Bollywood has taken the West by storm, its films, fashion, music, and dance becoming familiar not only within Indian diasporic communities, but also to many who have no heritage claims to the subcontinent. People across Europe, North America, and Australia have been teaching and taking classes in Bollywood dance and performing for a variety of cultural events, competitions, and recitals. These new fans have come to appreciate Bollywood dance, to hire choreographers and performers for their hen nights, weddings, and corporate events, and to incorporate the style into their own performances. But as familiarity with the film industry and its associated culture and merchandise grows, the blanket category of Bollywood has become inadequate, opening the field for Indian cinematic dance styles to fragment into regionally distinguished categories. Additionally, as British identity expands to include South Asian popular culture, Bollywood dance has become part of such nation-building activities as the London 2012 Olympics and the 2014 Bollywood Extravaganza hosted by the former mayor. Although most of the choreographers and dancers are of Indian heritage, given that cultural control over Bollywood is still very much in the hands of Indians, the market 177

and the opportunities are broadening, and different personalities are effectively and creatively marketing themselves and their narratives. In this chapter, I analyze three strategies for the promotion of Bollywood culture and dance that involve television, stage, fitness, global fusion, and regional specificity to demonstrate ways that members of London’s largest minority population have both linked and de-linked Indian identity from popular culture. The three choreographers I discuss (Jeya Raveendran, Jennie Jethwani, and Honey Kalaria) are all part of the second-generation Indian diaspora in London, although Jethwani is the only one born in the UK. Raveendran’s family moved there from France and Kalaria’s from Malawi when they were small children. Jennie Jethwani codes Bollywood dance as a global cultural product that fuses Indian with Western styles, whereas Honey Kalaria codes it as culturally Indian. Jeya Raveendran narrows his focus to mark his dance as Tamil, distinguishing this regional cultural identity from the broader Indian one. Each choreographer consistently highlights his or her dance product as being distinct from western popular culture. The effect is the association of their varied dance products and brands with values (affective, aesthetic, financial, transnational, and national—Indian, Sri Lankan, or British) that raise the exchange rate of their cultural capital within their particular target audience’s unique “scale of value,” to borrow a phrase.1 After acting and choreographing for Bollywood films, Honey Kalaria opened her dance studio in London in 1997, making her name in the West with a series of Bollywood exercise videos starting in 2002. Jeya Raveendran reached the semifinal round of 2013’s Got to Dance—Season 4 with his Tamil regional dance troupe Gaana Rajas and is now an indemand choreographer and dancer in both the UK and abroad as well as producer and host of the IBC Tamil dance competition show Nadana Rajas. After several years with Bollywood Dance London, Jennie Jethwani started Absolute Bollywood in 2012. She has a diverse dance training and distinguishes her company as Bollywood fusion, attracting dancers and students from a wide variety of communities. I examine the narrative and affective trajectories of these three choreographers as they have parlayed their unique positions and skills in performance as well as in traditional and social media into marketable brands and careers. A number of factors contributed to the rapid expansion of Bollywood’s popularity in London in the early 2000s, many related to the 178

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Bollywood film industry itself. In 1998, the Indian government granted industrial status to the film industry so that filmmakers could access funding through banks and no longer needed to rely on private funding, which often came with high interest rates in addition to underworld ties.2 About the same time, the Indian government made “overseas entertainment earnings tax free.”3 This move provided real incentives for producers to promote their films overseas and to follow Hollywood’s lead in merchandising clothing, accessories, and jewelry from the films. The success of this strategy is evident in the responses of Ranjan Bandyopadhyay’s second-generation British-Indian female university student informants when he asked them about whether watching Bollywood films inspired them to go to India. The answer was emphatically yes and related mostly to shopping for clothing and jewelry inspired by what they had seen on-screen. They were eager to purchase “authentic” items to wear for Indian events in the UK. One woman said, “Did you see the yellow chiffon saree Aishwarya [Rai] was wearing in the movie Bluffmaster . . . that’s superb! It will be great if I can . . . have some varieties of those and can wear [them] in my cousin’s marriage in London . . . that’s the main reason I want to go to India.”4 Some Bollywood dance classes culminate in an annual performance, for which the teachers source costumes from India for the students to purchase and wear. I participated in Honey Kalaria’s 2013 Bollywood Musical stage show, and the costumes were the subject of considerable discussion and controversy among the mostly high school age students. The costumes did not arrive from India in time for the show and we had to make due with whatever was available from our own wardrobes and Kalaria’s storage. The students had been to India either not at all or infrequently, so the authenticity and glamour of the costumes was extremely important to them. Ann David suggests that this astronomical growth in the number of dance classes is related to the growing interest in the UK in Bollywood films in general. Paul Brians wrote in 2003 that “South Asian culture has become highly popular around the world . . . South Asia is now chic in the West in the way that Japan was a decade ago.”5 He credits this development in part to Bollywood films such as Lagaan (2001), which was nominated for an Academy Award and had a British actress in a lead role. After economic liberalization in the early 1990s, there was “an expansion in Indian media, particularly the entry of satellite television B O L LY WOO D DA N C E I N L O N D O N

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channels such as B4U (Bollywood-for-You), ZEE-USA and Sony, and a veritable explosion of websites concerning every imaginable aspect of the world of Hindi cinema (fanzines, discussion groups, review sites, and so on).”6 Simultaneously, “Indian film exports jumped twentyfold in the period 1989–1999 and have continued to grow since.” 7 A number of films were released that included representation of diasporic Indians to cater to the diasporic audiences, which now had easier access to Bollywood films through the internet, television, and movie theaters. Sheena Malhotra and Tavishi Alagh write that “the Indian film industry has understood that Indian diasporic communities (particularly Indians residing in North America and Europe) represent an important audience in that these diasporic Indians not only have wealth to invest in India but also constitute a very important market for exploitation. Therefore, it is important to re-appropriate these Indians into the dream of the Indian nation.”8 One trend involved films aiming to attract global (nondiasporic) audiences by including British actors and actresses in leading roles. In 1999 alone, “more than twenty Bollywood films were actually produced in the UK.”9 The British and Indian governments subsequently “signed a joint agreement to promote film co-productions” in 2005.10 It is not only the actions of Bollywood and the governments that encourage the spread of Bollywood overseas. The rising interest in the UK has a specific history that prompted Kaleem Aftab to write in 2003 that The Hindi popular cinema known as “Bollywood” has lately become a byword for cool in the British media, its ubiquity extending from broadsheet Sunday supplements to the West End stage and the windows of Selfridge’s department store. . . . To speak knowingly about the latest Bollywood epic . . . is currently as essential a component of hipness as sporting the latest pair of Jimmy Choo shoes.11

He points to the 2000 hosting of the first International Indian Film Awards at London’s Millenium Dome as a catalyst. By that point, the city had become the second largest market for Bollywood films outside India and the event attracted more than three thousand “celebrities, stars, and directors” who included not only big name Bollywood personalities like Aishwarya Rai, Anupam Kher, and Sanjay Leela Bansali, but also stars like Jackie Chan, Angelina Jolie, and Kylie Minogue.12 180

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The live broadcast reached six hundred million viewers in more than 122 countries.13 Other evidence of the popularity of Bollywood in the UK is the BBC’s online poll at the start of the new millennium to find “the public’s favorite screen actor of the past century,” which resulted in a surprise win for Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan.14 H O NE Y KA L AR I A : H O N E Y ’S DA N C E AC ADEM Y

Honey’s Dance Academy was one of the first to offer Bollywood dance classes in the UK, a few years before they became common in London.15 By the time other Bollywood schools started opening in London in the early 2000s, Kalaria was quite well established thanks to her exercise DVD Bollywood Workout, which helped propel her brand and popularity beyond the UK. As she explains in a 2015 interview, the first week that it was released . . . I went into . . . Woolworth’s . . . and they normally have a fitness board with about the top twenty or top fifty fitness videos and I started right at the bottom to see where is my video, you know. And I started going up up up. Top ten, I thought. Oh my god, it’s probably not even listed, I thought to myself, it’s done so bad, you know. Soon I was at ten, nine, eight, seven and I think number three was Geri Halliwell at that time with the fitness yoga video. Oh, no. Number two, then I looked at Number One, (gasp!) Honey Kalaria’s Bollywood Workout! It had sold thousands. It . . . again proved the fact that Bollywood was becoming pretty popular and people wanted to know more about it.

These fitness DVDs provided her with an early venue to gain an audience at a moment when Londoners were becoming entranced with the color, fun, and excitement of Bollywood. Kalaria’s work complemented other India-coded fitness routines of the time like the yoga video and American dancer Sarina Jain’s Masala Bhangra workout videos. She was able to capitalize on the Western obsession with cardio and fitness and combine it with the growing cool factor for all things Indian. Honey Kalaria started dancing at age four, her mother as her primary guru, but spent her summer holidays in India training with different gurus in Bharata Natyam, Kathak, and folk styles such as Garba and Dandiya. Back in the UK, she studied belly dancing, Latin American dance, and Rock and Roll. She is now seen as an authority on Bollywood, earning B O L LY WOO D DA N C E I N L O N D O N

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her the title of Bollywood Ambassador to the UK and a variety of performance opportunities. One of the most exciting was the 2002 Andrew Lloyd Webber stage production of Bollywood Dreams, which included music by A. R. Rahman and a script by Meera Syal and Thomas Meehan. It ran for two years in London’s West End at the Apollo Victoria Theatre before moving to Broadway in New York, where it was nominated for a number of Tony Awards. Kalaria provided dancers for the London show and “did a promotional tour for them. That was really great. It was really a great step forward in bringing Bollywood to the masses.” She reminisced about when she first opened her dance school: “I remember from 1997 until around 2001 or 2002 I had to struggle quite a bit, teaching and educating and continuously talking to people about what Bollywood was about.” After Bollywood Dreams, the level of general knowledge about the films and the dance style in London had increased to a much higher level and Kalaria was no longer dealing with journalists who said, Bollywood? What’s this Bollywood? [laughs] They had no idea what Bollywood was. And so many people said to me, Honey, why not just run Bharata Natyam classes or some Indian traditional classes? Because Bollywood’s not going to work. Nobody knows about Bollywood in this country. So I remember in ’97 I had made a little mission up . . . I’m going to . . . go out there and educate about the world of Bollywood. . . . So when I started, I did a lot of school tours and I had a lot of support from the Minister of State for Art and Culture . . . I did a whole UK tour, teaching people about Bollywood.

Most people in Britain were familiar with the films and somewhat with the culture by the early 2000s, and Kalaria was able to transition to a balance of more performances and less education. Still, for Kalaria, it is all about providing “Bollywood dance training in such a way that Indian art and culture is promoted through, so Indian tradition is taught, but mainly through a means and a vehicle which British Asians could understand and appreciate.”16 Her students are primarily second- and third-generation British Asians ages four to eighteen. She considers her biggest reward to be the letters and emails from parents telling her that her dance classes inspire their children to listen to Indian music, take part in Diwali shows, watch Bollywood films, or learn a bit of an Indian language. In the twelve-week dance course that 182

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I participated in from April through July 2013, where all the classes performed in the big musical stage production, there was only one other white woman (married to a British Asian); the rest were of Indian heritage. When I interviewed Kalaria in October 2012, she said that her academy (professional team and students) took part in an average of about 250 shows per year. In the few weeks following our interview, she had scheduled a Diwali show at Trafalgar Square, the Ideal Home Exhibition, a show for the mayor of Aldenstone for Diwali, and a peace and unity show promoting multifaith friendship. Before the surge in Bollywood dance, a number of teachers in London offered classes in classical Indian dance forms. Ann David’s research has shown that many of those teachers are finding that demand for these classes has dropped away and that they are shifting to teaching more Bollywood. Students are, in general, less interested in acquiring technique and more interested in learning dances quickly that they can then perform. David surmises that “as the younger generations interact and integrate more with non-Asian life, the traditional values promoted by the study of artistic forms may become less appealing . . . an up-beat, easily-learnt and more sensual form of dance is perhaps more attractive . . . it offers to them a global, expressive, fun, glamorous, modern and cosmopolitan image.”17 Although traditional values may be less appealing, the brand equity of Bollywood is more popular than ever and transfers some of that appeal to the country of India, bringing more interest in the culture from both the younger generation and those without heritage connections. As Anne Allison writes, for this generation, “worldliness is both an asset and a marker of coolness.”18 One London teacher lamented, “the reality is that there is no real demand for classical. I have more offers than I have time for Bollywood. Bollywood markets me; I don’t have to market it!”19 The rise of dance and talent shows on television has also contributed to the fantasy of some of these young dancers that they may become stars, either at home in London or in Bollywood itself. Ann David interviewed a number of students at Bollywood dance studios and finds that “the classes are framed predominantly by a discourse of health, fitness, sport and pleasure, are sold to potential customers as a ‘modern Indian dance style.’” A minority of particularly young Asian students, though, “see the learning of Hindi film dance as a possible entry into the glamorous world of the Bollywood film star—ambitions B O L LY WOO D DA N C E I N L O N D O N

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fuelled by TV programmes such as Bollywood Star (2004), The X Factor (2004–10) and Britain’s Got Talent (2007–10).”20 This minority is the one that Honey Kalaria focuses on: talented students who are serious about being professionals in the performing arts world. In 2012, she downsized her academy so that she could do this more effectively. She explains in an interview: [At one point] we had twenty schools running in different parts of London . . . because it was so big, we couldn’t spend that much time with individuals who were extremely talented because there were so many to work with. There were 1,800 students at a time that we were teaching every week . . . we used to create very good stars because there were smaller numbers, maybe three hundred—seven hundred, let’s say, students, but when it started becoming so many you just do not have that much time . . . I would be more involved in training the trainers so I couldn’t recognize where the talent was so that I could work with them on a longer term basis. We just felt that there are enough dance schools running anyway, for people who want to go for fun and fitness. . . . But we are more interested in really providing high quality training. And that’s why what we decided to do was to turn the schools into an academy.

Now she trains students for the Bollywood exams conducted by the authorized dance examination board through the Council of Dance and Education Training and focuses on those students who are truly exceptional. She talked about finding martial arts instructors for students who wanted to act and would need to be able to fight “with style,” arranging singing, acting, and Hindi lessons, and setting up meetings with actors, directors, and producers in Bollywood, trying to develop talent and shape students’ careers. Part of the spread of knowledge among the general population in Britain had to do with a reality talent-search show Kalaria was involved with in 2004 called Bollywood Star. Daya Kishan Thussu describes it as “a reality show on Britain’s Channel 4 [that] followed a group of British hopefuls as they underwent auditions and tests to compete for a star role in a Hindi film . . . broadcast at prime time on a major terrestrial channel, [Bollywood Star] gave the Indian film industry huge exposure among the general British television audience.”21 Honey Kalaria “was one of the advisers there on how to bring Bollywood to the mainstream 184

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audiences. And I introduced them to the actual director Mahesh Bhatt . . . who said, yes, I will offer a role in one of my movies . . . as a prize.”22 She says that the show was really popular and people are still talking about it ten years later, thus it was a shame that Channel 4 did not continue it for additional seasons. Kalaria also sends her students to Got to Dance, and Ajay Bhandari, one of the teachers at her studio, auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent in 2009. This video circulated widely among the students, who stared in amazement as they watched him sit down on the stage, saying, “I’m not going to leave here until I get my yesses” after being rejected unanimously by the three judges. Simon Cowell was the first to get up and leave.23 JEYA RAVE E NDR A N : J E YA R AV E E N D R AN DAN CE AC A D E MY

Jeya Raveendran made his name in the reality dance competition Got to Dance in 2013. His group, Gaana Rajas, made it to the semifinals, where they received two yesses and one no from the judges. The first judge told them, Yes, God, oh my God, you guys are representing your style to the fullest and that’s what I absolutely love. You know, it’s rare that the more traditional styles stand out against bigger crews you know, or bigger styles like street, for example, but this does. Seriously, immense choreographies, immense transitions, staying true to yourself. Really hard work and seriously, I love you guys, so good job.

The second said, Listen, you just put Gaana style on the map, right now. Seriously. You really did. You really did. You came out here and you were like, listen, we’ve seen street crews and we’re going to shut it down. I actually now want to learn this style of dance because of you guys . . . basically, though, loved it. Well done.

The third, however, said (to vigorous booing from the audience), I love your style, I think you did a great job. But, in context of this competition, I feel that you could be a bit more dynamic . . . style is amazing . . . but

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this is Got to Dance and it’s not just about having a style, it’s about having the whole package. [argues with other judges] I’m sorry, but from me it is going to be a red.24

After that performance, as he explained in a 2015 interview, Raveendran noticed a “big difference in the community. I don’t know if it’s because Gaana Rajas went on to Got to Dance . . . or if it’s just that the generation mentality is changing about dancing. Right now, I get so much support from the community and I’m doing my academy and a lot more parents are supporting now than were before.” The Jeya Raveendran Dance Academy he started in 2014 has grown from about eighty students to more than three hundred, and he teaches every day at four different locations. He feels as if he is bringing the community together through dance and has received numerous invitations to perform and collaborate over the last few years. For example, he performed at the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize concert in Norway to celebrate the honorees Kailash Satyarti and Malaya Yousafzai. The television show Nadana Rajas that he proposed and produces has him judging alongside Kollywood greats Gayatri Raghuram and Nagendra Prasad (his idol Prabhudeva’s brother). Raveendran also judges for Bollywood and other shows, including Toronto’s long-running Thaalam: Ultimate Gaana Competition and London’s prestigious Battle of Bollywood, which attracts more than three thousand participants and viewers to the Apollo Eventim. Rather than prioritizing promotion of culture like Kalaria, Raveendran focuses on fostering community connections. He has expanded out from the Sri Lankan Tamil community, but it is still the basis of his support, even among his international fans. He is beginning to focus more on bringing Gaana and Tamil culture mainstream, but much of his interest is in bringing this community together through dance. He is extremely active on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat) and uses it to market his classes, maintain interest, make connections, and share his work. Some of his students (Twinkle and Sham, for example) now have their own followers, thanks to being featured in his YouTube videos, some of which have nearly five million views; a half million people have subscribed to his channel. The connections Raveendran is making around the world and the recognition he is bringing to Sri Lanka and to Tamil performance and identity have 186

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the potential to replace memories and impressions of fear and violence with those of pride, joy, and irresistible dance beats. I propose that Raveendran’s regional dance–focused academy could not have succeeded were it not for the number of Bollywood schools already established in London. When he first started, before the Got to Dance appearance, he had a hard time convincing parents to let their children attend, or even his own parents to let him make dancing a career, but now he is at capacity in terms of both class size and available hours. As he explained in an interview, he is promoting Gaana, a south Indian folk-inspired film dance, primarily from Telugu and Tamil films, and uses people’s existing knowledge of Bollywood to describe it: “It’s more raw, it’s more energy. Where Bollywood is more about, it has more grace and is more colorful. This is more from the streets, it’s very folky.” Gaana has been difficult for him to explain without the Bollywood reference, because the very name and specificity of the style started among the Tamil diaspora communities, and the word is not used or widely understood as a dance form in India. Raveendran says, Gaana is actually the [genre of the] music, but we, Sri Lankan Tamils, we named it ourselves . . . In India it’s not called Gaana. . . . So whenever I’m judging and there’s an Indian judge on the panel, he’s always debating with me what’s this, what’s that. But he doesn’t understand the fact that, we weren’t taught this. . . . Gaana was a movement and it just started off and we had to give it a name. . . . In UK, there is a Gaana movement and I was part of it . . . And I’m the first person who is carrying it on to this level professionally. In Canada there’s a movement, everywhere there’s a Gaana movement.

The spelling or name may vary, but this dance is performed by Tamils and Telugus around the world. Raveendran had a difficult time when he filled out the application for Got to Dance because the form asked about style. In regard to Gaana, he says, “there’s no reference to it, there’s no source to it, there’s only movies and videos, but the Tamil industry doesn’t have an explanation about Gaana anywhere.” So he had to come up with an explanation himself, collecting input from friends, family, and other dancers: the movement was created by this community come together. Saw the movies, saw it on TV, wanted to do it. . . . It’s different because it’s more

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drums, more beats. Gaana as a type of music is repetitive . . . You know Kolaveri? Keep saying ‘Why this Kolaveri’ three times. . . . That’s the format of a Gaana song. As long as it’s got drum beats, we know that it’s folk. We know that it’s Gaana.

In the combined explanation Raveendran gave with Dr. Uma Vangal at a dance workshop at Kenyon College in September 2015, they noted the hallmarks of Gaana dance as threefold: the hand held up with the pinky, index finger, and thumb up and the other two fingers folded into the palm, the tongue sticking out slightly, and hip thrusts to go along with the musical genre’s vigorous drum beat. They talked about Gaana’s roots in “Dabang Kuttu” (the Dead Body Dance), so named because the particular folk style that the film dance references is traditionally performed by mourners (especially in North Madras) following a dead body to the cremation ground, accompanied by drums. A key reference for modern Gaana is Prabhudeva’s classic dance “Urvashi Urvashi” (1994), which Raveendran cites as being his primary inspiration for starting to dance at age five. Raveendran was born at the height of the civil war in Sri Lanka and only recently visited there for the first time, although he strongly identifies with the Sri Lankan Tamil community in London. As he explained in an interview, Kollywood is Gaana style. That represents our Tamil culture a lot, that’s Tamil dance. Tamil dance is Gaana. That’s how we see it. It’s not Sri Lankan, but because we migrated from Sri Lanka, we kind of follow, we watch Tamil movies and we are very connected to India, to Tamil Nadu. So anything that they did is what we celebrate.

When I presented a paper on his work for the Wings Conference on Arts and Reconciliation in Colombo in 2016, the roomful of Tamils were fascinated by the recognition he is bringing to their community through a dance form that is not part of their identity or dance practice. It is an Indian Tamil dance style, developed through popular film, but its wide distribution network within the diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil community has led it to be identified with Sri Lankan (as well as Indian) Tamils around the world. Raveendran learned to dance by watching popular films and his older brothers, and never had any formal dance training. He performed at some cultural shows, where he showed 188

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real aptitude and eventually turned professional after earning his mechanical engineering degree and choreographing and performing while at university. For Kalaria, being a Bollywood ambassador means teaching Indian culture. For Raveendran, Gaana is about Tamil culture, and the Tamil film industry of Kollywood has not been nearly as successful at promoting itself among diasporic communities as Bollywood for a variety of reasons. Factors include Kollywood’s focus on keeping narratives and characters relevant to the local Indian Tamil audience, the international distribution and promotion channels being dominated by Bollywood, and the importance of Tamil identity rather than a pan-Indian one for these films. Selvaraj Velayuttam does note a shift around 2005 away from village-based stories to urban middle-class settings that are more appealing for wealthier diasporic Tamil audiences in the West: While Bollywood has forged ahead in terms of the global promotion and circulation of movies with impetus from the Indian diaspora, other Indian film industries are lagging far behind. The popularity of Bollywood extends beyond the Indian community. The mass global following of Bollywood is steadily growing. It is not just the movies but also songs, dance and other cultural repertoires associated with the industry that have gained popularity. Within this context, the South Indian film industry which is the largest producer in the country remains a non-entity outside of India.25

Raveendran is changing that, though he has had more of an uphill battle than either Kalaria or Jethwani, because he is promoting a dance style that did not even have a name until a few years ago. JENNI E J E TH WA N I : A B S O L U T E B O LLY WOO D

Jennie Jethwani’s Absolute Bollywood was founded in 2012 and grew out of the former Bollywood Dance London school, which had opened two years earlier and was doing quite well when the cofounders decided to split and open separate companies: Jethwani started Absolute Bollywood; Nileeka Gunawardene founded The Bollywood Co. Both schools offer similar services, but with different strategies in approach and marketing. Absolute Bollywood’s website is all about the team. The Bollywood Co. is much more about the founder. Jennie does not have the B O L LY WOO D DA N C E I N L O N D O N

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forceful personality of Nileeka, Raveendran, or Kalaria, and her company is much more team and collaboration based than any of the others, which depend on their founder’s charisma and personality. Both Jennie and Nileeka have impressive resumes and clearly the city can easily sustain both dance companies, which have now been running for more than seven years. Jethwani trained at the Sylvia Young Theatre School in London, eventually earning dance teaching qualifications in Impact Dance, YMCA ETM Qualification (level 2, part 1), and belly dance. She learned Bollywood dance on her own and through working with a variety of dance studios. The Absolute Bollywood website states that her “Notable performances include the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, the Asian Music Awards at Wembley Arena, Russell Howard’s Good News, a guest appearance on BBC Newsnight, Diwali on The Square, Move It and the Mayor of London’s Bollywood Extravaganza. She also has backing dance experience for stars including Kanika Kapoor, Arjun, Golkartz, Ash King & the Vyas brothers.”26 Jethwani is especially known for her unique combination of Bollywood dance and belly dance that she calls Bellybolly and in which she teaches special classes. Other members of her team teach most of the other drop-in classes. Absolute Bollywood focuses on private lessons, workshops, hen parties, kids’ parties, and themed events. They will send dancers to your home or school, give lessons over Skype, and provide dancers, DJs, henna artists, accessories, photographers, and musicians for weddings, birthday parties, corporate events, or other occasions.27 Although they are often hired by clients of Indian heritage, they are just as often not. Their dance events provide what Anne Allison calls “an interactive activity by which something foreign soon becomes familiar,” bringing Bollywood into the embodied experience of many British residents. These women (they also have male dancers they call on when requested for particular performances, but the men are not part of the regular team) take turns choreographing for the different performance events, though Urvashi Patel is listed on the website as senior choreographer. Patel has trained at the Nupur Dance Academy in the UK in the classical Indian style of Bharata Natyam as well as in contemporary dance, ballet, hip-hop, and Latin American dance. She studied Bollywood dance at the Anupam Kher Institute in Mumbai. The website focuses on the global nature of her performance as well as the Indian connection, listing performances 190

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abroad and film and theater choreography along with British nationbuilding events and connections to Bollywood stars. With Absolute Bollywood, Urvashi has taken Bollywood dance global; most recent appearances in Dubai, Egypt, Germany, Paris and Aberdeen . . . Notable credits include film choreography for: My Big Fat Love Story & My Beautiful White Skin. Theatre choreography for: Lalita’s Big Fat Asian Wedding & East is just not East. Other credits include: Special Olympics opening Ceremony, Dhamaka Royal Albert Hall, Labour Party Gala, Asian Awards, Diwali on the square and Zee Carnival. Urvashi has also worked with renowned stars including Shamaila Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Isha Savani, Kulvinder Ghir and Preeya Kalidas. In addition to her work behind the scenes she has also featured in numerous music videos.28

Many British Asians and non-Asians are looking for something fun for a hen night or a first dance at their wedding, and Absolute Bollywood is ready to provide the entire experience for them, including the choreography. They will even bring dancers to get crowds of up to three hundred onto the dance floor and moving. The team of dancers and the students at Absolute Bollywood was the most diverse I have seen at any Bollywood dance academy, including British Asians, whites, blacks, and others. I attended around six drop-in classes at both of the central London locations (Pineapple and Danceworks) and worked with at least three teachers. Some dedicated students, particularly one Iranian-British woman that I saw nearly every time, were there for fitness or simply for fun; they tended to be women in their twenties through forties. Other students were members of the dance studios and tried these classes as a break from their usual ballet or jazz class. The goal of Absolute Bollywood is to “bring the best of Bollywood to London. Absolute Bollywood strives to make Bollywood and Indian dance more accessible in the UK.” 29 Sometimes the Absolute Bollywood classes were more belly-dance focused, sometimes older classic Bollywood, and sometimes very recent or fusion styles. Each class stood alone and introduced new music and choreography. Raveendran’s classes work in a similar way, offering a new Gaana song each week. In contrast, Kalaria works on a select number of songs over the twelve-week session, preparing serious students for a show or exam. B O L LY WOO D DA N C E I N L O N D O N

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The ability to teach yourself Bollywood dance from the films is in contrast to classical Indian dance forms, which require time investment and a guru. Bollywood is such a mix of styles that any dance or cultural background can be effectively applied. Many of the classes offered in London are on a drop-in basis, students attending for fitness and fun. Having a teacher means that you do not need to take the time to watch film sequence over and over and repeat the movements, but can work with someone who has prepared choreography at the right level for you. Absolute Bollywood’s classes are small and focused, usually between four and ten students. Jeya Raveendran’s original choreography attracts nearly forty students per class, and has a family atmosphere, in part because first his sister-in-law and now his mother (who knows all the students and their parents) is present to take attendance and collect attendance fees. Honey Kalaria’s classes are organized into twelve-week sessions of approximately twenty-five to thirty students each. The differences in approach have a great deal to do with what the students of these very different teachers are hoping to get out of the classes, be it fitness, fun, cultural knowledge, or star power. Where Honey Kalaria is truly trying to nurture future “Bollywood stars,” Jethwani is promoting fitness and fun, and Raveendran is bringing the Tamil community together and educating the world about Gaana and Kollywood. The three strategies and dance schools are very different, and London has the students and performance opportunities both within and outside of the British Asian community to sustain them all. Although most of them stay within London, performers such as Honey Kalaria and a few of her students and Jeya Raveendran work with the Bollywood and Kollywood industries in different capacities. They are expanding ideas of what it means to be British and how Indian popular culture fits into that definition. They are also expanding what it means to be Indian as they bring their own histories, experiences, and flourishes to the way they represent Indian culture to vast populations in Britain and the world at large through international workshops and television. N OTE S This research was funded by a grant from the Stoddard O’Neill Fund through the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. I need to acknowledge Jeya Raveendran and his family, Honey Kalaria, Jennie Jethwani, and the teachers, students, and parents at their studios for being so generous with

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their time. Also thanks to the Association for Asian Performance, where I presented part of this work, to Vagish Vela, who was there with me, dancing and recording interviews, and to Monika Mehta, who invited me to participate in this volume. 1. Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison, and John Frow, Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 269. 2. Daya Kishan Thussu, “The Globalization of ‘Bollywood’: The Hype and Hope,” in Global Bollywood, edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 105. 3. Kavita Karan, “Cultural Connections in a Globalized World: The Power of Bollywood in the United States,” in Bollywood and Globalization: The Global Power of Popular Hindi Cinema, edited by David J. Schaefer and Kavita Karan (New York: Routledge, 2013), 150. 4. Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, “Nostalgia, Identity and Tourism: Bollywood in the Indian Diaspora,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 6, no. 2 (2008): 92. 5. Paul Brians, Modern South Asian Literature in English, (Westport. CT: Greenwood Press, 2003): 3. 6. Aswin Punathambekar, “Bollywood in the Indian-American Diaspora: Mediating a Transitive Logic of Cultural Citizenship,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2005): 155. 7. Thussu, “The Globalization of ‘Bollywood,’ ” 98. 8. Sheena Malhotra and Tavishi Alagh, “Dreaming the Nation: Domestic Dramas in Hindi Films Post-1990,” South Asian Popular Culture 2, no. 1 (2004): 28. 9. Kaleem Aftab, “Brown: The New Black! Bollywood in Britain,” Critical Quarterly 44, no. 3, (2003): 89. 10. Thussu, “The Globalization of ‘Bollywood,’” 109. 11. Aftab, “Brown: The New Black!,” 88. 12. “Millennium Dome Hosts the Bollywood Oscars,” The Guardian, June 26, 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jun/26/bollywood.news. 13. Thussu, “Globalization of ‘Bollywood,’ ” 102. 14. Aftab, “Brown: The New Black!,” 88. 15. Bollywood dance schools increased significantly starting in about 2000. See Ann R. David, “Beyond the Silver Screen: Bollywood and Filmi Dance in the UK,” South Asia Research 27, no. 1 (2007): 5–24. 16. Personal interview, 2012. 17. David, “Beyond the Silver Screen,” 15, 16. 18. Rob Walker, “Comics Trip: What Are American Kids Looking For in the Cultural Mix and Match of Japanese Manga?” New York Times Magazine, May 30, 2004, 24, quoted in Anne Allison, Millenial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): 2. 19. Ann David, “Dancing the Diasporic Dream? Embodied Desires and the Changing Audiences for Bollywood Film Dance,” Participants: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 7, no. 2 (November 2010): 233. 20. Ibid., 219, 225. 21. Thussu, “Globalization of ‘Bollywood,’ ” 103. 22. Personal interview, 2012. 23. iiDanny, “Ajay Bhandari—Britains Got Talent 2009—Auditions 7,” YouTube, May 23, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC9iFTX3oJQ.

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24. Gaanarajas, “Gaana Rajas Full LIVE Semifinals—Got To Dance Series 4 | Jeya Raveendran Choreography,” YouTube, September 7, 2013, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=ZbIf6alrvTo. 25. Velayutham, “Diaspora and the Global Circulation,” 186. 26. “Meet the Team,” Absolute Bollywood, http://www.absolutebollywood.co.uk /about-us/meet-team. 27. Absolute Bollywood, http://www.absolutebollywood.co.uk. 28. Absolute Bollywood, “Meet the Team.” 29. Dance Works, Jennie Jethwani, 2017, http://danceworks.net/teachers/jennie -jethwani.

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10

From Seoul to Cinemascapes The Private Lives of Contemporary Cine-Tourism in (and out) of India Sa m h i ta Su ny a

Significant portions of Anurag Basu’s Gangster (2006) were shot on location in South Korea, a choice that inspired several reviews, press bytes, and blog posts that noted the visual impact and allure of the setting. Viewers lauded “the exotic locales and jazzy trains of South Korea,” “beautiful autumnal Seoul,” and the “natural locations of Seoul . . . tapped by a Hindi filmmaker [for the first time].”1 The same year that saw Gangster’s release, Cinemascapes—a conference-exhibition “event that celebrates the coming together of cinema and tourism”—convened for the first time in Bombay.2 Six years later, a report on the 2012 edition of Cinemascapes quoted producer Mahesh Bhatt recalling, “My (2006) film Gangster was the first Bollywood production to shoot in Korea . . . Before the film’s release, air passenger occupancy from Mumbai to Seoul was around 30%. Six months after the film’s release, occupancy levels shot up to almost 95%.”3 Although synergies between tourism initiatives and those of the Bombay film industry can hardly be characterized as a postmillennial trend, the shooting of Gangster on location in South Korea and the establishment of Cinemascapes point to important shifts in the contemporary landscapes of both cine-tourism and audiovisualizations of the global city. On the one hand, private interests have come to the helm of organized, incentivized cine-tourism ventures. On the other, 195

the designation of new potential shooting locations (such as Seoul, in this case) marks out aspirations toward Asian cities and audiences not only as emergent sites of foreign investment but also as utopian nodes of cultural and diplomatic exchange, against a far more dystopian vision of the global city within a transnational network of crime, exploitation, state violence, and surveillance. It is this tension, between utopian and dystopian configurations of contemporary transnational networks, that lies at the heart of this paper’s exploration of cine-tourism in the instance of Gangster, a neo-noir crime melodrama that unfolds, its subtitle insists, as A Love Story. CI NE - TOU R I S M

Sue Beeton notes that contemporary pronouncements of dramatic increases in tourism in response to a location’s prominence in a film are necessarily suspect in the absence of reliable, empirical studies that point to a strong causal relationship.4 What is much more clear, according to Beeton, is that tourists who visit places that have become familiar as cinematic locations end up referring to the films in recounting their travel experiences, regardless of whether the films prompted their travels in the first place. Likewise, press announcements that link filming locales to tourism take on the veneer of facts by virtue of their ubiquity, even when these stories are at their core far more in the realm of hearsay, gossip, and even cinephilia than anything else.5 Verifiability aside, this chapter asks what is at stake in the ubiquity of narratives that hold touristic experiences as being motivated by cinematic encounters, and cinematic experiences as mediating touristic encounters. For example, Beeton notes that Repeated claims, along with many other media reports, that the effect of movies such as The Lord of the Rings on tourism to the destinations in which they have been filmed is significant, has resulted in such claims becoming generally accepted as fact. . . . However, research to date paints a far more complex and less optimistic picture. Research conducted for Tourism New England in 2003, during the height of The Lord of the Rings awareness, found that, while the majority of current international visitors to New Zealand were aware of the movies, they motivated only 9% of current international visitors to visit.6

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Indeed, touting such hyperbolic pronouncements as facts—and the reference to Lord of the Rings’s relationship with New Zealand tourism in particular—is repeated in a prominent text box of bullet points that adorns a glossy brochure for the 2010 Cinemascapes event in Mumbai: Film locations set glorious examples and enhance indirect push to grow the Tourism industry: Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge grew Swiss Tourism by 7 percent Lord of the Rings pushed tourism to New Zealand by 40 percent Slumdog Millionaire turned out so well because of his interaction with the locals and the environment’s representation of the film Kashmir Ki Kali increased tremendous support to Kashmir Tourism Krish helps out to grow Singapore Tourism7

These claims range from citations of specific—and suspect, as Beeton notes—quantitative figures to vague suggestions of relationships between a particular film and its effect on tourism in an affiliated location. In this context, Gangster producer Mahesh Bhatt’s claim also enters the realm of hearsay, though this does not make such a claim less significant. As one instance among many similar pronouncements, Bhatt’s narrative itself, that “Six months after the [Gangster’s] release, occupancy levels [of flights between Mumbai and Seoul] shot up to almost 95%,” attests to both an avowal of the integration of private industries (such as entertainment, aviation, tourism) as a good thing, and an active economy of desire for forging new, unprecedented—namely SouthSouth—transnational networks of travel and exchange, through contemporary cinematic ventures. In “Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema,” Ranjani Mazumdar explores the circulation of desire around travel and romance within a wider milieu of visual culture of the 1960s. She identifies the importance of the “postcard imagination” in this era because the number of films that were shot in color mushroomed alongside the circulation of postcards, the popularity of the View-Master, the nationalization of Air India, the growth of the commercial aviation industry, and the prominence of the national carrier’s mischievous and playful Maharaja as an icon in the print culture of the decade. Mazumdar notes that not only the buoyancy and eroticism of film sequences shot in exotic, overseas locales, but also the expenses involved in shooting in F ro m S e o u l to C inemascapes

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overseas locations as well as in color, belied the national financial crisis at hand due to the devaluation of the Indian rupee. Thus Mazumdar emphasizes the growth of an economy of middle-class desire that stoked, and was in turn stoked by, the romance of air travel, an increasingly sensual and sexually suggestive cinema, and the “postcard imagination” that constituted an important node of global visual culture in the decade of the 1960s. What is particularly striking is that although both the film industry and aviation industry are identified and very much present in the history of 1960s Bombay cinema, travel, and visual culture that Mazumdar charts, tourism remains an indirect effect rather than a distinct, identifiable industry. Put differently, although the airline advertisements featuring the beloved Air India Maharaja, circulation of postcards, color romantic sequences filmed in foreign locales, and novelties like the View-Master all promoted both travel and tourism in the 1960s, the significant operation of any distinct, private tourism industry seems to remain an anachronism within the frame of Mazumdar’s analysis. A shift is thus evident, from which tourism has since emerged as a significant, identifiable neoliberal industry driven by private, corporate interests, and for which a postmillennial cine-tourism integration initiative like Cinemascapes is symptomatic, in the context of India and Indian cinema. CI NE MA SC A P E S

Inaugurated in 2006, Cinemascapes was established by the Film and Television Producers Guild of India in conjunction with SATTE, the organizer of what is called South Asia’s Leading Travel Show. By 2012, it had become a segment of the Mumbai Film Festival, organized by the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI). By 2014, it seems to have been dispersed into TourismFirst, a print, online, and event-based tourism platform that, according to its stated mission, embraces the wider picture for tourism in the country, connecting the tourism vertical [sic] to developments in national economy, industry, society and culture at large. It underlines the fact that a wide cross section of stakeholders exist [sic] outside of hotels, airlines, and travel agents—and brings them into the larger fold of tourism. It believes that the tourism product of

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India, what is uniquely India, needs to be identified, nurtured, developed and promoted. It seeks to integrate this product into one seamless experience.8

The nationalist impulse in this statement echoes one of the ostensible commitments of Cinemascapes—that of promoting locations and services across India as attractive options for film producers.9 Invited to give the inaugural address for the 2013 edition of Cinemascapes, Minister of Information and Broadcasting Manish Tewari vowed a commitment to “single window service” for obtaining clearances for shooting in outdoor locations in India. To date, he acknowledged, the amount of red tape—clearances, permits—involved in outdoor location shooting had made India an unattractive destination for filmmakers and producers, domestic as well as foreign. Recognizing the lost revenue and prestige in the process, he mentioned that a Committee on Promotion and Facilitation of Film Production in India had been established to address the issue.10 It is this specific circumstance of bureaucracy for outdoor shooting in India, paired with South Korea’s film policies that have invited and encouraged filming on location, that informs the 2006 production context of Gangster’s travels to South Korea.11 A few months before Tewari gave his inaugural address for Cinemascapes, the online publication Business of Cinema reported on the establishment of the Committee on the Promotion and Facilitation of Film Production in India, featuring an interview with Tewari.12 Under the headline “When Indian Filmmakers Shoot Abroad, It Spurs a Wave of Tourism,” attributed to Tewari, the article quotes the minister repeating the definitive claim that locations featured in films suddenly become choice destinations for tourists: “Films are a huge tourism multiplier,” Tewari asserts in the interview, “and when Indian Film [sic] makers shoot abroad, it spurs an entire wave of tourism.”13 Yet, aside from the sheer ubiquity of the claim, little evidence, as Beeton notes, indicates instances in which films have precipitated dramatic, causal effects on tourism in their shooting locales. In fact, Gangster director Anurag Basu went on to become a spokesperson and advocate for the promotion of Korea as an attractive shooting location for Indian filmmakers, though another Indian filmmaker has yet to follow the precedent that Basu established with Gangster. In leading the panel discussion “How to Shoot a Film in Korea” for the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC)’s 2014 Film Bazaar, a platform F ro m S e o u l to C inemascapes

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for Indian filmmakers and international producers and distributors that takes place during the annual International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa, Basu cited several benefits that he encountered while filming in Korea.14 These included the healing air, given that he was recovering from chemotherapy during the shoot; the efficiency of the Korean units that he worked with; the Korean teams’ kindness, technical knowledge, and impressive knowledge of cinema; in addition to the “infrastructure and attractive incentives offered by the Seoul film commission [that] are reasons enough to woo filmmakers to shoot there,” all of which allowed him to stay within the limited budget of $1.2 million.15 In addition, Basu has been extremely vocal about the importance, beyond questions of profitability and efficiency, of forming and maintaining relationships with new locations and communities as an ethical commitment. Between the minister’s remarks and those of Basu, what emerges is a contemporary sense of “cinematic diplomacy” in which the gesture of cinematic collaboration itself opens up the possibility of further exchange through tourism and travel. The irony implicit in Basu’s advocacy of Korea as a shooting location for Indian filmmakers is that Korea has not been a prominent site of cultural and cinematic exchange, despite the ease of travel and plethora of incentives it offers as a destination for tourists and filmmakers alike. It is this frustration that Gangster takes up in its narrative to a degree—that the interconnectedness of global cities has catalyzed only alienation, exploitation, and surveillance, not meaningful human connections. Even a look at Cinemascapes’ parent organizations is telling about the extent to which sprawling networks of global capital have become primary nodes of connection between cities across the world. Like TourismFirst, SATTE, the original cofounder of Cinemascapes, is another agency that essentially provides a marketplace for multiple vendors, private- and public-sector organizations, and media agencies to convene through a major, annual Delhi-based event dedicated to the business and promotion of travel and tourism. UBM India, the producer of SATTE, is a subsidiary of Hong Kong–based UBM Asia, which is in turn an offspring of UBM plc, a British company. The senior executives who serve on UBM plc’s board of directors are led by Chairman Dame Helen Alexander, who “is also a non-executive director of Rolls-Royce Group plc, Huawei UK, and a senior adviser to Bain Capital.” In addition, “Helen is Chancellor of the University of Southampton and is currently involved 200

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with other not-for-profit organisations in media, the arts and education, as a director of the Thomson-Reuters Founder’s Share Company, the Grand Palais (Paris), the Said Business School (Oxford) and an honorary fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.”16 The scale of entities making up these organized, transnational corporate networks that, among other activities, promote tourism in this scenario is dizzying. In excavating a genealogy of Cinemascapes, one finds the confluence not only of cinema and tourism industries in India, but also of a backstage network of European and American capital investments, several pan-Asian subsidiaries, and cartoon-like executives with their fingers in an absurdly wide range of ventures that span luxury cars, alternative investments, print and electronic media, entertainment, arts management, and even public-sector education. It is the dystopian underbelly of such contemporary networks that Gangster explores and visualizes through tropes of organized crime, state surveillance, exploitation, and violence. TH E SE OU L O F G A N G S T E R

Gangster’s plot parallels its production in moving between Bombay and Seoul. I show, furthermore, that the film’s formal and narrative engagements with a contemporary global noir genre are inextricable from its shooting on location in Seoul. Contemporary press accounts, as noted earlier, celebrate the potential of cinema to connect more or less distant points through location shooting in mutually beneficial cultural exchanges that promote both diplomacy and tourism. Yet, the neonoir form of the film presents a much darker vision of this very interconnectedness—of global cities in particular—whose power and profit-hungry interests, both state-driven and private, cannibalize those who are sincere, trusting, and prone to falling in love. In a discussion of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s relationship to Hollywood genres, Samuel Amago notes that films such as La mala educación (Bad Education) (2004) and Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) (2009) are situated much more in the tradition of film noir than in the specifically Hollywood genre of melodrama: Film noir, much like the X-ray, relies on a dual representational scheme that depends on the contrast between black and white, seeing and not seeing

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and good and evil, which, in turn, evokes the central motif of the noir worldview: the unseen, unseemly and violent underworld that remains hidden from public attention.17

Amago’s formulation is helpful, not only in situating Gangster’s thematic and narrative affinities within the genre of film noir, but also in drawing comparisons between treatments of the noir genre that are marked by non-Hollywood inheritances of stylized melodrama, and by lurid palettes of saturated primary colors that distinguish Almodóvar’s La mala educación and Los abrazos rotos, in addition to Basu’s Gangster and Navdeep Singh’s Manorama Six Feet Under (2007), a Hindi remake of Roman Polanski’s noir classic Chinatown (1974). When Gangster is in a contemporary neo-noir genre cycle, which David Desser has referred to as global noir, the film’s formal proclivities dovetail not only with the classical Hollywood noir genre’s dystopian visions of urban space, but even more with a transnational cycle of post1990s global noir films that are frequently imbued with melodrama and unfold within an audio-visual mediascape of global cities, whose images are often uncanny in their interchangeability. Desser urges attention not only to the cultural contexts in which specific neo-noir films have emerged, but also to their cinematic contexts, in noting, for example, the prevalence of plot lines that feature a couple on the run; the preponderance of chance encounters, often melodramatic; and the automobile as a site of action that captures the “atomization of the individual, and the imbrication of global capital in individuals’ lives” in global cities around the world—all of which hold true for Gangster. In addition, Desser emphasizes relationships between production—for example, participation in such a transnational genre cycle—and circuits of cinephilia, because contemporary film productions draw on a plethora of formal, generic, and stylistic possibilities encountered in the multidirectional cross-currents of circulating media not limited to flows that are East-West or that tend to move outward from Hollywood.18 In fact, Zinda (Sanjay Gupta, 2006), an unlicensed Bollywood remake of the critically acclaimed, globally distributed neo-noir South Korean film Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) was released in the same year as Gangster, among a slew of subsequent unlicensed Bollywood remakes of South Korean films within a decade: Ugli Aur Pagli (Sachin Khot, 2008), a remake of romantic comedy My Sassy Girl (Kwok Jae-yong, 202

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2001); Awarapan (Mohit Suri, 2007), a remake of neo-noir crime film A Bittersweet Life (Kim Jee-won, 2005); Murder 2 (Mohit Suri, 2011), a remake of horror film Chaser (Na Hong-jin, 2008); and Ek Villain (Mohit Suri, 2014), a remake of horror film I Saw the Devil (Kim Jeewoon, 2010). Two of these remakes—Murder 2 and Awarapan—were produced by Gangster producer Mukesh Bhatt, and both were directed by Mohit Suri, as was Ek Villain. Whether one describes such a pattern as a genre cycle or wave, Iain Robert Smith’s characterization of the unlicensed Bollywood remakes’ appropriation of South Korean “extreme genres” of crime and horror, points to Desser’s assertion that multidirectional, transnational flows of cinephilia have allowed explorations of the parallel, darker facets of the transnational flows of capital through a neoliberal landscape of interconnected global cities.19 Gangster, in this regard, becomes a case in point. Gangster opens with sounds of rain and thunder and a shot of wipers swishing across the windshield of a car. This cuts to a series of successive close-up shots of two sets of hands loading and passing a gun, whose audible clicks give way to a long shot of a car parked on a rainy street. A voiceover commences, in which a woman pleads, “Promise me, Usman. If I get caught, you will shoot me as tomorrow’s sun rises.”20 Through aerial shots of an ascending elevator, we see a woman (Kangana Ranaut) who emerges from the elevator and rings the doorbell of a suite in a posh building that is paneled and floored with exquisite, dark wood. A series of close-up shots, silhouettes, and slow-motion sequences make for what is simultaneously an aestheticized and melodramatic opening in which the woman fires a series of gunshots at a man whose face remains hidden. An aerial shot shows her pattering down the stairs, and as we hear the resonant clicks of her shoes, a cut shows a bloody hand holding and cocking a pistol. In another shot, the bloody hand reaches out into the foreground of the aerial shot, shooting downward and hitting the woman as she descends the stairs. Her body falls backward in slow motion as her face tilts upward, directly at the camera, and a loud sigh escapes, heard as an echoing voiceover. Through the opening sequence, the bright red of the dripping bullet hole that bores into the man’s white shirt, his bloodied, crimson hand, and the woman’s deep hyacinth dress against the dark wooden paneling of the building establish both a motif of red that abounds through the film and a color palette of high contrast—bright, saturated hues that pop from the frame. F ro m S e o u l to C inemascapes

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Another visual motif established through the mise-en-scène and composition of shots is that of squared architectures and perpendicular lines. In Gangster, this becomes a way of establishing both a distinct visual style as a pattern of continuity, as well as the film’s themes of alienation and the circumscription of trafficked, female bodies within the sanitized architectures of contemporary global modernity.21 Juxtaposed with Bombay, Seoul thus congeals in Gangster as an ultramodern global city, as an epitome of the “tiger” modernity of rising Asian economies. Alongside the visual patterns of blocked color motifs, clean perpendicular lines, and squared architectures that contribute to the ultramodern depiction of Seoul in the film, the sound design of the film deepens the sense of an unblemished modernity. Even in outdoor sequences that feature wide shots of roads, city lights by night, and aerial shots of skyscrapers, the expected cacophony of ambient, urban sounds is eerily absent and overtaken by a jazzy score. This ultramodernity rendered by a cinematic audiovisual architecture of sanitized, controlled space becomes heavy with a dystopian sterility that is eerie and unsettling. The opening sequence is actually the story’s ending, with the rest of the film unfolding as a flashback that catches up to the present before the final concluding sequence. We learn that the heroine, Simran, is a depressed alcoholic who, through her frequenting of bars in Seoul, encounters Akash (Emran Hashmi), a nightclub singer. As Indians living in Seoul, the two connect, and as their friendship blossoms into a romance, Simran shares her back story: that she fell in love with Daya (Shiney Ahuja), a fugitive member of an international gang led by the notorious Khan Saheb (Gulshan Grover). Simran encountered Daya back in India, as he was on the run and rushed into her home looking for a hiding place. Subsequently, Daya began frequenting the Bombay dance bar in which Simran worked as a bar girl, though he made no attempt to exploit her—or even impose any conversation, for that matter. It was only when Simran was being harassed by a group of drunken men that Daya intervened, heroically whisking her out of the exploitative milieu of dance bars only to bring her into the seedy underworld of gangs and international crime rings. In Daya’s attempts to evade both the police and Khan Saheb, he, Simran, and an orphaned child named Bittoo become a family of fugitives on the run with no place to call home while hopping from city to city across the continent. Eventually, 204

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they are tracked down by Raghavan, an Indian intelligence officer, and a dramatic shootout ensues in which the innocent Bittoo is killed. It is this trauma that causes Daya to distance himself from Simran, fearing that his proximity will put her life in danger. In the vacuum of her lover’s absence and her depression over the trauma of Bittoo’s violent death, Simran fills herself up with alcohol and, eventually, her indulgence of Akash’s pleading advances. The two become lovers, and from hesitant flirtation to consummation, their romance is picturized through a series of romantic songs: “Tu Hi Meri Shab Hai” (Only You Are My Night), “Bheegi Bheegi Si Hain Raatein” (The Nights Are Drenched), and “Lamha Lamha” (Moment by Moment). Through striking outdoor location shots of beautiful, autumnal Seoul as well as Nami Island, in the case of “Lamha Lamha,” the film both adheres to Hindi cinema’s longstanding template of featuring the romantic couple in exotic, foreign locales, at the same time that Gangster offers vistas of Seoul and South Korea—locations that lack any precedent in the repertoire of exotic, romantic locales in the visual genealogy of popular Hindi film and song. At one point, Daya comes to Seoul and finds Simran and Akash in a public display of affection. He angrily begins to beat Akash against the backdrop of a vibrant nightlife district in Seoul, stopping only because Simran pleads that he leave Akash alone after all the pain that Daya has caused her. Mournfully, Daya leaves, determined to turn his life around entirely, to leave Khan Saheb’s gang once and for all, and to ask Simran for another chance. When Daya returns, Simran capitulates, but they find themselves suddenly being chased and on the run once again. In a necessary melodramatic twist, she also discovers that she is pregnant with Akash’s child. As Daya continues his attempts to further evade and escape the gang and seek peace, his attempts are thwarted in the hit “Ya Ali” (O Ali) song sequence, a qawwali motivated by the backdrop of an ecstatic, Islamic prayer ritual that Daya ostensibly joins in his pursuit of solace. This backdrop instead becomes the backdrop for a violent showdown and shootout with Khan Saheb and his men, in the process of which Daya’s and Simran’s counterfeit passports—the acquisition of which Daya planned as a final and petty crime—are thrown into a blazing fire. Bloody and bruised, having been badly beaten, Shiney Ahuja’s appearance as the defeated Daya reprises his love-lorn character Vikram, who meets a similarly unfortunate fate in the acclaimed Hazaaron Khwaishein F ro m S e o u l to C inemascapes

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Aisi (A Thousand Such Desires) (Sudhir Mishra, 2003), released just before Gangster. Desperately, Daya makes a phone call and pleads that Simran meet him at 10 p.m. at Seoul station. Simran waits, and when Daya shows up, so does a team of police and intelligence officers, led by Raghavan. Howling like a captured animal, Daya is arrested. Shortly thereafter, Simran walks into a building purportedly that of the Indian embassy in Korea, signaled by the symmetrical flags that hang outside— in which Akash is revealed to have been an undercover intelligence officer, who has been decorated for doing the necessary in preying on Simran’s vulnerability and becoming her lover to extract information over Daya’s whereabouts and successfully capture the gangster who had been at large. A video monitor shows Simran as it plays surveillance footage of intimate conversations between her and Akash. Akash is cheered by a bevy of Indian and Korean police officers. Daya is sentenced to be hung and Simran is bereft. The opening scene is repeated and now we understand that it is Simran’s act of vengeance for Akash’s violent, exploitative masquerade. Simran shoots Akash and, after he in turn shoots her, ends up in a hospital—a scene that is repeated from the opening, the mise-en-scène of which occurs as a sterile, brutalist, concrete space of squared lines, orderly staff who wear dark green uniforms, and orderly machines, seen through aerial views without any ambient noise. The hospital, too, becomes yet another violent, transnational space of the global city—alongside the space of the street, the nightclub, the transportation station—that inflicts its own demands on Simran, who does not wish to live any longer. The illusory security of her home and of Akash’s embraces have been shattered as well, also revealed as spaces of violent intrusion, exploitation, and surveillance. As the meeting of noir and melodrama comes to a head, Simran resolutely detaches herself from the machines to which she is hooked and ascends the hospital stairs that lead to the roof. Her ascent is cross-cut with Daya’s hooding and ascent of the gallows, and at the moment that Daya falls through the trap door, Simran plunges from the roof of the hospital. She descends toward the street in slow motion, and, like Daya, wears a smile as she embraces death at the same time that her true love does the same. Simran is shown to land softly in a lush, grassy field. Daya and Bittoo are present as well, and the three embrace. In a visual citation of the 206

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many such pastoral, romantic sequences over decades of Hindi cinema, the escapism of the ending is both wholly cinematic and wholly ironic— a romantic dream that is untenable in the hostile urban reality of the contemporary world. Even the earlier romantic sequences that, in the parlance of Hindi cinema, feature the couple traipsing through alluring, exotic locales, have been shattered by the film’s ending, given that the romance between Simran and Akash was hardly the tender relationship it seemed. Yet such a quintessential, touristic, utopian image of love—and of cinema—is nonetheless invoked as the finale of Gangster. It is this dream that there could yet be some place for serenity and for transnational exchanges of friendship, love, and sincerity, that Gangster espouses through both the narrative of its production in Seoul, and through its diegetic narrative, interwoven with the dystopian currents of organized, exploitative, transnational networks of private capital and state surveillance.

N OT E S 1. Chandigarh Tribune, “Bollywood Goes to South Korea—The Land of Morning Calm”; Aanjo, “Gangster Movie Review—A Brilliant Romantic Thriller”; “New Releases: A Dose of the Deadly,” April 28, 2006, http://www.tribuneindia.com/2006 /20060428/ttlife.htm. 2. BollySpice, “Barfi and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara Wins Award as the Best Film Shot at Cinemascapes,” press release, November 10, 2012, http://bollyspice. com/barfi-and-zindagi-na-milegi-dobara-wins-award-as-the-best-film-shot-at -cinemascapes. 3. Nyay Bhushan, “‘Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ Honored for Showcasing India Filming Locations,” Hollywood Reporter, October 26, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/best-exotic-marigold-hotel-honored-383406. 4. Sue Beeton, “Understanding Film-Induced Tourism,” Tourism Analysis 11 (2006): 181–188. 5. Douglas Cunningham, “‘It’s All There, It’s No Dream’: Vertigo and the Redemptive Pleasures of the Cinephilic Pilgrimage,” Screen 49, no. 2 (June 20, 2008): 123–141. 6. Beeton, “Understanding Film-Induced Tourism,” 183. 7. Satte Cinemascapes, “Cinemascapes 2010 Brochure.” 8. The former website for Cinemascapes redirects to TourismFirst (see “About Us,” 2015, http://www.tourismfirst.org/about-us). 9. Business of Cinema Editorial, “Guild to Organize Third Edition of Cinemascapes in October,” June 14, 2008, http://businessofcinema.com/bollywood-news /guild-to-organize-third-edition-of-cinemascapes-in-october/23662. 10. Sailesh Gandhi, “I&B Minister GoI Mr Manish Tewari Inaugurates Cinemascape 13 | Trending Now,” blog post, October 23, 2013, http://instantpublish .blogspot.com/2013/10/i-minister-goi-mr-manish-tewari_23.html.

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11. Jonathan Rodrigues, “Anurag Basu Pitches Korea to India at the Film Bazaar,” Times of India, November 22, 2014, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/ Anurag-Basu-pitches-Korea-to-India-at-the-Film-Bazaar/articleshow/45235734.cms. 12. Ramma Pande, “When Indian Filmmakers Shoot Abroad, It Spurs a Wave of Tourism: Manish Tewari,” Businessofcinema.com, April 17, 2013, http://businessofcinema.com/hollywood/when-indian-filmmakers-shoot-abroad-it-spurs-a-wave-of -tourism-manish-tewari/72676. 13. Pande, “When Indian Filmmakers Shoot Abroad.” 14. Rodrigues, “Anurag Basu Pitches Korea.” 15. Ibid.; Indo-Asian News Service, “Anurag Basu to Visit South Korea for Film,” Indian Express, November 22, 2014, http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment /bollywood/anurag-basu-to-visit-south-korea-for-film. 16. UBM, “Board of Directors,” http://www.ubm.com/about-ubm/ubm-board /biographies. 17. Samuel Amago, Spanish Cinema in the Global Context: Film on Film (New York: Routledge, 2013), 31–32. 18. David Desser, Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 532. 19. Ian Robert Smith, “Oldboy Goes to Bollywood: Zinda and the Transnational Appropriation of South Korean ‘Extreme’ Cinema,” in Korean Horror Cinema, edited by Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 187–198. 20. Author’s translation of Hindi-language dialogue. 21. Thanh-Dam Truong, “The Underbelly of the Tiger: Gender and the Demystification of the Asian Miracle,” Review of International Political Economy 6, no. 2 (January 1, 1999): 133–165.

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Hallyu in Hollywood South Korean Actors in the United States Va l e r i e So e

Since 2008, several South Korean actors have appeared in a number of Hollywood films. K-pop star Rain has appeared in three Hollywood movies. Veteran actor Choi Min-sik appeared in the Scarlett Johansson sci-fi vehicle Lucy (2014). Song Kang-ho played a leading role in Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (2014). Lee Byung-hun has appeared in six Hollywood films. With one notable exception, however, none of these roles have fallen too far outside the realm of the action, martial arts, gangster tropes of past Asian male portrayals in the US film industry. They do vary enough from those tropes, however, to indicate that Hollywood representations of Asian men may be undergoing a change. The current Hollywood roles played by South Korean stars reflect Hollywood’s historically limited depictions of Asian men, as well as echoing common representations from Asian films marketed in the West, most notably Hong Kong and Korean action movies. Conspicuously, these images reflect a distinct lack of romantic lead roles. At the same time, these roles reflect the impact of Hallyu in Hollywood as well as changing Asian American demographics of the United States. This suggests a situation in flux as Hollywood struggles to reconcile older, racist and Orientalist images with newer, more global iterations of Asian and Korean masculinity.

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As Asian American studies scholars Kent Ono and Vincent Pham observe, “Asian and Asian American men have often been characterized as a yellow peril, as physical threats, gangsters or martial arts foes. However, they are also largely constructed as asexual and nerdy, as delivery boys or computer geeks, and ordinarily as physically unattractive.”1 These stereotypes reflect the fraught historical relationship between the United States and Asian nations, wherein countries such as the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia were sites of armed conflict with the United States during the twentieth century. Because of this, Hollywood productions often portrayed Asian men as adversaries or enemies. Among the most venerable and resilient of these older Hollywood stereotypes is the representation of Asian men as inhuman villains bent on world domination, which was codified in the fictional character of Dr. Fu Manchu, who embodies Orientalist fears of what Asian American studies scholar Jachinson Chan describes as “the confirmation of the cultural incommensurability between the East and West.”2 Fu Manchu echoes yellow peril fears of barbaric Asian hordes overrunning civilized Western nations. Korean American actor Philip Ahn’s career exemplifies the types of negative roles that Asian men have played in Hollywood. Ahn, who was active from the 1930s through the 1970s, appeared as a supporting character in dozens of Hollywood films and was known for his portrayals of villainous Japanese soldiers.3 As noted in an essay written by his nephew Philip Ahn Cuddy, “By 1946 Philip had already played about 110 Chinese and 71 Japanese roles. Philip Ahn was cast in dozens of propaganda films that stirred up hate for the Japanese during World War II. He played many roles as the cruel Japanese officer who tortured American flyers and soldiers for information.”4,5 Another pernicious Orientalist representation of Asian men in Hollywood movies is that of the emasculated male, which reflects Edward Said’s concept of the feminized East. This emasculation is embodied in the character of Chinese American detective Charlie Chan. Jachinson Chan explains, “Charlie Chan’s model of masculinity links asexuality with a stereotypical cultural stoicism that promotes a submissive male identity that is content in spite of systematic racial discriminations.”6 210

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This image continues to prevail in Hollywood, as revealed in an exchange recounted in the blog AsAm News at a 2015 press conference for Make It Pop, a US television show about K-pop. The blogger at AsAm News notes, After the producer’s presentation, during the Q&A, I mustered up the courage to ask, “Will there be an Asian guy in it?” In a joking tone, the producer said “Nope! Never! Asian guys in my show, not gonna happen!” What a great message we are sending to the Asian girls in our society—that your brother, cousin, father, and your Asian guy friends, are all just laughingstock, unattractive clowns who aren’t good enough for you, are incompetent, aren’t manly, and completely incapable of love, romance, attraction, being bad ass or cool.7

Even martial arts superstar Bruce Lee was not immune to a type of emasculation. Regarding Lee’s sole Hollywood film, Enter the Dragon, Chan says, “This is the only film (following several starring roles in Hong Kong) in which the female characters do not show any sexual interest in him.” Bruce Lee’s global popularity was thus skewed because his only role in the Hollywood narrowly defined the roles for the Asian and Asian American actors that followed him: “The film industry has not provided many opportunities for Asian American men to play nonmartial arts roles since the 1970s. Indeed, Bruce Lee’s martial arts has constructed another stereotype of Asian men: the chop socky, kung fu fighting Asian American.”8 In the 1990s, Korean males made a few appearances in Hollywood films as inner-city strife resulting from poverty and governmental neglect brought the tensions between Korean American and African American communities to the forefront of the US cultural consciousness. As Ono and Pham observe, “Korean Americans were constructed as a particular variant of yellow peril, coming in to exploit the African American community economically.”9 In films such as Do The Right Thing (1989), Falling Down (1993), and Menace II Society (1993), Hollywood portrayed Korean men as surly, hostile characters with strong accents and without the ability to understand or navigate US cultural norms, an iteration of the perpetual foreigner stereotype of Asian Americans. As sociologist Mia Tuan observes, “Despite many Asian Americans being longtime daughters and sons of this nation, some with lineages H ally u in H o lly w o o d

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extending back to the 1800s, many people continually view and treat them as outsiders or foreigners within their own country.”10 The perpetual foreigner stereotype resulted in discriminatory and racist legislation including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred most Chinese immigration to the United States for sixty years, and Executive Order 1099, which sent 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps in World War II based on the unfounded suspicion that they were spies for the Japanese government. Koreans were not spared the effects of the perpetual foreigner stereotype, being effectively barred from immigrating to the United States by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. Both the yellow peril Fu Manchu trope and the perpetual foreigner stereotype of Korean males came to a head during the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers who had beaten motorist Rodney King. Asian American studies scholar Elaine H. Kim explains: [One of] the three main media images of Koreans before, during, and after the quote-unquote riots, [was] . . . Korean American merchants, mostly males, on the roof of their property ready to shoot anyone, mostly with the implication that they only cared about their property, they didn’t care about human life or the communities, or the people in the communities where their stores had been located.11

Asian American studies film scholar Jun Xing remarks on another stereotype contributing to the perception of Korean men as ruthless killers: “As a pervasively displayed stereotype in popular culture, Asian men were routinely portrayed as gangsters or rapists with perverted sexual appetites for white women.”12 Although this stereotype originated with Fu Manchu, it was more permanently inscribed in the Western consciousness through the popularity of Hong Kong and South Korean action films marketed in the West. Beginning in the 1980s with John Woo heroic bloodshed films, the genre popularized image of the sleek, well-dressed, Asian male gangster. More recently, South Korean films featuring similar depictions of Korean gangsters such as Shiri (1999), A Bittersweet Life (2005), and New World (2013) have found audiences in the West.13 Thus, as film scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu notes, there is “a longer tradition in Hollywood movies of iconic portrayals of Asian 212

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American men . . . (as) rapacious and brutal. . . . Sexuality and gender act as forces in the racialization of Asian American men.”14 Recent roles by South Korean stars in the US film industry in some ways continue these unflattering representations. Others, however, show a more positive evolution. Although by 2017 none had yet become A-list movie stars, Korean American males made some inroads in Hollywood. John Cho and Sung Kang are featured players in the popular Hollywood franchises Star Trek and The Fast & Furious. Korean American actor Steven Yeun was a featured player in the television series The Walking Dead and plays a role in Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s Netflix feature film Okja (2017). Yet these Korean American actors have been eclipsed by their South Korean counterparts in Hollywood productions, reflecting both the historical invisibility of Asian Americans as well as the conflation of Asians and Asian Americans in American pop culture representations. Ironically, Hollywood’s historical uneasiness with Asian American males has opened the door for Asian stars in US films, and Korean stars in particular have begun appearing regularly in commercial films, though with varying degrees of success. This is due to several factors, including changing demographics, Hallyu, and Hollywood’s growing awareness of the lucrative allure of the global market. CHA NG I NG DE MO G R A P H I C S A N D T H E KO R EAN WAV E

The Korean American community has grown considerably since the enactment of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which removed several barriers to immigration from Asian countries, allowing from fewer than two thousand people in 1914 to nearly seventy thousand in 1970 and more than 1.7 million in 2010.15 This demographic increase has led to a corresponding increase in Korean American culture in the United States. At the same time, since the 1990s, the South Korean government has actively promoted Hallyu throughout the world, using soft power diplomacy by sending Korean pop music, food, automobiles, sports, movies, and other cultural markers across oceans and national borders. As Korean American studies scholar Youngmin Choe points out, “Hallyu’s impact extends beyond South Korea’s shores and beyond the world of pop culture as well. It’s a vital part of the South Korean economy, bringing in $5.1 billion in export sales in 2013—up 11 percent from H ally u in H o lly w o o d

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2012.”16 South Korean economic forces also recognize the significance of Hallyu. In 2013, Korea Eximbank CEO Kim Yong-hwan stated, “In this age of globalization, Korea is being understood through its pop culture. It should be carefully fostered and developed.”17 Hollywood has also recently recognized the vast markets available to them in Asia and has begun courting South Korean and other international stars to appeal to those audiences. In addition, the rise of the internet and the increased accessibility to global culture has created a new perception of Asian masculinity, most notably in the popularity of K-pop acts around the world. As communications scholar Sun Jung notes, “Due to the global cultural flows that are enabled by postmodern pop consumerism, Western audiences now consider South Korean masculinity, once undesirable because marginalized, as ‘totally consumable and/or cool.’ ”18 Jung quotes an online post—“A Bittersweet Life really kicks ass and the lead actor is just totally hot”—and observes, “This posting is a clear indication that Western male viewers now harbor a new longing for South Korean masculinity. Described as sexually ‘hot’ and ‘cool,’ Western male viewers, to some extent, seem to identify themselves with this desirable image of South Korean masculinity.”19 Some of the Hollywood roles South Korean stars take reflect this recent rise in the desirability of South Korean masculinity, in contrast to previous representations and perceptions of Asian males as effeminate and emasculated. RA I N: SE X Y A S E XUA L I T Y

As evidence of Hollywood’s attempt to capitalize on this new longing for South Korean masculinity, K-pop superstar Rain (also billed in his Hollywood films by his given name, Jung Ji-hoon) has appeared in three US films to date. Rain debuted in the South Korean entertainment industry in 1998 and has become one of the most well-known stars in Asia. At the height of his popularity in 2006, he broke into the US market with several tour dates. His popularity mirrors the rise in interest in K-pop in the United States and worldwide since the mid-2000s. In 2008, Rain made his debut in Hollywood. Yet despite his massive fame in Asia and around the world his appearances in Hollywood did not break much new ground regarding representations of Asian men in US films. 214

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His characterizations in his three Hollywood films instead represent a continuation of several of historical tropes of Asian males in Western films. Although Rain was the first Asian male to topline a Hollywood action film, in Ninja Assassin, he has been relegated to playing stereotypical Asian characters in his other two films. Yet his appearances in these films represent some of Hollywood’s initial forays into the vast Asian market.20 Rain began his Hollywood career in Speed Racer (2008), playing the Japanese driver Taejo Togokahn. Although aligned with the team of the film’s titular protagonist, Taejo is not a hero but instead depicted as callous and opportunistic, at one point saying, “Justice? That’s a commodity I don’t waste my money on.” Taejo’s masculinity is also mocked in the film as one character states, “Maybe you forgot how it feels to stand up and be a man,” continuing the emasculation of Asian men in Hollywood films. Tellingly, by the end of the film Taejo reveals himself as a selfserving and somewhat duplicitous character who ultimately switches his allegiance from the team to his family in Japan, By selecting his clan over his teammates, Taejo echoes the perpetual foreigner stereotype used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, which suggested that, given the choice, Japanese Americans would side with Japan against the United States and thus undermine national security. However, as Nikki JY Lee notes, “[Taejo] is a double-crossing, untrustworthy guy rather than an out-and-out villain.”21 This may be due to the film’s producers’ hopes of capitalizing on Rain’s popularity in Asia, which is borne out by box office figures showing that Speed Racer grossed just under $44 million in the United States but earned more than $50 million overseas, including $5 million in South Korea, $3.5 million in Japan, and $3.1 million in China.22 The softening of Taejo’s negative characteristics reflects Hollywood’s ongoing confusion and ambivalence when marketing male Asian stars as well as a recognition of Rain’s marketability in Asian territories. Yet despite his positive influence on Speed Racer’s global bottom line, Rain followed that film with a role in Ninja Assassin (2009) that echoed long-standing stereotypes of Asian men in Hollywood. Although he is the leading man in the film, his characterization as well as the film itself reiterates several common Orientalist motifs. Throughout the film, Rain’s physicality is both fetishized and feminized. As Nikki JY Lee notes, “his half-naked body is . . . exhibited as a H ally u in H o lly w o o d

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spectacular object of display.”23 Raizo spends a good portion of the film shirtless, yet at the same time he is oddly asexual. His relationship with his first love, though it includes a stolen kiss, is curiously chaste for an action star, and though the film’s narrative hints at attraction between Raizo and Mika, the female lead character, their relationship is never explicitly expressed. Bruce Lee’s character in Enter the Dragon was similarly portrayed, as Jachinson Chan observes, “[Lee] perpetuates the asexual role that Western culture has constructed for Asian men and does not spend the night with the Asian female character—something that would be unthinkable in a James Bond film.”24 Raizo is further feminized later in the film when another character tortures Raizo by inserting his hand into a gash in Rain’s torso, simulating sexual violation. This emasculation again echoes Lee’s depiction in Enter the Dragon. As Ono and Pham explain, “While Lee self-consciously displays his body in sometimes sexually desirable ways and is on display for broad admiration of his Chinese body, and while he neither flaunts hetersexism nor binarizes heterosexuality and homosexuality, one could read his ambivalence . . . as a kind of asexuality.”25 Thus Hollywood remains wary of fully empowering the sexuality of both Lee and Rain. Although the movie was not a box office success in the United States, Rain’s presence in the cast increased its box office worldwide. In the United States, it earned only $38 million; worldwide, it grossed more than $23 million, $8.7 million in South Korean alone. Its production budget was $40 million so the lackluster US box office was saved only by the film’s global returns. The film’s producers may have overestimated Rain’s ability to successfully topline a film in the United States despite his great popularity around the world. Following his role as the lead character in Ninja Assassin, Rain returned to villainy in his next Hollywood film, The Prince, where he was again relegated to playing an archetypal Asian male villain. Rain’s character Mark is a psychopathic killer who shoots unarmed people in the back and at one point violently drags a woman by her hair. He shows no remorse for his violent acts. In one scene, as another character talks about feeling the pain of his victims, Mark listens indifferently, emphasizing his robotic lack of affect. His characterization clearly enacts an Asian villain firmly rooted in the tradition of Fu Manchu. Mark’s costuming, in a tailored black suit with a white pocket handkerchief and with a trendy hairdo and eyeliner, also reflects the stereotype 216

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of the effeminate Asian male. This contrasts with the casual outfits of the other characters and his incongruously fastidious grooming echoes the Asian male villain from D. W. Griffith’s silent film, The Cheat. As film scholar Gina Marchetti notes of the “elaborate, exotic dress” of that film’s main character, “Cheng Huan embodies the “feminine” qualities linked in the Western imagination with a passive, carnal, occult and duplicitous Asia.”26 Mark also speaks in strangely formal English, at one point saying, “I feel like I would be remiss if I did not reiterate my position.” This contrasts with far more vernacular dialog of the other characters, which is laced with the F-bomb and other slang, emphasizing both Mark’s foreignness and his lack of understanding of the masculine codes and lexicon of the other characters. Mark’s robotic killings, his fancy clothes and fussy hairstyle, and his out-of-place speech patterns thus reiterate long-standing images of the Asian male as dangerous, feminine, and foreign. CH O I MI N- SI K : UN I V E R S A L O R I E N TA L OT H ER N ESS

Veteran actor Choi Min-sik is perhaps best known in the United States for his leading role in South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s cult classic Oldboy (2003), one of the most popular examples of “Asian extreme” cinema. Dae-Soo, Choi’s character in the film, embodies what Sun Jung calls the “transgressive and dangerous masculinity” found in South Korean films marketed in the West. Choi’s work in Oldboy led French director Luc Besson to cast him in Lucy. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Besson called Choi “the most popular actor in the world” and openly courted the South Korean star.27 Choi draws attention a particular clause in his contract: “I specified in the contract that the movie story must not demean Koreans nor depict any prejudiced attitude toward Asians.”28 Unfortunately, despite the stipulations in the contract, Choi’s role in Lucy reinforces classic Orientalist tropes. Choi plays Mr. Jang, an Asian gangster, and the film is rife with racist misrepresentations. Although the beginning of the film takes place in Taiwan, Mr. Jang is Korean, reiterating what Asian American studies scholar Robert Lee calls the “universal Oriental otherness” found in the West’s pop culture representations of Asians.29 H ally u in H o lly w o o d

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Choi’s role also reifies various Asian male stereotypes. The film introduces Mr. Jang when he is savagely beating a man, thus establishing his general lawlessness. Like Rain in The Prince, Mr. Jang and his minions are costumed in sleek tailored suits and sport expensive haircuts. This contrasts with the general sloppiness of the Western characters in the film, again reiterating the trope that Asian men are fussy, effeminate, and emasculated. Choi’s Korean dialog is not subtitled, emphasizing his menacing foreignness in the eyes of Scarlett Johansson’s monolingual protagonist. As Choi explains, “Me speaking in a foreign language was supposed to intensify the fear and confusion Scarlett’s character Lucy felt during our first encounter.”30 This reflects the perception that an Asian male speaking in “a foreign language” is inherently sinister and threatening and reinscribes classic stereotypes of Asian men as treacherous, malevolent, and Other. L BH: E VOL UT IO N

As of 2017, Lee Byung-hun, one of South Korea’s most popular stars, has played roles in six Hollywood releases: GI Joe: The Rise of the Cobra (2009), its sequel, GI Joe: Retaliation (2013), Red 2 (2013), Terminator: Genisys (2015), Misconduct (2016), and The Magnificent Seven (2016).31 His US career exemplifies Hollywood’s ambivalence and confusion in contemporary portrayals of Asian males. As Storm Shadow in GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra and GI Joe: Retaliation (GI Joe 1 and GI Joe 2), Lee portrays Storm Shadow, a superninja who is a member of the villainous organization Cobra, the antagonist to the heroic GI Joes of the films’ titles. The only Asian character in the main cast is Storm Shadow and his role is villainous—he kills with little motivation and without remorse and he borders on the sociopathic. His character has no significant dramatic arc and he exists primarily to harm others. Yet, though he is one of the bad guys, Storm Shadow’s backstory is more fleshed out than those of some of the film’s protagonists. In several flashbacks, the narrative reveals his complicated relationship with his fellow ninja clan member Snake Eyes, a member of the GI Joes, and although unresolved in GI Joe 1, this storyline becomes one of the main subplots in GI Joe 2. In GI Joe 2, a movie in which character development 218

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is secondary to explosions, gunfights, and declarations of patriotism, Storm Shadow’s character is one of the most developed in the film. He begins as a nemesis of the GI Joes but by the film’s end he has joined the team and has been exculpated for the death of his sensei, whose murder he was wrongly accused of. After he is absolved, Storm Shadow disappears and is not present at a ceremony in honor of the GI Joes at the White House. His personal honor is redeemed but his acceptance as a full member of the Joes is incomplete. He is thus still an ambiguous character who may or may not be a good guy. This reflects Hollywood’s continued ambivalence toward fully incorporating Asian males into its heroic pantheon. It also reflects the perpetual foreigner stereotype, in which Asian Americans are regarded as outsiders, foreigners, and non-Americans no matter how long they or their families have lived in the United States. Storm Shadow’s shifting loyalties reiterate historic perceptions of Asian Americans as having questionable allegiances, most clearly demonstrated in the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II on unfounded suspicions of disloyalty and treason based solely on their ethnic heritage. Storm Shadow may have fought this particular fight with the good guys, but he is still not completely a “Joe.” He is not to be fully trusted because he is sneaky and deceptive and switches sides often. In his Hollywood films, Lee’s characters reiterate Hollywood’s common representations of Asian males as gunplay experts, martial artists, and action stars. In Red 2, Lee brandishes two guns at a time à la Chow Yun-Fat, as seen in various John Woo films. He later demonstrates some high-kicking tae kwon do, echoing the moves of Asian action stars Jet Li, Bruce Lee, and Jackie Chan. He also engages in a bit of Tokyo-drifting with a gun-toting Helen Mirren, which is discussed more closely later. During Storm Shadow’s climactic battle with Snake Eyes in GI Joe 1, Lee strips off his shirt and in the course of the fight acquires several long knife slashes on his torso. In this way he visually recalls one of Bruce Lee’s most iconographic images, from the hall of mirrors sequence in Enter the Dragon. In GI Joe 2, Lee also almost immediately loses his shirt, appearing half-naked in one of the film’s first action scenes. A promotional poster for the film also includes an image of a bare-chested Lee holding a samurai sword. H ally u in H o lly w o o d

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As with movies starring his compatriot Rain, Lee’s Hollywood films include several images that fetishize his body. In his introductory scene in Red 2, Lee’s character Han is quickly divested of his clothing, appearing buffed out and naked, back and front. He then dons a kimono and assassinates someone with origami. In both GI Joe films, Lee Byung-hun has gone half-naked. Although these images are seemingly hypermasculine, like Rain in Ninja Assassin, in some ways the opposite is true. In two of the three instances when Lee’s characters fight without shirts, their bodies are wounded or slashed by sharp objects. Like Rain, by stripping away Lee’s characters’ clothes and cutting or penetrating their bodies, as well as exposing their bodies to a fetishistic gaze, the films render each of the characters more vulnerable and thus weakens and feminizes them. Lee explains in an interview: “In Red 2, there was one line in the script that said, ‘Han is naked. His body is perfect.’ ” None of other male characters’ bodies in the film are thus assessed—only Han’s physicality is so closely scrutinized. Similarly, in the GI Joe films, Storm Shadow is the only male character that spends an extended screen time with a bare torso. Like the female characters costumed in formfitting outfits, the focus is thus on Storm Shadow’s body, making it an essential aspect of his characterization. His representation therefore becomes more feminized and objectified than those of the other male characters.32 Although Lee does an admirable job in his action-film duties in the United States, he is perhaps better known in South Korea for his romantic roles. He says, “My fans [in South Korea] may be disappointed or find it strange that I chose this role [in GI Joe 1] because it is so different from my previous roles, which have been more sensitive or romantic leads.” Lee’s roles in his US productions reflect Hollywood’s continued ambivalence toward Asian and Asian American males as romantic leads. His gradually more sympathetic characters, though showing some progress, exemplify the deep anxiety the predominantly white male Hollywood establishment has toward Asian masculinity. In GI Joe 1, for example, Storm Shadow’s personal relationship with the Baroness is curiously muted. The Baroness is a highly sexualized character, costumed in a cleavage-baring black outfit and paired with three male characters. However, Storm Shadow never becomes an object of her desire, though 220

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he works closely with and appears in several scenes with her. Like the many Asian males who preceded him in Hollywood films, Storm Shadow is allowed to fight and kill but is not considered a romantic or a sexual being. However, both Lee and Sienna Miller, who plays the Baroness, have suggested that there might be more to their relationship. In an interview, Lee notes, “In the press conference in Korea, she [Sienna] talked about that maybe in the sequel there could be romance between Storm Shadow and The Baroness.”33 The coyness present in their relationship stems from Hollywood’s unease with portraying Asian men as romantic leads, yet audiences overseas, which have begun to constitute a large portion of the box office for US productions, are familiar with Lee and other Asian stars portraying such roles. Here again the racist and Orientalist history of Hollywood’s portrayals of Asian men conflicts with the growing global audience’s knowledge and expectations of South Korean stars such as Lee. In Red 2, Lee’s character Han also lacks a love interest, but Han and Victoria, played by Helen Mirren, have a shadow of a romantic relationship in their scenes together. At the start of their Tokyo-drift style car chase scene they challenge each other’s prowess. Victoria asks, “Can you drive this ridiculous thing?” Han replies, “Can you shoot?” They then together work as a team, framed in two-shot as Victoria fires off a blaze of gunfire with a pistol in each hand (not unlike Han in an earlier sequence) as Han ably commands the speeding vehicle. Victoria also peeks briefly inside Han’s shirt collar, ostensibly to examine a wound, thus heightening the implied intimacy of their encounter. At the climax of the scene, Victoria demands, “Show me something!” after which Han performs a handbrake turn, firmly grasping and yanking up the shaft of the car’s brake as Victoria spreads her arms and shoots. In one extremely brief shot, Han and Victoria appear to touch as his hand on the steering wheel seems to grasp her wrist as he gazes directly at her. Although this could be read as a sexualized moment, it is still fairly slim pickings and reflects Hollywood’s squeamishness at making an Asian male a romantic lead. As Sun Jung observes, this reflects “an ambivalent phenomenon between the West’s Orientalist desire for the primitive Other and Western male identification with South Korean cool masculinity.”34 Nonetheless, this is the kind of incremental progress that possibly foreshadows more explicitly romantic roles for Lee in particular and Asian men in general in Hollywood in the near future. H ally u in H o lly w o o d

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In furthering his career in the West, Lee may have powerful Hollywood economic forces on his side. As the Korea Times notes, Despite a production cost of $175 million, the first GI Joe installment released in 2009 didn’t enjoy the commercial success expected in North America, taking in a disappointing $152 million in ticket sales. Yet ticket sales in Asia were relatively strong, prompting some to credit Lee for its success in the region.35

Korea Joong Ang Daily also claims, “GI Joe’s studio, Paramount, is increasingly looking to overseas markets, and it appears to be very interested in upping Lee’s role in the new GI Joe film.”36 His fourth role in Hollywood is in Terminator: Genisys, the latest installment in the blockbuster science fiction franchise that established Arnold Schwarzenegger, another foreign-born transplant, as a major star in the United States. Although receiving star billing in the film, as the villainous T-1000 robot Lee utters only one line of dialog and is killed off less than halfway into the film. The depiction is thus one-dimensional and returns Lee to the more typical antagonist role that Asian men in Hollywood historically played. However, although Terminator: Genesis made only $85 million in the United States, globally it earned $350.2, including $112.7 million in China and $23.5 million in South Korea, suggesting that Lee’s presence in the cast, along with the popularity of Schwarzenegger, contributed to box office success in those countries. Although with each film his billing rises, unlike Rain, he has yet to play a starring role in Hollywood. Instead, he has acted mostly in ensemble films as supporting character. His Hollywood roles in 2016 were also in ensemble films, in the remake of The Magnificent Seven, and the thriller Misconduct, where he once again played a hitman.37 In The Magnificent Seven, Lee is among the more sympathetic characters in the cast, again attesting to the incremental steps forward of representions of Asian men in Hollywood films.38 S O NG KA N G-H O : E X C E P T I O N O R H AR BIN G ER ?

Veteran actor Song Kang-ho is one of the most popular actors in South Korea. In the United States, he is perhaps best known for his role in two Bong Joon-ho’s films, Memories of Murder (2003) and The Host (2006), each of which had limited stateside release. Song made his Hollywood 222

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debut in Bong’s 2014 film Snowpiercer, a South Korean production with an international cast including Hollywood actor Chris Evans (Captain America in the Marvel Avengers superhero franchise) and English performer Tilda Swinton. The film’s dialog is primarily in English but includes a smattering of Korean spoken by Song’s character. Song is secondbilled behind Evans in the cast, attesting to his star power in South Korea and Asia. The story takes place in a futuristic dystopia where the last remnants of the human race travel continuously on a train that circumnavigates the globe, the wealthy and privileged in the front cars and the poor and oppressed in the rear. Song plays Namgoong Minsu, the train’s security specialist, who designed the locks on the train and literally holds the keys to the journey from the rear to the front of the train. Song, despite playing second lead to Evans, is in some ways is the more heroic of the two characters. Curtis is wracked by guilt and doubt in his role as the leader of the rebellion; Nam is confident, smart, observant, and resourceful. Nam also has a strong and protective relationship with his daughter, Yona, which further humanizes his character and encourages audience identification. The film advances this identification by presenting Nam as a main protagonist in the narrative. Several shots from Nam’s POV, including significant images of a crashed airplane and a melting snowflake floating through the air, suggest Nam’s intelligence and perceptiveness. The film also makes clear Nam’s physical strength and agility as he engages in hand-to-hand fighting and at one point incapacitates one of the main bad guys. In a key scene toward the end of the film, Nam also acts as the sounding board for Curtis’s confession of pain, suggesting that Nam is both trustworthy and capable of sympathy. In a subversion of the perpetual foreigner stereotype, Nam’s Koreanness is celebrated rather than reviled. Although Nam speaks only Korean in the film, that he does so is presented as an indication of integrity and not weakness: he refuses to be cowed by or capitulate to other characters that are daunted by his refusal to speak in English. Director Bong has said that he selected Nam’s name because it’s particularly tricky for English-speakers to pronounce: “I was looking for a name that would be most difficult for foreigners to pronounce. Namgoong . . . it is difficult.”39 Through Nam’s valorization, Bong privileges the Korean language, perspective, and experience, subtly decentering Western perceptions and perspectives. H ally u in H o lly w o o d

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These aspects of Nam’s character indicate a departure from past depictions of Asian men in Hollywood films and suggest several factors at play. Snowpiercer is directed by a South Korean and financed by South Korean production companies. Song was cast because of his great popularity in South Korea, indicating Hollywood’s growing desire to court the Asian market. In addition, Nam’s heroic protagonist reflects what Jung calls the “desirable image of South Korean masculinity.”40 The elevation of Nam to a heroic lead character reflects the evolution of Asian male representations in Hollywood. Hollywood’s tentative explorations of Asian men in leading roles and its interest in increasing its share in the Asian market, as well as South Korea’s use of Hallyu to push for global prominence, may further propel the careers of South Korean male stars in the West. As Song Kang-ho’s heroic turn in Snowpiercer suggests, roles for Korean actors in Hollywood may incrementally be turning. However, Rain and Choi Min-sik’s recent appearances as stereotypical villain and Lee Byung-hun’s varied career suggest that significant roadblocks remain along the way. Like many other Asian and Asian American males before them, these South Korean stars are versatile performers who for the most part have been hemmed in by their roles in the United States. However, the political, economic, and cultural circumstances surrounding their appearance on the Hollywood stage may enable some of them to write different stories for their forays into the US film industry. N OTE S 1. Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham, Asian Americans and the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 71. 2. Jachinson Chan, Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee (New York: Routledge, 2001), 34. 3. Throughout his long career, Ahn played Korean characters only twice. He is perhaps best known for portraying a Chinese monk in the television series 1970s Kung Fu, which is notorious for being the series that cast white actor David Carradine instead of Bruce Lee as a Shaolin monk and martial arts master. 4. Philip Ahn Cuddy, “Philip Ahn: Born in America,” 1996, http://www.philipahn .com/pacessay.html. 5. Ironically, Ahn used his roles to rally support for Korea against Japanese military incursions. As Cuddy notes, “He once said making people hate the Japanese was a way for him to actively participate in the Independence Movement of Korea, in which his father had been a great leader against imperialism.”

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6. Chan, Chinese American Masculinities, 53. 7. DTMuniversal, “TV Producer: ‘Asian guys in my show? Not gonna happen!,’ ” AsAm News, March 3, 2015, http://www.asamnews.com/2015/03/07/tv-producer -asian-guys-in-my-show-not-gonna-happen. 8. Chan, Chinese American Masculinities, 91. 9. Ono and Pham, Asian Americans and the Media, 205n18. 10. Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 4. 11. Elaine Kim, “Introduction to Sa-I-Gu,” PBS, 1992 broadcast. 12. Jun Xing, Asian America through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identities (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 1998), 56. 13. New World is slated to be remade in Hollywood. Mike Fleming Jr., “Sony Pictures Buys Remake Rights to Korean Crime Drama ‘New World,’” Deadline.com, April 11, 2013, http://deadline.com/2013/04/sony-pictures-buys-remake-rights-to -korean-crime-drama-new-world-472722. 14. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 19. 15. Asia Matters for America, “Korean-American Population Data,” East-West Center, n.d., http://www.asiamattersforamerica.org/southkorea/data/koreanamericanpopulation. 16. Andrew Good, “The Korean Wave,” USC Dornsife, May 8, 2014, https://dornsife .usc.edu/news/stories/1728/the-korean-wave. 17. Na Jeong-ju, “Eximbank to Finance ‘Hallyu’ Businesses,” Korea Times, February 2, 2013, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2013/02/602_130133.html. In 2013, Korea Eximbank pledged approximately $917 million to entertainment and food firms over three years to promote the Korean wave overseas. 18. Sun Jung, Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-pop Idols (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 143. 19. Ibid. 20. This has continued with Hollywood’s attempts at breaking into China’s huge film market, by coproducing films including The Great Wall (2017) and by casting Chinese film stars in movies such as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). 21. Lee, “Pop-Orientalism,” 39. 22. Box Office Mojo, “Speed Racer: Foreign,” n.d., http://www.boxofficemojo.com /movies/?page=intl&id=speedracer.htm. 23. Lee, “Pop-Orientalism,” 40. 24. Chan, Chinese American Masculinities, 89. 25. Ono and Pham, Asian Americans and the Media, 78. 26. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 35. 27. Hyo-won Lee, “Busan: Choi Min-sik on Hollywood Breakthrough, Lucy, Roaring Currents,” Hollywood Reporter, October 7, 2014, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com /news/busan-choi-min-sik-hollywood-739080. 28. Cecilia Youk, “Choi Min-sik Revealed the Behind-the-Scene Story of Movie ‘Lucy,’ ” K-pop Buddy, October 4, 2014, http://kpopbuddy.com/2014/10/04/choi-min -sik-revealed-the-behind-the-scene-story-of-movie-lucy. 29. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999), 197. 30. Lee, “Busan.”

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31. Lee also appeared with US actor Josh Hartnett in Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s 2009 France-Hong Kong coproduction I Come with the Rain, in which he played a Hong Kong gangster. Although the film grossed only $4.7 worldwide, almost all of its earnings came from Japan and South Korea, suggesting that Lee’s presence in the cast contributed to its box office totals in those territories. 32. This, however, is subject to discussion given that in all three films Lee’s seminudity occurs during violent action scenes where his characters display his prowess in fighting and killing. 33. ComicBookMovie.com, “EXCLUSIVE: Byung-hun Lee: The Stormshadow Interview,” August 7, 2009, http://www.comicbookmovie.com/gi_joe/news/?a=9085# KhCqr0LqHSAFbfPK.99. 34. Jung, Korean Masculinities, 123. 35. Korea Times, “Lee Byung-hun to Star in ‘G.I. Joe 3,’ ” January 7, 2014, http://www .koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/culture/2014/01/386_149330.html. 36. Lee Sun-min, “More ‘Joe’ for Lee Byung-hun,” Korea Joong Ang Daily, January 8, 2014, http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2983148. 37. The Magnificent Seven, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai (1954), is one of the films credited with starting the interest in Asian cinema in the West. 38. I discuss this further in “The Asian Wave: Three Asian Male Superstars in Hollywood,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema, edited by Aaron MagnanPark, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-kam (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 39. Junho Bong, “Namgungminsu, ilburoe oeyeoun ireum chajatta,” August 4, 2013, http://entertain.naver.com/read?oid=108&aid=0002230922. 40. Jung, Korean Masculinities, 143.

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12

Sassy Girls A Transnational Reading of the Monstrous Girlfriend in South Korea, India, and the United States J a n e Ch i H y u n Pa r k I saw Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo (My Sassy Girl, 2001) for the first time on DVD with my mother and brother in Dallas. Released in South Korea (Korea) a few years before, it had performed well at the box office and had gained popularity all over East Asia, especially in China where young women were purported to be imitating the aggressive behavior of the unnamed female protagonist, simply referred to as “The Girl.”1 We watched about fifteen minutes before having to turn it off. My mother found The Girl’s crass behavior—almost passing out drunk in public then vomiting on an older man on the train—to be alienating, a perfect example of how modernization in Korea has led to youth absorbing the worst traits of the West and the East. My brother was bored. I was, as usual, ambivalent. As a family, we had enjoyed watching the New Korean films that burst onto the scene in the early 2000s, most of them male-centered action, thriller, and gangster films: Friend (2001), Oldboy (2003), and A Bittersweet Life (2005), to name a few. They gave us dramatic stories with charismatic male leads, fast-paced editing, high production values, and provocative genre combinations. Associated with the industry-constructed transnational genre Asia Extreme, these were the films that soon came to define Korean cinema to global audiences.

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Yet they also supplemented the serial narratives of the more quotidian television dramas that had been part of our lives since the 1990s, which we watched, marathon-style, on the mountains of videocassettes borrowed weekly from the local Korean grocery store. Of these, two classic, hugely successful dramas—Moraesigye (Sandglass, 1995) and Dae Jang Geum (The Jewel in the Palace, 2003–2004)—provided examples of strong Korean heroines on-screen. Respectively set in Seoul during the democracy movement of the 1980s and the court of the Joseun Dynasty, these dramas starred smart, tough (and, of course, beautiful) heroines who persistently overcame obstacles and modeled empowered versions of Confucian womanhood for modern audiences. In retrospect, I think our initial negative reception of Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo (YG) stemmed from seeing a female protagonist whose attitude and actions seemed to deviate completely from what we had grown to expect of leading ladies in Korean movies and television. In the first half of the film, The Girl performs the very opposite behavior of a proper, middle-class (or aspiring middle-class) young Korean woman. She does not play the passive love interest nor does she seem keen to become a sacrificing wife, mother, or revolutionary. Furthermore, her career aspirations are unconventional and idealistic. She writes bad scripts, remaking Hollywood and Korean film plots that invert traditional gender roles, much like the very film in which she stars. I consider how and why this gender inversion works in YG, revisiting arguments I made in an earlier reading of the film and its American remake, My Sassy Girl (2008), and testing them through a brief examination of its Indian remake, Ugly Aur Pagli (Ugly and Crazy, 2008). I present a comparative reading of these cross-cultural remakes to analyze their narrative and formal strategies, approaches to the romantic comedy genre, and ideological perspectives on gender, sexuality, and class. In particular, I probe the various ways these films depict the romantic relationship between the aggressive female protagonist and passive male narrator and speculate on how their articulations of gender inversion may speak to different forms of mixed modernity in Asia. I look at how the original Korean film draws on the historically American genre of the romantic comedy to address its own national and cultural context, and go on to consider the creative choices made in the American and Indian versions to remake this Korean story for non-Korean audiences. 228

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My reading illuminates the points at which these translations do not work, centering on structural and cultural divergences among the films and the discourse of critical, commercial, and cultural failure that dominates their reception. The aim is not to pass aesthetic judgment, but rather to trace how a South Korean narrative about young, modern, heterosexual love is transformed in different cultural contexts and to reflect on what those transformations might reveal about the impact of global popular culture. HAL LY U I N A N D A S T R A N S LAT IO N

In following the trajectory of a South Korean film narrative in the United States and India, this chapter contributes to two related projects in InterAsia cultural studies and Asian American studies. The first attempts to map the movements of popular media as a field of study and potential site of activism in the Asian region.2 The second traces transnational connections in Asian film, especially among and through diasporic communities in the West.3 In both approaches, global flows of popular media produce common intertextual literacies that link audiences across geographical and cultural borders. Studies such as David Desser’s article on the emergence of global noir and Hye Seung Chung and David Diffrient’s recent book on the transnational nature of Korean film genres show how cinema is creatively promiscuous but has culturally mixed results.4 Such studies prompt us to rethink not only the model of national cinemas but also the post–Cold War nation-centered boundaries of area studies. Surveying the current state of scholarship on the role of the Korean Wave in East Asia, Koichi Iwabuchi observes a “lacuna in the studies of inter-Asian media culture connections, which tend not to critically attend to the politics of representation.” He notes that although studies of industry history and audience reception continue to be important, they need to be supplemented by “critical analysis of what kinds of representation of gender relations, for example, are traversing the boundaries in East Asia, and what are not.” Iwabuchi concludes by calling for more emphasis on “intra-regional and intra-national disconnection and disparity” to avoid falling into the trap of reifying homogenous national identities and cultures.5 In many ways, this chapter responds to Iwabuchi’s call. Rather than using an ethnographic approach to highlight the political economy of S assy G irls

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media industries or fandoms, it performs close readings of specific films, paying attention to how these cultural texts have been created and circulated. Also, in contrast to most scholarship on the Korean Wave in general and particularly within the region, it centers on film rather than K-pop or K-dramas. In doing so, it shifts the focus from the primarily aesthetic notions of (Korean) identity that permeate the Hallyu literature to look at how identities are mobilized through reiterations of narrative as well as spectacle. Finally, it extends the context of Hallyu circulation beyond East Asia, questioning the assumption that the appeal of the Korean Wave to audiences is due to viewers’ cultural proximity to or desire to become like Koreans. As with Western discourse on other forms of Asian popular culture, from Hong Kong and Bollywood films to anime characters and Filipino pop singers, the trope of imitation is constantly invoked with regard to the Korean Wave: K-pop as postmodern pastiche, Korean cosmetic surgery as racial imitation, Korean cinema as Hallyuwood or Copywood. These imitative tendencies are attributed to the social, economic, and cultural aspirations of South Korea as a newly industrialized economy. The appeal of Hallyu is attributed to similar aspirations its products evoke in East Asian consumer fans. Meanwhile, remarkably little scholarship is to be found on how and why affluent consumers outside the region would wish to imitate the images and lifestyles promoted in Korean popular media. To that end, I consider another, less explored angle: when and where do cultural connections cease to exist or matter at all? Indeed, how much did they matter to begin with? Consider, in particular, countries where, outside diasporic East Asian communities, Confucian-based Asian values do not hold much water. What can we learn by homing in on differences rather than similarities between the so-called host and receiving cultures—examining the points at which reinterpreted texts radically depart from their sources to become something wholly new? Focusing on distance and dissonance reveals the limits of cultural translation. Furthermore, acknowledging these limits may generate theoretical models beyond those of (psychological) identification and (economic) aspiration that provide more nuanced ways to analyze the complex ways we respond to and consume cultural difference, especially that of non-Western and nonwhite groups. Perhaps centering on the local appropriation of the global, in a sort of paradoxical twist, could illuminate universal aspects of fantasy and 230

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pleasure in becoming an other, if only momentarily, through our enga­ gement with the movies. That the global in this instance is Hallyuwood, rather than Hollywood is, of course, a significant substitution—one I grapple with in the sections that follow and later return to. DE F I NI NG Y EO PG I

As mentioned, Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo, directed by Kwak Jae-young, was a big hit in Korea and neighboring countries when it was released in the early twenty-first century. A generic combination of gross-out teen film, romcom (romantic comedy), and melodrama, it was the second top grossing film in Korea in 2001, earning $26 million at the box office.6 Based on a popular 1999 internet novel by engineering graduate Kim Ho-sik, the film chronicles the turbulent romance between undergraduate students, The Girl (Jeon Ji-hyeon) and Gyeon-woo (Cha Tae-hyun) who narrates the story of their meeting, dating, breaking up, and eventually finding each other again. YG was part of a cycle of female-centered films in 2001, including Jopok Manura (My Wife Is a Gangster), Silla Ui Dalbam (Kick the Moon), and Goyangireul Butakhae (Take Care of My Cat)—all of which feature female protagonists and men in peripheral or subordinate roles. Feminist filmmaker and scholar Soyoung Kim cites the first two movies as examples of blockbusters in which local women play the role of horrific monsters or comic gangsters in the first phase of the globalization of Hallyu.7 I would add to this list films such as Sigan (Time), Minyeoneun Goerowo (200 Pounds Beauty), and Cinderella, all released in 2006, which likewise center women as technologized monsters whose bodies and identities have been modified through plastic surgery. Like most of the women in these movies, the character of The Girl in YG is the product of male fantasy, and as such reflects and negotiates anxieties about modernity and globalization through representations of local women. Kim Ho-sik’s novel drew from his own experiences dating an attractive, aggressive young woman with a penchant for drinking and bullying. This was then adapted into YG in which a likable loser, an average young Korean man with a bad academic record and dismal career prospects, falls in love with a drunken young woman he saves from falling onto the train tracks. Taking on a sense of responsibility for her welfare, he takes her to a hotel to sleep off the alcohol. S assy G irls

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After waking, she assumes that he has taken advantage of her and reports him to the police who take him to jail, where he spends the night. From that first “date,” the two embark on a number of misadventures that usually (but do not always) end with Gyeon-woo in physical pain and emotional confusion—chasing The Girl in her high heels while she runs away in his tennis shoes, almost drowning after she throws him off a bridge, feeling forced to praise her poorly written scripts, ordering what she tells him to at restaurants, and through it all repeatedly getting slapped and being asked whether he “wants to die.” Yet Gyeon-woo persists in pursuing her because she is different, unpredictable, and sexy, and because he senses her vulnerability under the tough, sadistic exterior. This striking contrast between The Girl’s exterior and interior, a point of attraction for Gyeon-woo (and by extension, most young Korean male viewers of his generation), can be described as yeopgi. The American translation of yeopgi as “sassy” fails to capture the monstrous, perverse, and potentially subversive elements of this term. Taken literally, Yeopgi means “weird,” “novelty-seeking,” and even “delinquent,” but in recent usage has come to signify a cool transgressiveness. This is wonderfully exemplified in the Korean cartoon character, Mashimaro, who emerged around the same time as YG in a series of flash animations by Kim Jae-In. Also known as Yeopgi Tokki (Weird Rabbit), Mashimaro (Marshmellow) is a cute, fat, bad-tempered rabbit known for his toilet humor and naughty antics, which include bullying others. He has since become an international merchandise icon—a sort of twisted cousin of Hello Kitty. Much like The Girl, Mashimaro’s appeal lies in the disjunction between his cute and cuddly exterior and his aggressive, even violent actions.8 Also like Mashimaro, who apparently behaves badly due to hidden emotional trauma, we eventually learn that The Girl drinks so heavily because of her ongoing grief for her dead fiancé.9 The guilt she feels for falling in love with Gyeon-woo because of his resemblance to her ex prompts her to break up with him. At this pivotal point, the film shifts from comedy to melodrama. The montage sequence, which shows scenes of what each character does during the breakup finds Gyeon-woo (re)gaining his masculinity through accomplishments in sport and work as The Girl becomes passive and self-reflective while studying abroad. As Kathleen Rowe notes, this is a common trajectory in the genre of the romcom, in which the “unruly woman” at the beginning of the 232

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story is safely contained within the patriarchal system as a good wife and future mother by the end.10 When they reunite through a quirk of fate—they are set up by Gyeon-woo’s aunt, whose son was The Girl’s fiancé—both characters have matured and are able to enter a serious relationship, which we know will end in marriage. RE MA KI NG Y E O PG I I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT ES

Before discussing My Sassy Girl, the American remake of Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo, it is important to point out how YG as a generically hybrid film exemplifies the glocalizing strategy of New Korean cinema specifically and Hallyu generally. All of the genres referenced in YG—teen, gross-out, and romantic comedy—are imported from Hollywood. The only indigenous genre, melodrama, becomes more prominent in the second half of the film, which constrains The Girl’s superficial unruliness and reveals the cause of her abnormal behavior and her “true” character, glimpsed in early scenes when she shows respect for elders, talks down a potential suicide victim, and elegantly plays Pachelbel’s Canon in D. This duality in The Girl’s character—outwardly exciting, bad, and wild while inwardly reflective, good, and docile—negotiates and manages (Western) globalization without losing the supposed authenticity or essence of Korean national identity. Indeed this inner-outer duality is a gendered model for modernization in postcolonial or post-imperial nations throughout Asia, including India.11 Not dissimilar to the ways in which South Korea has adopted and adapted American style democracy and capitalism, Korean movies have always drawn on and reinterpreted American culture, specifically, film styles, narratives, and genres. Since the globalization of Korean popular media from the early 1990s—and of film from 1999 with the first Korean blockbuster Shiri—these local adaptations of American and other cultures, are now themselves being adapted and remade, including in the United States. Examples include The Lakehouse (2006, originally Il Mare, aka Siworae, 2000), The Uninvited (2009, originally A Tale of Two Sisters, 2003), and Oldboy (2013, originally Oldboy, 2003). Such Hollywood remakes, according to Bliss Cua Lim and Gary Xu, erase the cultural uniqueness of the original films, “deracinating” them for American audiences.12 S assy G irls

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The question of genre is important here. Romcoms, which foreground human relationships, and therefore emotional expression and character development, arguably require more cultural literacy than other film genres, such as actions and thrillers, which rely on efficient plotlines and the spectacle of the body and special effects. What we find funny, much like our fantasies of ideal masculinity and femininity, is rooted in our cultural backgrounds. Thus, translating gender and humor into a different context entails more reworking of the original text for it to make sense to new target audiences. The US remake of Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo failed to do this, falling short of industry expectations.13 Directed by French expat director Yann Samuell, My Sassy Girl was released direct to DVD in 2008 and starred Elisha Cuthbert and Jesse Bradford in the main roles, renamed Jordan and Charlie, respectively. Without the teen target audience based on the demographic of Kim Ho-sik’s internet followers, the American remake struggles to find its audience. It loses the gross-out humor of YG and attempts to make the romance more sophisticated, giving it a strangely anachronistic feel, which speaks to the films’ alternate modernities. Because of differences in cultural norms, the gender inversion in YG, performed through the yeopgi aspects of The Girl and the resigned submission of Gyeon-woo, is neither funny nor endearing in My Sassy Girl. For instance, The Girl’s excessive drinking in the original film, which could be read as liberating in a context where social drinking is a sanctioned form of emotional release and women are not supposed to drink (or as much as men) degenerates into pathetic alcoholism in the American one, where drinking culture arguably is more moderate and egalitarian. Also, the platonic nature of the relationship, titillating in its innocent suggestiveness in the original, becomes inexplicable in the American context, where most university students are assumed to have sex outside marriage and are free to flaunt it. Gyeon-woo’s Korean masculinity is shaped through his interaction with tough female figures, including his mother, The Girl, and his aunt, in contrast to that of Charlie, whose American masculinity is defined through interactions with men, namely, his and Jordan’s father. Indeed, although both The Girl and Jordan seem to lack female community, Jordan is considerably more male-identified in her close relationship with her father and the absence of her mother. The films end differently. The Korean couple faces a secure future, Gyeon-woo as a successful 234

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screenwriter and their families sanctioning the relationship. Meanwhile, the American couple has thrown caution to the wind with Charlie giving up his career goals, and neither he nor Jordon knowing or caring how their families respond to their union.14 B O L LY WOO D, MO D E R N I T Y, A N D WO M EN

My Sassy Girl failed to appeal to American audiences because of its awkward mistranslation of Korean cultural differences or its inability to translate them at all. One cannot help but wonder what would have happened if British Sikh Kenyan director Gurinder Chadha had helmed the Hollywood remake as was originally planned.15 Would Chadha— well known for female-centered, Indian diasporic films such as Bhaji on the Beach (1993), Bend it Like Beckham (2002), and Bride and Prejudice (2004), the last an homage to Bollywood—have been able to avoid “deracinating” Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo? The question decenters the hegemony of Hollywood by gesturing toward a speculative instance where another kind of cultural translation might have occurred. One key difference between the Korean original and the American remake is an absence of the excessive, almost exaggerated displays of emotion in the remake. Tellingly, when traces of such emotion do surface in the characters, they feel distinctly out of place. Although a comparative exploration of affect between Korean and Indian romcoms is beyond the scope of this chapter, the visceral emotional responses elicited by frequent shifts between high melodrama and broad physical comedy seem to characterize both. Furthermore, these emotions are almost always linked to the site of the family, crucial to the maintenance of cultural national identity, toward which romantic love, a concept taken from the West, is meant to be oriented. Media scholar Shakuntala Rao refers to “familial emotion” as something missing from Hollywood film that Hindi film producers inject into the remakes, making them uniquely Indian.16 Her reception study found Punjabi university students recognize such emotions as an integral part of Bollywood films along with cultural hybridity that emphasizes Indianness: “audience members expressed an almost universal expectation that Bolllywood films contain traditional clothing and music, that they retain the emphasis on familial emotion, and that they reinforce ‘Indian’ values. The active audience of Bollywood films in India S assy G irls

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does not passively succumb to complete Westernization, but rather successfully demands a compromise between Westernization and India.”17 This process of cultural negotiation, or glocalization, results in films that showcase the affluent consumer lifestyles of cosmopolitan, transnational, and diasporic Indians. Indeed, Rini Bhattacharya Mehta traces the beginning of the globalization of Bollywood, or Hindi cinema, to the huge commercial success of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (The True of Heart Will Win the Bride, 1995) where for the first time, a nonresident Indian (NRI) plays the hero-protagonist, embodying a new kind of global Indian consumer-citizen.18 Glocalization, then, can be seen as a strategy for managing globalization, which began in India with the economic liberalization of the 1990s that introduced international television in 1991 and gave industry status to films in 1998.19 Since then, Bollywood films have become more visible and palatable outside India, primarily for diasporic Indians but also for audiences around the world. Similarly, the government played a key role in the growth of the Korean film industry with segyehwa (globalization) policy promoting movies and other forms of soft culture in 1993, followed by increased government support for IT and media industries after the 1997 recession. Hallyuwood also glocalizes—recombining elements of Hollywood film to appeal to local and increasingly regional audiences. This is attributable to the lucrative existing Hallyu consumer base in East Asia, especially China where coproduced remakes of Korean movies currently are huge commercial hits.20 Finally, both film industries, as instruments of nation-branding, construct pan-Indian and pan-Korean or pan-Asian styles and tastes, and through these, ideologies about class, gender, sexuality, and race. In both, cultural nationalism becomes transnational, and cultural hybridity is celebrated as a sign of Asian modernity. Representations of changing gender roles and relationships, especially those of young women, illuminate these contradictions of globalization. The phenomenon is not surprising given the significant function that women have played in nationalist movements and modernization in the non-West broadly and India specifically, as Tejaswini Niranjana explains: narratives of the nation-in-the-making were premised on the assertion of cultural difference from the West, with women often represented as the

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embodiment of that difference. Nationalist discourse in the non-Western world thus produces an antithetical relationship between modernity and culture at the same time as it aligns women with the cultural and the authentic. In the Indian context, it is the narrative of the nation that stiches together women and tradition, women and national culture, making women emblematic of that which is uniquely Indian.21

In India and South Korea, boundaries between once clear-cut binaries of good, traditional versus bad, Westernized women have blurred on and off screen as American neoliberal values are adopted and adapted. I now consider how these boundaries are negotiated in Ugly Aur Pagli, the 2008 Indian remake of Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo. RE MA KI NG Y E O PG I I N I N D I A : U G LY AU R PAG LI

Within the scattered English-language scholarship on Asian film remakes, only two studies look at Indian remakes of Korean films, and both focus on Zinda (2006), the Bollywood remake of Oldboy.22 David Desser and Iain Robert Smith discuss how the film draws on the currency of global noir, Asia Extreme, and New Korean cinema to repackage the violent Korean thriller for young Indian audiences.23 All of the Asian remake scholarship focuses on horror, thriller, and action genres with the exception of Jennifer Jung-Kim’s study on the multiple remakes and adaptations of My Sassy Girl in Japan, Hong Kong, the United States, and India. Ugly Aur Pagli (Ugly and Crazy), an uncredited remake of Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo, was helmed by rookie director Sachin Khot and released in 2008. The protagonists, Kabir (Gyeon-woo) and Kuhu (The Girl), are played by bankable stars, Ranvir Shorey and Mallika Sherawat, respectively, and the plot remains almost identical to the original, with the exception of the requisite song-and-dance sequences and some tweaked and added scenes, discussed in more detail later. In her analysis of Ugly Aur Pagli, Jung-Kim notes that some Korean cultural nuances carry over because of shared elements such as the custom of arranged dates and similar gender stereotypes in the two countries. However, according to her, these efforts failed in that the film made only a little over $1 million in its first week at the box office and met with mixed reviews—criticism of the film itself and praise for the performance of the stars. Drawing on comments from online reviews, S assy G irls

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Jung-Kim attributes its overall negative reception to cultural differences in humor, speculating that the “plot and slapstick humor familiar to Korean viewers [may have] seemed outlandish for Indian audiences” and to the song-dance-routines not meeting audience expectations.24 The remainder of this chapter extends Jung-Kim’s observations by taking a closer look at a few of the key differences in Ugly Aur Pagli then closes with some thoughts on why they might matter, especially for doing future comparative research on global popular culture. Although both films deploy toilet humor in the setup, Ugly Aur Pagli takes it a step further by having Kabir fart in the elevator when he is first alone with Kuhu. She is understandably disgusted, though the next time he sees her, she is the drunk, abject one that he rescues at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus station. It is also unclear why Kabir is addressed throughout the film as “Ugly”: the short song refrain, “Whatchya gonna do, Ugly” comes up every time he has to make a decision about Kuhu. Perhaps it refers to his emasculated status rather than his appearance, which is certainly not hideous. In any case, the word stands out in an odd way to a viewer located outside India geographically and culturally. Likewise, yeopgi translated as “sassy” in the US version becomes “crazy” here. Although crazy is closer in some ways to yeopgi, it paints Kuhu as potentially mad—a possibility reinforced by Kabir when he questions his sanity for falling in love with her, musing, “I never had so much fun with anyone. She was really very good fun, but very strange. Like a seesaw on the playground,” referring to her erratic behavior and mood swings. When he sees her at the train station, he finds her “beautiful” but after observing her drunken behavior, quickly adds, “Who would want such a wife?” This immediately introduces the specter of marriage as a social expectation, the desired and necessary goal of romantic relationships, in contrast to the delayed mention of marriage in the second half of the original film and its eventual actualization in both the original and the Hollywood remake. Like Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo, Ugly Aur Pagli is set in a global Asian city: Mumbai takes the place of Seoul. However, throughout the film, the city is shot from above, giving the viewer a sense of being above the urban fray, in contrast to the mostly eye-level shots of Seoul in YG. The lovers’ central meeting place is the roof of Kabir’s posh apartment building where, like Gyeon-woo, he lives with his parents. The almost panoramic view of the city heightens the audience’s sense of the characters’ 238

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upper middle-class status and cosmopolitanism, as do the other settings: an Italian restaurant where they have their first real date; a summer carnival in the park that becomes a song and dance set incorporating Latin, hip-hop, and Indian music and dancing styles; the swimming pool in which Kabir almost drowns; and various night clubs, which easily become backdrop for song and dance sets that feature sexualized dance moves and erotic lyrics (often invoking alcohol) to a combination of hip-hop and Bollywood beats. The restaurant scene, in particular, is interesting in that Kuhu reprimands the waiter for bad service, in contrast to The Girl’s reprimanding middle-aged male customers for dating underage girls. What this does is erase the overtly feminist (albeit depoliticized and popularized) characteristics of The Girl, replacing them, in Kuhu, with the consumer capitalist motto of “the customer is king.” Furthermore, the lead characters never wear traditional Indian clothing. Following the dress code of the characters in YG, Kuhu appears in tasteful, usually tight dresses, slacks, and tops and Kabir wears jeans and T-shirts until he sharpens his image after the breakup. According to Rao, most Bollywood films display a seamless integration of Western and traditional clothing. Audiences derive pleasure from this “interpenetration of local and global styles in clothing” because it signifies the cultural mobility of the modern Indian subject.25 That the lead characters in Ugly Aur Pagli never wear traditional Indian clothing would appear to erase their Indianness. Perhaps to balance this, they never actually leave India, which is also an anomaly because most Bollywood films feature foreign settings. The film adds a scene that precipitates the breakup in which Kuhu persuades Kabir to run away with her for a seaside holiday in Goa. And when Kuhu leaves Kabir, she does not go abroad to study like The Girl, but instead to Kolkata. Finally, Kuhu’s film scripts glocalize those in Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo. As noted earlier, in the original and its American and Indian remakes, The Girl aspires to be a screenwriter, forcing the patient protagonist to listen to one horribly bad script after another—remakes of canonical film and literary texts as well as film genres, from Terminator, Titanic, and “Sonagi” (The Shower, a classic Korean short story about doomed love) to wuxia films and westerns. In all these remakes, the female protagonist inserts herself in the position of the male hero and her boyfriend in that of the female heroine or male antagonist. These gender S assy G irls

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inversions in The Girl’s fantasy life are played for laughs, like other examples of her physical and mental assertiveness throughout the film. The lovestricken male protagonist tolerates her bad (re)writing much as he does her punches, pinches, and mood swings. At her bidding, he even tries to sell the scripts, to no avail. In Kuhu’s scripts, the female protagonist expresses even more violence than her counterparts in Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo and My Sassy Girl, performing an exaggerated, cartoonish stereotype of a feminist who hates men. The romance genre is conspicuously missing in the Indian translation; instead, we get Kuhu as a wuxia and Western heroine defeating an evil Kabir and playing a female terminator in 2050 when “they have made all the boys in the world like girls.” She “rescues” Kabir from a group of men who are trying to liberate him from her, and he returns to her as a grateful pet, complete with dog collar and leash. The female protagonist’s unruliness is contained in the second half of the film, when the lovers break up. Significantly, during this time, she stops writing and literally disappears. In contrast, we follow her boyfriend, who finally “mans up,” becoming more proactive and taking up screenwriting himself with much success.26 Before this happens though, in a wonderfully funny and self-reflexive Ugly Aur Pagli scene, Kabir tries to convince a jaded film producer to buy Kuhu’s latest script. During the interview, the producer asks Kabir for the DVD of the film on which the script is based. When Kabir tells him it is an original screenplay, the producer laughs, saying, “Even God’s work is not original! Do one thing. Tell me the story of a person’s life . . . and I’ll tell you which film it is inspired from.” This scene is an inspired addition in Ugly Aur Pagli that illuminates its own unabashed unoriginality, cleverly inverting the process of translation which we expect to proceed from experience to representation, original to remake, the West to the Rest. It also takes me toward a conclusion. In her reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Rey Chow uses the metaphor of transport to emphasize the movement that underlies and enables any act of translation—from one language, culture, or medium to another—and points out that the original text is doubled through this movement, thus questioning its authenticity and authority.27 This doubling is made literal in the process of remaking a film—whether the original is transported to, and translated for, a new temporal or cultural context or both. 240

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In her reading of Naoki Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity, Morris stresses two points Sakai makes about the potential of translation as a mode of cultural exchange: first, “translation as a social relation, a practice always . . . carried out in the company of others and structuring the situation in which it is performed” and second, “translation as a mode of address,” which should take into account the question of whom one is speaking to and where they are coming from.28 According to Morris, it is through our sometimes challenging encounters with differences embodied and enacted by those outside our cultural comfort zone that we are led to revisit, and often rethink, our assumptions and expectations about how the world works. As should be apparent now, I have been reading these Hollywood and Bollywood remakes of a Korean blockbuster as cultural translations of a fantasy of rebellious young Korean femininity that was briefly trendy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The negative reviews seem to suggest that they did not rework this fantasy in ways that resonated culturally, emotionally, or aesthetically with audiences in the United States and India. This brings up the questions that everyone who writes about the Korean Wave and the relatively recent globalization of Korean culture is asked at one point or another: what makes Korean cultural products, so integral now to the national branding of Korea beyond its borders, uniquely Korean, and what makes them potentially universal, or cross-marketable? In what ways is the Korean cultural industry different from and similar to its American counterpart—the original model that it remade in its own image, to great success among its East and Southeast Asian neighbors and increasingly as a subculture around the world? Answers to these questions have to take into account shifts in the economic and geopolitical power of South Korea, and the continued incorporation and decentering of Western culture—popular and otherwise—in Asia and the rest of the non-Western world. This is why it is so important to attempt comparative cultural research between and among non-Western cultures, as this anthology aims to do. Such a task is challenging, as demonstrated in this essay by my own cultural and linguistic limitations and prompts us to collaborate with scholars outside our cultural and disciplinary comfort zones. Not doing so risks reproducing the same banal binaries between the West and the Rest, churning out more scholarship that inadvertently centers and normalizes S assy G irls

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a fantasy of the West as America—a fantasy continually reproduced in Hollywood movies, themselves fun and shiny, deracinated and commodified remakes of cultural differences from all over the world. N OTE S 1. Xiying Wang and Petula Sik Ying Ho, “My Sassy Girl: A Qualitative Study of Women’s Aggression in Dating Relationships in Beijing,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 22, no. 5 (2007): 623–638. 2. Beng Huat Chua and Koichi Iwabuchi, East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008); Catherine Driscoll and Meaghan Morris, Gender, Media and Modernity in the Asia Pacific (London: Routledge, 2014). 3. Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2003); Leon Hunt and Wing-Fai Leung, eds., East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2008); Gina Marchetti, Peter Feng, and See-Kam Tan, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009). 4. David Desser, “Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism,” in Film Genre Reader III, edited by Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 516–536; Hye Seung Chung and David Diffrient, Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). 5. Koichi Iwabuchi, “Korean Wave and Inter-Asian Referencing,” in The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, edited by Youna Kim (London: Routledge, 2013), 52–53, emphasis added. 6. Mi Hui Kim, “Local pix soared in 2001 B.O. derby,” Variety, January 22, 2002, http://variety.com/2002/film/news/local-pix-soared-in-2001-b-o-derby-1117858857/. 7. Soyoung Kim, “The State of Fantasy in Emergency,” Cultural Studies 27, no. 2 (2013): 263. 8. Yunji Park, personal conversation, January 12, 2016. 9. “This rabbit’s name is derived from the word marshmellow [sic], because it resembles a partially bitten one. Mashimaro feels neglected because it is different from all other rabbits. Due to this, Mashimaro has become a bit twisted from the rest of society and chooses to act in very strange ways. This is a way for him to discover and find his own identity, since he is not yet comfortable in his own skin” (MashiMaro, http://ink.pierski.com/mashimaro). 10. Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 40–42. 11. Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 624–625. 12. Gary G. Xu, “Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood,” in East Asian Cinemas, edited by Hunt, Leon, and Wing-Fai Leung, 191–202 (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2008); Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 190–244.

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13. Jane Park, “Remaking the Korean RomCom: A Case Study of Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo and My Sassy Girl,” in Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia, edited by Daniel Black, Stephen Epstein, and Alison Tokita, 13.1–13.12 (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2010). 14. Ibid., 13.6–13.10. 15. Pamela McClintock and Nicole Laporte, “ ‘Sassy’ Sahays to Circle,” Variety, December 4, 2005, http://variety.com/2005/film/markets-festivals/sassy-sashays-to -circle-1117933956. 16. Shakuntala Rao, “ ‘I Need an Indian Touch’: Glocalization and Bollywood Films,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3, no. 1 (2010): 13. 17. Rao, “ ‘I Need an Indian Touch,’ ” 1. 18. Rina Bhattacharya Mehta, “Bollywood, Nation, Globalization: An Incomplete Introduction,” in Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, edited by Rina Bhattacharaya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande (London: Anthem Press, 2010), 1. 19. Rao, “ ‘I Need an Indian Touch,’ ” 2. 20. Sonia Kil, “Mutual Benefits Propel Chinese-Korean Co-Productions,” Variety, November 4, 2015, http://variety.com/2015/film/asia/mutual-benefits-propel-korean -chinese-co-productions-1201632854. 21. Tejaswini Niranjana, “Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia,” Interventions 9, no. 2 (2007): 212. 22. Xu, “Remaking East Asia”; Lim, Translating Time; Earl Jackson, “Borrowing Trouble: Oldboy as Adaptation and Intervention,” Transnational Cinemas 3, no. 1 (2012): 53–65. 23. David Desser, “Noir as Global Currency: Oldboy from Manga to Mumbai” (paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, Chicago, March 8–11, 2007); Iain Robert Smith, “Oldboy Goes to Bollywood: Zinda and the Transnational Appropriation of South Korean ‘Extreme’ Cinema,” in Korean Horror Cinema, edited by Alison Pierse and Daniel Martin, 187–198 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 24. Jennifer Jung-Kim, “My Sassy Girl Goes Around the World,” in The Korean Wave: Korean Popular Culture in Global Context, edited by Yasue Kuwahara (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 91. 25. Rao, “ ‘I Need an Indian Touch,’ ” 7. 26. Park, “Remaking the Korean RomCom,” 13.9. 27. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 248–254. 28. Meaghan Morris, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 177–178.

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PART IV

Mediating Circuits and Markets

By the mid-2000s, Hallyu began to experience a backlash from neighboring Asian countries even as, given exorbitant budgets and stale content, profits waned. Industry experts and academics alike pronounced the phenomenon “all but dead.”1 In some senses, this was true. The era of Hallyu dominated by K-dramas and fueled by mostly East Asian middle-aged housewife fans was experiencing a downturn. The development and widespread normalization of social media sites during the same period, however, unexpectedly catalyzed a new iteration of Hallyu that has not only revitalized the phenomenon but also expanded its global reach even further. Asian media outlets first coined the term Hallyu 2.0 in August 2010 to describe the “second invasion of Hallyu,” which since then has been the domain of teens and twentysomethings and uses social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter as its platform.2 According to media studies scholar Dal Yong Jin, Hallyu 2.0 is “the combination of social media, their techniques and practices, and the uses and affordances they provide . . . this new stage has been made possible because Korea has advanced its digital technologies.”3 Whereas K-dramas, consumed on primetime television or on VCRs or DVDs, were the centerpieces of the Hallyu 1.0, K-pop and online gaming are the current mainstays of Hallyu 2.0 because both genres are easily consumed online—a space 245

where teens and twentysomethings not only navigate with ease but arguably prevail. What this new era of digital technology has brought to the table is accessibility, the impact of which cannot be understated. On the one hand, social media has given K-pop stars unprecedented access to fans. Although K-pop has long dominated the Asian market, K-pop idols have for the first time been able to break into Western markets through YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, which make it easier for stars to reach wider audiences. On the other hand, a key feature of these social media sites is their emphasis on user-generated content.4 Fans use global social networking sites to produce and exchange their own content about their favorite K-pop idols and create communities and fan activities such as flash mobs, or to perform labor such as “subbing” K-dramas or music videos that feature their favorite stars.5 In short, unlike previous iterations of Hallyu, social media has created a two-way street along which K-pop stars can access fans and fans can, in some respects, access stars or at least become producers in their own right. Although this section of the book asks how the digital has been productive in many ways of global pop culture formations, it also asks how the digital mediates and manages the global. In other words, in contradistinction to the idea that the digital is simply and straightforwardly a democratizing force, we ask what is also constrained and limited by the digital? In answering these questions, Monika Mehta and Lisa Patti turn to digital distribution of entertainment content in order to explore how online streaming sites—namely, Netflix, Eros Entertainment, Drama­ Fever, and Viki—position Korean and Indian media context. The online world is often described in common parlance as “limitless” or “barrier breaking.” Mehta and Patti argue, however, that copyright contracts, geographical coordinates, and “marketable” content effectively manage and dictate how the “global” appears on these sites. Like Shin, they find that these distributors are not only competitors, but also often rely on one another to supply context. This section both highlights the ways in which Indian and South Korean pop culture are circulated and marketed in today’s global world and provides a window into the industrial mechanisms through which these global pop culture formations have come to exist as alternatives to Western, and more specifically, US pop cultural hegemony. As the outline of Hallyu 2.0 suggests, digital media has transformed the nature 246

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of marketing, making the relationship between producer and consumer much more reciprocal than the one-sided consumption of previous eras. This has led to new marketing strategies that juggle global, local, and regional desires and sensibilities, as Solee Shin’s piece outlines. To this end, she tracks the industrial strategies deployed by K-pop—in relation to J-Pop and C-pop—in cultivating global and domestic audiences. Shin notes that these industries often borrow from one another and target similar fan groups; these practices, however, do not produce competition in the international music market. She explores how music industries successfully leverage star power to reproduce and successfully market old and borrowed content, given that regional industrial alliances help circulate culture. She also questions the common perception that remakes, remixes, and other appropriations suggest a lack of imagination and originality. Rather than focusing on marketing strategies, Hae Joo Kim examines generic conventions by showing how K-dramas deftly employ local and global conventions to appeal to both domestic and international audiences. Kim adopts textual analysis as a methodology and provides a detailed reading of the K-drama Dream High. She observes that Dream High, by blending K-pop with Hollywood musical tropes, forges a uniquely Hallyu product. Kim’s argument returns us to Shin’s claims as it highlights how the remixed and remade becomes something innovative (rather than a mere copy) that enables the crossover potential of this immensely popular K-drama. Finally, Roald Maliangkay zeros in on a pre-digital form of movie advertising and marketing—the painted billboard. In considering the role of painted billboards in Korea and India in shaping audience expectations, he points out that although this form of film advertisement was once quite popular in these two countries, Euro-American film industries rarely used them. Painted cinema billboards were unique in that they demonstrated why movies had to be seen, specifically at the venues to which they were tied. Maliangkay thus focuses on the medium’s importance as an expression of local culture. In so doing, he provides us with a clear picture of the casualties of the digital era, in which marketing is defined by immediacy and global outreach. He offers incisive perspective on the circulation, production, and reception of entertainment regimes that expand the geographical purview of the global and the local, the national and the transnational, and the pleasure and power of popular culture. M ediating C irc u its and M arkets

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N OTE S 1. Ingyu Oh and Gil-Sung Park, “From B2C to B2B: Selling Korean Pop Music in the Age of New Social Media,” Korea Observer 43, no. 4 (2012): 366. 2. Sangjoon Lee, introduction to Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, edited by Sangjoon Lee and Abe Mark Nornes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2015), 15. 3. Dal Yong Jin, “New Perspectives on the Creative Industries in the Hallyu 2.0 Era,” in Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, edited by Sangjoon Lee and Abe Mark Nornes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 54. 4. Dal Yong Jin, paraphrasing Kaplan and Haenlein, defines social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (“New Perspectives,” 58). 5. Because of the thematic intersectionality employed by our contributors, many of our essays could belong to multiple sections or groupings. For example, Erica Vogel’s chapter in this volume, “K-pop in Mexico,” illustrates how international fans use social media to organize flash mobs and in so doing, become global producers, not just consumers, of K-pop in their own right.

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13

Imagining Virtual Audiences Digital Distribution, Global Media, and Online Fandom Monika M e h ta a n d L i sa Pa tti

The proliferation of online venues for the exhibition of films, television shows, and other media content has enabled an expansion of the engagement by US audiences with media produced in other global regions. Popular sites such as Netflix present Bollywood blockbusters and K-dramas among a shifting catalog that uses algorithms to program content according to not only national production affiliations but also microgenres. Although the ascendancy of Netflix as a distribution platform has received widespread attention as a harbinger of emerging industrial patterns that challenge the relevance of both theatrical and DVD and Blu-ray distribution, the ways that online distributors imagine and engage their intersecting audiences have not been addressed in a comparative framework. We examine Netflix, DramaFever, Eros Entertainment, and Viki, analyzing how each distributor positions Bollywood, Hallyu, and Hollywood films and television shows within an evolving and unstable matrix of global media. On these sites, geographic coordinates and unpredictable temporal windows define the availability and disappearance of content. We begin to map this dynamic online exhibition environment by focusing on the organization of each distributor’s online catalog according to both genre affiliation and national production contexts; the incorporation of subtitles and other translation practices; the curation and presentation of articles, links, and paratexts; and 249

the opportunities for audience interaction as either fans or cinephiles. Through each of these modes of analysis, we explore how the online distribution of popular media from other global regions imagines internet audiences via nation, language, and class. The companies we have chosen to study include profitable start-ups (DramaFever, Viki), a seminal online distributor (Netflix), and an established industry stalwart (Eros).1 This selection enables us to analyze their catalogs as well as their industrial configurations and relationships. Netflix offers a robust collection of Hollywood films and a much smaller selection of Bollywood works, largely Hindi films and a few regional Indian films. Eros Now addresses this gap in Netflix’s catalog by showcasing a sizable library of Hindi films as well as commercial films in other Indian languages. When Netflix was founded, its library foregrounded an investment in film, building on its foundation as a DVD-by-mail distributor; its brand identity has evolved to emphasize streaming and television. Similarly, Eros has had a long history of distributing films; only after introducing online distribution has Eros shown an interest in airing and producing television. DramaFever is one of Netflix’s primary content providers for K-dramas. DramaFever’s site locates Hallyu center stage, alerting us to the importance of the Korean media industry in the US market. Like DramaFever, Viki is invested in cultivating a television catalog. Relative to all of the other companies, it has the widest range of content, which is culled from varied national and industrial contexts. It mobilizes its broad fan base to generate subtitles in numerous languages. Each of these sites imagines global media differently; these visions contest simple center-periphery binaries, and instead assert the importance of both Bollywood and Hallyu. They also reveal that the online exhibition of international media is increasingly dominated by television. Our comparative investigation of these case studies focuses on the textual analysis of their online catalogs. We analyze these sites as exhibition spaces, conceptualizing them as contemporary video stores that reimagine some features of the traditional video store (such as establishing a local film community), replicate other features (such as organizing content according to genres), and add new features that exploit the possibilities of global online distribution (such as automatically cueing the next episode in a television series). We pay particular attention to each site’s fluctuating library of titles, reviewing the organization 250

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of their film and television holdings as a window into how each company defines their audiences and the global content they watch. Our analysis focuses not on specific titles offered but instead on the broader organizational logic that situates those titles within various submenus and markets them to subgroups of consumers. We also attend to paratexts that accompany some titles; each company’s presentation of paratexts signals its strategy for framing its library and its investment in providing supplementary content to recruit, inform, and engage its viewers. Each website enables some level of fan engagement, so we review fan comments to understand the fan discourses that emerge within each streaming community. Finally, we dwell on the ways that each company describes itself—from the mission statements posted on their websites to the statistics they share about their users to lure new advertisers—to bring these corporate discourses into direct dialogue with fan discourses. In their promotional appeals, these companies combine this emphasis on their global reach with a hyperbolic rhetoric of mobility, promising users access to “global” content anywhere. This language of mobile viewing stands in contrast to the instability of their libraries because they depend on contracts, licenses, state censorship, and audience tastes. Industrial and state constraints show that neither the companies nor the content can be everywhere. Although each site circulates different terms to describe its users—with varying degrees of investment in notions of community and fandom— all of them encourage binge viewing as a televisual practice, using the rhetoric of binge viewing both in packaging and promoting their content and in characterizing viewing habits. For example, Eros Now plans to market completed shows as “binge” packages, and DramaFever showcases videos and comments from fans who discuss staying up allnight to watch K-dramas. DramaFever’s site features a Marathon alert that notifies its users that an entire television series is available for viewing.2 The online interface also encourages binge viewing, giving users as few as five to twenty seconds before the next episode starts. Binge viewing compels us to (re)conceptualize television flow; online streaming replaces the segmentation associated with network and cable television programming with the simultaneous cueing (and queuing) of successive episodes of the same series. Although streaming often includes advertising and other forms of narrative interruption, it promotes the breadth of its inventory yet facilitates the exploration of one series at a time in I magining V irt u al A u diences

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depth. Network and cable television schedules typically accommodate two-hour films and twenty- to forty-minute shows, but the popularity of binge viewing reveals that viewers watch media content for much longer periods. In 2013, Netflix reported that half of the viewers of the ten most popular shows on Netflix at the time completed an entire twenty-two episode season of a series in one week.3 Although this study suggests that binge viewing has become a common viewing practice, not all users are converts. Many of them might simply visit a site to watch one film or television episode. When Netflix and other online streaming companies release statistics about their subscribers, they generally describe their overall subscriber base with the most inclusive number possible but the viewing habits of these subscribers by focusing on the active viewers, thus suggesting to current and prospective shareholders, advertisers, and content partners that all of their subscribers are as actively engaged as their most committed users. In examining contemporary media cultures, we are aware that these companies’ services, partnerships, and platforms are shifting and transforming quickly. The observations we make in the case studies and examples we cite will have changed by the time of publication. Thus, our analysis of the ways that prominent online distributors imagine their audiences for Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hallyu content provides a snapshot of evolving corporate and consumer practices, during a specific historical moment and within a particular distribution context, namely, online streaming in the United States between 2015 and 2017. NE TF L I X

Since 2007, when it introduced streaming in addition to its distribution of films and television shows on DVD through an online mail order subscription service, Netflix has expanded its reach both globally and technologically. As of May 2017, it boasted one hundred million subscribers from 190 countries accessing more than 125 million hours of content each day. Supporting its claim to be the world’s “leading internet subscription service for enjoying movies and television shows,” Netflix asserts, “Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on nearly any internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments.” 4 252

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This generic corporate self-description may at first seem similar to other bland brand definitions, but several formulations within this statement reveal how Netflix imagines both its brand identity and the consumers that support it. First, Netflix describes its subscribers as members, invoking associations with privileged access, shared experiences, and communal interactions. Second, by stressing the ability to watch Netflix’s content on any screen device without ever needing to restart an interrupted program, Netflix points to its mastery of platform mobility—the set of practices through which viewers watch content in different locations and at different times, establishing a new experience of televisual flow.5 Finally, the statement concludes with a reference to Netflix’s maintenance of commercial-free viewing—a feature that separates Netflix from most of its rivals. Commercial-free viewing is a key element in the promotion of binge viewing. In 2016, Netflix expanded its streaming services to South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, extending its global reach beyond its previous operations in North America, South America, Australia, and Europe. Given the unique and rapidly shifting content libraries available in each global region, a comprehensive analysis of the global Netflix distribution is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, the chapter explores how Netflix understands global media by analyzing the presentation of films and television shows from other global regions on its website in the United States. Among its menu of standard genres such as dramas, comedies, musicals, and so on, Netflix includes “internatio­nal movies,” under which grouping large film-producing nations are included as subgenres, such as “Indian movies.” The term “international movies” first appeared in 2015. Prior to this, Netflix used “foreign movies” and “Indian movies” as separate categories. Unlike the word “foreign,” “international” seemingly embraces other cultures rather than making them strange. If “foreign” addresses the traditional cinephile—accustomed to encountering the term “foreign film” in theatrical and video distribution in the United States and eager to see the films it describes in spite of its estranging force—“international” potentially engages all users with its indication of a more generic cosmopolitanism and its effacement of foreignness more generally and foreign languages more specifically.6 From 2015 until early September 2016, Netflix replaced “Indian movies” with “Bollywood movies” and in September 2016 reintroduced “Indian movies” as a search category. I magining V irt u al A u diences

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The adoption of “Indian” as an industrial term is as problematic as “Bollywood” is. The former erases linguistic, industrial, and commercial cinema, middle cinema, and art cinema distinctions. The latter functions as a brand name, privileging commercial film—specifically, the output of the Bombay film industry— and places all other commercial, middle, and art cinemas in this category in spite of their divergent production and distribution histories. These shifting categories compel us to think about how to analyze and track a discursive object in commercial and cultural flux. Within the list of television shows, both “Korean dramas” and “Korean television shows” are listed in a menu that is focused almost exclusively on US television (with the exception of a few British and Spanishlanguage shows). Known for the computational “tagging” process that has generated more than seventy thousand microgenres in order to customize recommendations for individual members (such as “20th Century Period Pieces” or “Movies Featuring a Strong Female Lead”), Netflix offers less precise and less intersectional information about its international offerings, generally grouping films and television shows together by their country of origin.7 Most Korean television dramas share the descriptors “romantic and “emotional.” Although K-dramas are widely recognized as a genre in both industrial and cultural terms, some have more in common with dramas produced in other regions than with other K-dramas; yet after a member has watched one K-drama, Netflix only recommends other K-dramas. For example, the popular Korean drama Boys Over Flowers (2009), set at a prestigious private high school, leads to a recommendation for Fated to Love You (2014)—a Korean drama centered on the unplanned pregnancy of a much older protagonist— but not to Gossip Girl (2007–2012) or any of the many other US television shows featuring a similar fish-out-of-water exploration of teen social hierarchies. Netflix’s organizational strategies in effect reinforce broader industrial trends that bind all cultural products from a particular global region together for marketing and distribution purposes, neglecting or overriding the affinities that individual films and television shows share with content across geographic lines and placing members within globally specific virtual screening rooms by recommending one show after another from the same region. Netflix further flattens differences across titles by providing almost exclusively English subtitles for all content streamed in the United States.8 Its main menu suggests that subtitles are available in English, 254

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German, French, and Spanish, but most Netflix titles (based on extensive but by no means exhaustive browsing) include only English subtitles.9 For most if not all Bollywood films and Korean television dramas, only English subtitles are available. These subtitling practices shore up the global prominence of English, and locally, reproduce the United States as a monolingual, English-speaking nation. In addition, the film Chennai Express (2013) shows how these subtitling processes affect our viewing. In the film, a Hindi-speaking North Indian becomes embroiled in events in Tamil Nadu. The female lead helps him navigate this world by becoming his translator. When the film was screened in India, it had no subtitles for the Tamil dialogue, leaving the Hindi-speaking viewer as rudderless as the male lead. In providing subtitles for all of the dialogue when streaming the film in the United States, Netflix changes the viewing experience for Hindi-speaking viewers and for all viewers who do not understand the original Tamil dialogue. Beyond its expanding catalog of films and television shows—a virtue that must be assessed in relation to the number of titles that disappear from Netflix each month as streaming agreements with its various content providers expire—Netflix provides very little in the way of fan barter. The webpage for each film and television show includes basic details about the show (cast, creator, and so on), a list of genre affiliations, member reviews and comments, a content rating, and a list of similar shows. Some shows receive dozens or even hundreds of member reviews and comments, but Netflix does not enable each show’s viewers to communicate easily. Comments are listed but not dated and members cannot respond directly to another member’s comment in a thread. Netflix’s tight control of its site prohibits the liveness, community, and agency that characterizes other online streaming sites. EROS NOW

Eros Now, an online entertainment service, was launched in March 2012 by Eros International Limited. Headquartered in Bombay, the company has offices in Australia, Dubai, Fiji, the Isle of Man, the UK, and the United States. In 1977, it began its journey as a distributor of Hindi films at theatrical venues, and later via VHS, VCD, DVD, and Blu-ray. In 2005, it entered film production.10 Since then, it has both added the Eros music label and expanded its film repertoire to include distribution and I magining V irt u al A u diences

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production in other regional industries in India, including Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. The online portal, according to Eros Digital CEO Ricky Ghai, seeks to “develop a service that engages a new digital generation of South Asians globally—when, where and how they want,” in an echo of Netflix’s “anytime, anywhere” promotion.11 Jyoti Deshpande, another executive at Eros International, affirms this statement: “The idea behind Eros Now is a reflection of the changing consumption patterns. Young consumers are increasingly taking to on-the-go consumption of content. . . . Our goal is to provide endless entertainment at the consumer’s fingertips.”12 Initially, this service targeted diasporic South Asians because this group was likely to have access to faster bandwidth and was a more lucrative customer base, paying Eros in US dollars rather than rupees. As Eros has widened its digital reach via content and distribution partnerships with Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, HumTV, and ZeeTV, Eros executives have repeatedly invoked tech-savvy, mobile consumers both in India and abroad as their potential registered users and subscribers.13 Eros Now boasts fifty-five million registered users worldwide “across WAP, APP, and WEB.”14 Eros began to develop online streaming in India before either Netflix or Amazon entered this terrain, targeting young Indians, which it views as the most vital demographic for its expansion. In India, Eros introdu­ ced a “basic ad-supported service” and a range of paid services—daily, weekend, or weekly passes as well as monthly and annual subscriptions.15 All paying subscribers have access to all of the materials on the site adfree; monthly or annual subscribers can access the material in high definition as well as on multiple screens and offline. The varied pricing enables Eros to appeal to viewers from different class backgrounds as well as busy workers who might want to watch a film for a day. In India, where new films are often accessed via pirated downloads or VCDs, the monthly plan or annual subscription is, as Aswin Punathambekar notes, a new cultural mode of viewing.16 Within India, Eros is currently competing not only with Amazon and Netflix, but also with the new online streaming service Hotstar, which offers both film and television content in eight Indian languages.17 Hotstar’s most attractive feature is that it does not follow a subscription-based model, but instead—as of this writing—an advertisement-based video on demand platform that allows viewers to watch all its content at no cost. 256

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For registered users in the United States, Eros Now Basic offers a selection of movies, television shows, Eros Now Originals, and unlimited music. Both Indian media content and Pakistani television shows are available on Eros Now. In stark contrast to the political rhetoric between India and Pakistan, which is dominated by difference and enmity, the cultural domain as constructed by Eros Now signals and promotes cultural affinity and shared pleasures.18 Eros Now Premium subscribers, by paying $7.99 a month, can enjoy commercial-free, unlimited films with subtitles (in English and Arabic) and television shows in high definition. The differences in services as well as the pricing are indicative of geopolitical disparity in currency. Class is critical to the pricing structure in India, but class also informs access to streaming in the United States, where not all consumers can afford the $7.99 monthly fee or the other costs related to high-speed internet access. To woo its markets, Eros Now leverages its extensive and expanding library, which currently has five thousand films, 250,000 music tracks, movie trailers, and music videos. It has also signed contracts with third parties such Zee TV, Hum TV, and Google Chromecast to increase its collection and its reach. In November 2015, the glossy poster of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Baijaro Mastani (2015), an Eros production, was the main attraction of the company’s US website. The poster provided a link to the film’s trailer. It was followed by images and links that included the film’s song (“Pinga”), an animated show narrating the story of the historical figure Bajirao, a feature on Ranveer Singh’s (the film’s male star) transformation into Bajirao, as well as Bhansali’s select films that the visitor could watch at no cost. The digital venue provides an opportunity to promote the film in varied ways and incorporates past films into this promotional campaign. In addition to search categories such as “Movies (Genres, Most Popular, Languages),” “TV,” “Music (Music, Music Videos),” and “Originals (Popular Shows, Categories),” the home page also has sections devoted to free movies, star and industrial information and gossip, new additions (films, television shows, albums), films and music organized according to various themes (such as classics, love, big hits, star-themed, retro, dance), and television shows categorized according to channel offerings. The bottom portion of the home page keeps the users updated on trending movies and music. The webpage for each film offers a brief summary, year of release, length, and available subtitles—generally English and Arabic. It also provides the names of key cast members, the director, I magining V irt u al A u diences

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and the composer or composers, and indicates the film’s language. All of this information is hyperlinked so that the user can easily browse other films featuring the same crew and language. The site also directs viewers to other films they may like. Language is a critical filter for generating these choices. For example, if one watched a Hindi film, only other Hindi films would be recommended. Relative to the film webpages, the individual television sites appear sparse. They only provide year or years that the show was televised, episode length, and a brief synopsis. The viewer is invited to watch other episodes after they have finished one. On both the film and television webpages, the users are invited to interact by giving star ratings. The Eros audio and music video catalog is a key part of the Eros appeal, given that music is central to commercial films. An individual album page provides titles of the songs, names of vocal artists, and song length. Users are also invited to view song picturizations in music videos and to browse other albums. As is true of film, language is a regulatory mechanism for generating these choices. Beyond individual albums, the Eros Now website offers multiple opportunities for exploring music. For example, users can browse works by vocal artists, composers, stars, or thematic content (love, classics, latest hits). Although Netflix or Viki might offer Hindi films, they do not offer an aurally curated experience of Indian commercial cinemas. In this case, Eros content displays both a cultural and industrial acumen. Eros understands the value of songs, namely, their importance to a Hindi film’s success and their ability to attract audiences and earn revenue independent of films. Thus, in the UK, Eros acquired Ping messaging to form a community between fans and vocal artists, and among fans. Eros recognizes that its users are both viewers and listeners. As a production house, Eros is also able to offer information about yet-to-be released films. Thus, the vertical integration of Eros gives it a distinct advantage in the marketing of Bollywood-related media. D RA MA F E V E R

DramaFever, a New York–based streaming service was cofounded by Seung Bak and Suk Park in 2009. The company was bought by the Japanese-based internet and media service in 2014 and became a subsidiary of Warner Bros. in 2016. In both transitions, Bak and Park continued as 258

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CEOs. The multiple press articles available on the company website tell us that Park and Bak’s enterprise and hard work generated a company that boasts “21 million viewers of its content across its owned-andoperated platforms and syndication partners like Hulu, YouTube, and iTunes.”19 The “Work for DramaFever” page features snapshots of a multiethnic workforce. Themes of diversity, industriousness, perseverance, and entrepreneurial spirit are reiterated both in the articles and on the website, signaling an attachment to corporate American values.20 Initially, DramaFever’s content featured K-dramas; as of 2017, its “ever expanding library” includes television shows and films from sixty content providers from twelve countries that include Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, the UK, Brazil, and France. Its content is subtitled in Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese, English, and Spanish. In 2013, DramaFever coproduced the hit series Heirs, widening its industrial activities. Since then, mirroring the expansion of Netflix’s global production efforts, it has produced other series, generating its own library, not dependent on licensing agreements, to cater to the tastes of its subscribers. Replicating their rhetoric with regard to their diverse workforce, the cofounders repeatedly note their US viewers’ diverse ethnic backgrounds: “40% white, 30% Latino, and 30% Black and Asians.”21 Their core audience is the “young, female, millennial demo.”22 Why and how do K-dramas appeal to these diverse constituencies? Ethnographic accounts of niche content and minority fans generally cast fans as marginalized subjects who turn to K-dramas, music, or comics for a sense of belonging and affirmation. Discussions among K-drama fans and DramaFever staff offer more varied reasons: engrossing stories, “universal values,” “a longing for long drawn-out romance,” similarities with British period dramas, “Confucian values” of responsibility and respect, and the importance of “exploring cultural narratives that differ from their own.” One white American fan remarks, “I find these distinctly Korean elements of K-dramas are sometimes schmaltzy, but not particularly foreign to me. There is no nationalism in liking to look at attractive people while they look at each other and decide whether or not to make out.”23 Although she also says that she needs to be more attentive to these serials because she is obliged to read their subtitles, they are not a major obstacle to her viewing the content. This view challenges the often cited complaint that American viewers are unwilling to watch subtitled content. The case of K-dramas suggests that American viewers are quite willing to I magining V irt u al A u diences

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sit through hours of subtitled commercial content.24 Park characterizes K-dramas as a “machine for empathy” that enables cross-cultural interactions and the building of fan communities. The fan, then, becomes a cross-cultural entrepreneur. The K-dramas’ “chaste” content, carefully tailored to fit social mores and government regulations across national boundaries, enables it to travel to North and South America, the UK, Australia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, avoiding or, in effect, internalizing global censorship.25 Currently, the US website offers a variety of viewing services: a free, ad-supported, version; tiered monthly subscriptions that are titled Rookie, Idol, Superstar, and an annual subscription. The Rookie subscription allows viewers access to ad-free shows in high definition. The Superstar version extends these privileges by allowing access via Chromecast and Airplay as well as the ability to watch the content offline. In addition, Superstar subscribers get “exclusive invites to events hosted by DramaFever” (screenings, annual award show) and a “20 percent discount for merchandise on its e-commerce hub FeverShop.” Rob Kamphausen, DramaFever’s head of product, explains these tiers: “We crafted our tiers around audience—both our existing super-fans and our not-yet-converted family.”26 The ostensible goal is to turn members, rookies, and idols into Superstars. These categories mimic the language used to characterize Korean stars, offering fans the status of stars. An important part of this wooing strategy is located in an unexpected place—Netflix. The cofounders of DramaFever note that by syndicating their shows on Netflix they gain fans. Once a viewer has exhausted the slim number of DramaFever shows available on Netflix, they then seek out DramaFever so that they can continue their binges. Netflix thus assists in generating both fans and revenue for DramaFever. In 2015, DramaFever’s homepage featured an eye-catching poster of its “exclusive” drama Oh My Venus (2015), starring Shin Min Ah and Jo Si Sub. Above it, the menu offers the usual links for navigating the site: Browse, Movies, K-pop, News, and Forums. These links allow viewers to access DramaFever’s library, catch up on gossip about favorite stars, take quizzes about K-dramas and stars, interact with other fans, and comment on content. Each K-drama webpage offers a trailer, a brief summary of the show, the total number of episodes, release year, and the name of the network on which the show appears. In hypertext, it also provides names and photographs of cast members; genre (such as Korean, Exclusive, Melodrama, Romance); related themes (such as melodrama, 260

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Second Chances, Korean, childhood friends, opposites attract); and available subtitles (these vary and can include Chinese, English, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish). Below the information about the show, viewers are invited to review it. The reviews can be sorted by date, rating, and activity. By the time Oh My Venus had aired eight of its designated sixteen episodes, it had four thousand and one hundred sixty reviews in multiple languages. Unlike Netflix or Eros, DramaFever offers multiple venues for both fan engagement and creating fan communities. It even hosts DramaFever Awards in New York City. Fans are invited to vote for their favorite show and stars and encouraged to attend the ceremony and interact with both stars and fellow fans. Like Eros, DramaFever is attentive to the critical role of music in spreading Hallyu. Whereas the first Korean Wave focused on promoting K-dramas, the second is devoted to marketing K-pop. K-dramas and K-pop are linked industrially. Singers often star in K-dramas and sing one or multiple songs in dramas that feature them. For example, Choi Siwon, a member of the popular band Super Junior, played the second lead in She Was Pretty (2015), and sang its title song, “You are the Only One.” DramaFever clearly recognizes this two-way industrial traffic, featuring band concerts, music videos, and favorite K-drama songs as well as gossip about singers and bands on its website. This practice fuels fan engagement and lengthens their stay on the site. In providing numerous venues for fan engagement, DramaFever also risks its fans’ departure. Due to licensing agreements, DramaFever was able to make new episodes of She Was Pretty available two weeks after they released in South Korea. A viewer noted in the comments section that the latest episodes were available on Viki, rerouting viewers not wishing to wait until the next episodes were available on DramaFever. In 2017, DramaFever began responding to defecting viewers with a promotional campaign couched in a discourse of quality: “Professional Subtitles worth the wait.” The impetus for launching this discourse of quality was increased competition from Viki, which actively sought and cultivated “fan subtitling.” VIKI

Founded in 2007 by Razmig Hovaghimian, who had formerly worked at NBC Universal, and now based in Singapore, Viki—the portmanteau company name generated by blending Video and Wiki—distinguishes I magining V irt u al A u diences

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itself from other online distributors not only through the global breadth of its catalog and its subscriber base but also, and more significantly, by the involvement of those fans as active participants in the Viki community. A short video on the company’s webpage for prospective advertisers boasts that Viki enjoys “higher engagement among millennials and females than YouTube and Hulu.” Thus Viki’s “global audience of nearly 1 billion users” may be more attractive to advertisers than Netflix’s hundred million subscribers, especially when the following metrics of Viki fan engagement are considered: 63 percent of users are millennials, 32 percent earn $100,000 a year or more, 50 percent watch two or more hours of content on Viki per day, and 91 percent of users binge watch. Combined with a reported 3.2 percent cross-platform click-through rate and a 90 percent completion rate, these statistics reveal that Viki users are a valuable audience for advertisers.27 Viki’s website frequently uses the term “fan” to describe its users. Its interpellation of active users as fans hinges on its unique translation model. To facilitate the rapid translation of television shows into multiple languages, Viki outsources the task of subtitling to its community of viewers, who translate episodes collaboratively in real time, taking advantage of message boards to divide translating tasks and then editing each other’s translations for accuracy through timestamped comments. Viki allows users to search its content through three overlapping menus: genres, countries, and languages. The genres menu is similar to those found on other sites—Bollywood and Korean dramas included among a long list of familiar categories that transcend global boundaries: comedies, dramas, sports, and so on. Viki’s other menus, however, indicate its extraordinary global breadth in comparison with its online distribution competitors. The list of countries includes popular content producers such as the United States, Mexico, Korea, and India but also less frequently represented production sites such as Venezuela, Egypt, and Cambodia. The list of subtitled languages is even more expansive, including more than two hundred languages. Twenty-five percent of these languages are classified as endangered, and Viki explicitly ties its community-based translation activities to efforts to preserve those languages, citing its partnership with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. As of 2015, Viki users had translated more than one billion words. 262

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Viki’s diverse catalog emerges from a distribution strategy that offers content providers a new revenue source for existing content with several key advantages. First, Viki’s licensing agreements stipulate that it will not air content in the region in which it was produced, ensuring that Viki will not compete directly with the content providers for the same local audience. Second, Viki’s free fan-sourced subtitles are produced quickly, enabling the rapid publication of translated content online and undermining the value of pirated content (which is often released either without subtitles or with poorly translated subtitles.) For example, fans subtitled the first episode of Boys Over Flowers into more than twenty languages within twenty-four hours.28 Finally, Viki’s active community of fans uses the message boards, comments, and other features on the site that foster connected viewing to share information about their favorite shows, offering free internal promotion for content providers. Fan engagement is the heart of Viki’s distribution model, and participatory translation is the engine of that engagement. For fans of Korean dramas and other popular international television shows, wiki-style community translations afford them an opportunity to express both their passion for their favorite shows and their multilingual fluency and curiosity. As Hovaghimian noted in an interview about fan subtitling practices, “They fight over participles.”29 Viki’s facilitation of fan subtitling enables users to enjoy an experience of co-authorship, and in turn Viki translates content on an unprecedented scale with extraordinary speed at no cost. Our analysis provides an incomplete snapshot of the online distribution of Bollywood and Hallyu content. Within the limited context of US online exhibition, YouTube and Amazon are among 632 online distributors competing with the companies we have examined. Given the extraordinary breadth of each distributor’s online activity, it is more difficult to theorize the place of specific national media cultures within their catalogs. As their programming strategies evolve, they may become important rivals for the companies we mention. On a similar note, we contend that the potential impact of Viki’s approach to subtitling global media has not yet fully registered. In addition to Amazon and YouTube and other popular US streaming sites such as Hulu, we excluded illegal streaming sites from our analysis; but the immediacy and accuracy of Viki’s translations of popular global content may not only cut into the market shares of its corporate rivals but also marginalize illegal streaming. I magining V irt u al A u diences

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Furthermore, the content partnerships among these companies may not be sustainable. For example, although Netflix currently sources some of its K-dramas from DramaFever, it is also pursuing other content partnerships and developing its own series in different global regions. These unstable corporate alliances—each company simultaneously angling for greater global breadth for both its catalog and its user base— point to a set of cultural and political consequences that merit close scrutiny. For example, DramaFever was founded in the United States by two Korean American partners before being bought by a Japanese company and then by Warner Bros. DramaFever’s catalog originally featured K-dramas but later expanded to include content from China, Taiwan, the UK, France, and Japan, among other locations. DramaFever has been applauded by the Korean government for helping promote a positive image of Korea internationally as the K-drama has emerged as an effective tool of soft power. The analysis of distribution thus entails an analysis of the cultural and political motives and effects of global industrial trends. Similarly, as some of these companies expand into global distribution and production, the ways in which they imagine their audiences inform their practices. For example, Netflix will engage with Bollywood to be successful in India.30 As it moves into the online distribution market in India, it will change its content, reframing its Hollywood offerings and expanding and recategorizing its Bollywood and other Indian offerings. These brief examples capture the importance of theorizing the mobility of global media across digital platforms in relation to the global mobility of distribution companies. Concepts such as “national” and “transnational” do not capture the complicated corporate constituencies and audiences affiliated with each online distributor. Their ownership configurations, their content libraries, their advertising partnerships, and their distribution networks generate a global grid of intersecting vectors of competition and collaboration, the lines of which are redrawn at a rapid rate. The textual analysis of their online exhibition sites provides an opportunity to examine the collision of discourses of quality and quantity in a distribution arena where bigger is, at least for now, better. N OTE S 1. On October 16, 2018, DramaFever closed its doors as a result of AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner and the formation of WarnerMedia. AT&T stated that it plans to launch a broader subscription-based streaming service and will channel its

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resources there. The DramaFever site as well as all associated apps and promotional sites, such as the Facebook page, were removed without advance notice to subscribers. DramaFever’s demise reinforces our arguments about the unstable and contingent nature of streaming services. It also raises critical questions about archives and archival practices. With the disappearance of DramaFever, viewer comments on multiple platforms (including the Drama Fever website and Facebook page), as well as individual viewing histories, have also vanished. AT&T maintains access to this information. As of writing, the company has been unwilling to share this information. The ephemerality of streaming services poses challenges for scholarly projects that seek to theorize the ways in which contemporary online media distributors imagine and engage their audiences. For details about this closure, see Todd Stangler, “Warner Bros. DramaFever Korean-Drama Streaming Service Is Shutting Down,” Variety, October 16, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/dramafever-k-drama-shutting -down-warner-bros-1202982001. 2. DramaFever seems to be especially interested in culinary and fitness rhetoric. It characterizes some shows as “bite-sized” dramas. 3. John Jurgensen, “Netflix Says Binge Viewing Is No ‘House of Cards,’ ” Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023 03932504579254031017586624. 4. Netflix, “About Netflix,” https://media.netflix.com/en/about-netflix. 5. For a discussion of digital distribution and platform mobility, see Chuck Tryon, “ ‘Make Any Room Your TV Room’: Digital Delivery and Media Mobility,” Screen 53, no. 3 (2012): 287–300. 6. These terms are incompatible with the academic discourses surrounding global media. See, for example, the debates surrounding the value of the terms “global,” “transnational,” and “world” in Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, eds., World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010). 7. For a discussion of Netflix’s tagging process, see Alexis C. Madrigal, “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood,” The Atlantic, January 2, 2014, http://www.theatlantic .com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679. 8. Since 2017, Netflix has expanded both its subtitling and its dubbing practices. See, for example, Janko Roettgers, “Netflix’s Secret to Success: Six Cell Towers, Dubbing, and More,” Variety, March 8, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/netflix -success-secrets-1202721847. 9. Manuel Betancourt, “Netflix’s Quest to Conquer the World (Subtitles Available),” Paste, April 18, 2017, https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/netflix -narcos-ingobernable-midnight-dinner-tokyo.html. As it expands, Netflix has begun to provide subtitling and dubbing in languages other than English for global regions. 10. For the company history of Eros, see Economic Times, “Eros International Media Ltd,” n.d., http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/eros-international-media -ltd/infocompanyhistory/companyid-32234.cms. 11. Anand Rai, “Online Entertainment Service Eros Now Goes Live; Targets International Customers with Dollar-Denominated Subscription,” TechCircle, March 22, 2012, https://techcircle.vccircle.com/2012/03/22/online-entertainment-service-eros -now-goes-live-targets-international-customers-with-us-dollar-denominated -subscription. 12. Jyoti Deshpande, “OTT Is the Future of Entertainment; Eros Now Will Rewrite the Rules of Content Consumption: Jyoti Deshpande, Eros Int,” Economic Times,

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August 18, 2015, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-08-18/news/ 65530443_1_eros-intl-eros-international-jyoti-deshpande. 13. Television Post, “Eros Now Streams on Chromecast Globally,” December 17, 2014, http://www.televisionpost.com/technology/erosnow-to-stream-on-chromecast-globally; Business Standard, “Eros Now Signs New Deal with Pakistan’s Hum TV,” June 9, 2015, http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/erosnow-signs-new-deal-with -pakistan-s-hum-tv-115060900597_1.html; IndianTelevision, “Eros Now to Launch Three Original Shows; Ties Up with Anil Kapoor Film Company,” July 16, 2015, http: //www.indiantelevision.com/technology/software/applications/eros-now-to-launch -three-original-shows-ties-up-with-anil-kapoor-film-company-150716. 14. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), APP, and WEB refer respectively to mobile network protocols, software for mobile device and laptops, and internet protocols for desktop devices. Eros Now, “Corporate Profile,” http://phx.corporate-ir.net /phoenix.zhtml?c=201012&p=irol-homeprofile. 15. Television Post, “Eros Now Introduces Two-Tier Subscription for India; Spruces Up Original Content Pipeline,” October 10, 2015, http://www.televisionpost.com/technology/erosnow-introduces-two-tier-subscription-for-india-spruces-up-original -content-pipeline; Matthew Campbell and Bhuma Shrivastava, “Can Anyone Beat Netflix? One Bollywood Studio Is Going to Try,” Bloomberg Business, September 7, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-07/the-best-exotic-would-be -netflix-is-ready-for-its-india-closeup. 16. Campbell and Shrivastava, “Can Anyone Beat Netflix?”; NDTV, “Eros Shelves TV Channel Plan, to Focus on Digital Content,” July 19, 2015, http://profit.ndtv.com/ news/corporates/article-eros-shelves-tv-channel-plan-to-focus-on-digital-content -783038. 17. Hotstar is owned by Novi Digital Entertainment Private Limited, a subsidiary of Star India Private Limited (21st Century Fox). 18. The content that Eros Now offers in India and the United States varies. This content is also contingent on contracts and partnerships. For example, in 2015, Colors’ popular show Comedy with Kapil (2013–2016) was available in India, but not in the United States. By 2016, the show was no longer available on Colors. By 2017, Eros no longer offered Colors shows on its online platform. These shifts foreground how contracts and partnerships quickly transform what is or is not available online. 19. Sahil Patel, “How DramaFever Gets People to Pay for Korean Soap Operas,” Digiday, September 15, 2015, http://digiday.com/platforms/dramafever-subscription. 20. DramaFever, “About Us,” http://www.dramafever.com/company/about.html. 21. Claire Carusillo, “I’m Obsessed with Online Telenovelas for Korean Tweens,” Motherboard, August 5, 2014, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3k9g/im -obsessed-with-online-telenovelas-for-korean-tweens. The combination of black and Asian viewers as a demographic is unusual. It is especially so for a website that is so careful about noting specificity of its content. 22. Amna Nawaz, “Young, Female and Hooked: Why Binge-Watchers Flock to DramaFever,” NBC News, February 13, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian -america/young-female-hooked-why-binge-watchers-flock-dramafever-n300246. 23. Carusillo, “I’m Obsessed.” 24. The study of other foreign languages has declined in the United States, but the study of Korean has grown rapidly in recent years, a phenomenon attributed in part to the enthusiasm there for Korean popular culture—both K-dramas and K-

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pop. See Larry Gordon, “Korean-Language Classes Are Growing in Popularity at U.S. Colleges,” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/education /la-me-korean-language-20150401-story.html. 25. A more detailed examination of how and why K-dramas are constructed as “chaste” is beyond the scope of this chapter. 26. Patel, “How DramaFever.” 27. Viki, “About Us,” https://www.viki.com/about. 28. Roger Yu, “American Audiences: I Want My International TV,” USA Today, March 21, 2013, http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/03/21/international -tv-shows/1972949. 29. E. B. Boyd, “Boom Tube: How Viki Is Creating the Global Hulu,” Fast Company, July 12, 2012, http://www.fastcompany.com/1842719/boom-tube-how-viki-creating -global-hulu. 30. Nick Statt, “Netflix Might Start Producing Bollywood and Anime Programming,” The Verge, November 3, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9665844 /netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-anime-bollywood-tv.

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14

How K-pop Went Global Digitization and the Market-Making of Korean Entertainment Houses S olee I. S hin

The rise of digital technology and the new media has revolutionized how media products circulate and reach potential consumers. Web 2.0 and user-generated content sites such as YouTube, in particular, allow content producers to bypass the gatekeeping activities of conventional media oligopolies and directly connect with potential audience members. They allow audiences to access and interact with a wide range of information, whether the same old contents they used to receive from conventional media sources or the novel and unconventional, which, to some, may consist of Bollywood movies, K-pop music videos, or videos produced by an aspiring YouTube star. Thanks to these shifts, perspectives celebrating the new media’s revolutionary contribution to contemporary communications landscapes are aplenty. Notable is Henry Jenkins’s perspective that the age of new media is characterized by media convergence wherein “every important story gets told and every brand gets sold.”1 Others similarly conceptualize the internet as a networked depository that makes vast a quantity of content accessible anywhere by anyone, thus flattening the playing field or equalizing access to once-expensive information by lowering the associated barriers and costs.2 Because global middle-class consumers can now lay hand on information far more easily than in the past, nonmainstream and non-Western producers, typically excluded from the 268

mainstream platforms dominated by a handful of Western media oligopolies, can also distribute their creations and widen the scope of activities to connect with worldwide audiences. In addition, scholars point out how certain interactive properties of the new media have contributed to the rise of participatory democracy within the media landscape. Ordinary citizens, instead of being passive consumers, are now said to be crucial agents shaping the media contents through their bottom-up participation.3 These changes have without question revolutionized the media landscape. However, perspectives emphasizing media convergence and participatory democracy overemphasize the convergent nature of these developments and overlook how broader market dynamics pattern the specific product flows between producers and consumers. Digital technology, although it opens up possibilities for a large group of producers to gain visibility and directly engage with consumers, does not in itself determine which products are consumed by whom or which producers succeed in taking advantage of these newly emerging market possibilities. Inevitably, only some market players would be able to capitalize on new and novel practices and innovations. Some players would devise a strategy of action that allow them to open up new markets and use those changes to their benefit. Others might hold onto older ways of doing things and be relegated to smaller, niche markets. Some might miscalculate their best course of action. Because of the numerous possibilities that exist in terms of how producers might respond to market shifts such as digitization, attending to these broader market dynamics— the concrete relationship between producers and (existing and potential) consumers and related strategies and activities of production, distribution, and consumption that pattern and circulate specific product flows— for a holistic inquiry into the impacts of the digital age is essential. IN TE RME D I A RY AC T I V I T I E S O F E N T E RTAIN M EN T H OU SES

This chapter examines how some media producers have been more successful than others in responding to changing market contexts and in using digitization to organize a global market for their products. K-pop, a type of Korean popular music that experienced heightened popularity from the 2000s, is a rare example of a non-Western popular culture product that has managed to gain widespread global visibility.4 HOW K-POP WENT GLOBAL

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Contrary to what some casual observers might think, the global rise and success of K-pop was no coincidence. Nor did it inevitably and automatically rise as a result of digitization. At the crux of its global success was the rise of entertainment houses and their entrepreneurial and market-making activities, which strategically responded to shifting domestic and global market conditions, including digitization, to experiment with novel methods of producing and distributing popular music. They created regional and global demand for a type of music focused on idol groups by riding the wave of digitization and then pushed their products onto the global market. K-pop’s success is, thus, a story of entrepreneurship and organizational innovation by market makers who ceaselessly experimented with their arts of trade. The formula for K-pop production is both conventional and novel; it resonates with Korea’s economic context because its integrated management system incorporates taken-for-granted and conventionalized ways of coordinating economic activities in Korean society. It relies on a few large businesses hierarchically controlling activities in-house and diversifying related and unrelated business domains while minimizing networked cooperation. It further relies on the exclusion of labor, or entertainment houses’ complete control over the artists in ways that necessitated little input from the creators.5 Rather, music products are put together through strict and regimented top-down coordination. Using these methods, a few entertainment houses quickly dominated the Korean popular music market, competing among themselves, as had chaebol groups during Korea’s industrialization, developing successful export operations for mass-produced goods such as garments, automobiles, and semiconductors.6 What the K-pop producers developed, however, was simultaneously novel. Because it is conventional for management houses and record labels to take care of only minimal contracting and supporting function for artists in Western music industries, the integrated agency system, conceptualized as the one-stop factory for the production of musical content and talent, was unforeseen. So was the notion that talent could be manufactured completely in-house and that the management firm would double as primary producers of music, distinct from previous ideas of management as taking care of only certain contracting functions between (self-developed) artists and other industry players. Thus the rise of K-pop involved a profound transformation of the Korean 270

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music industry led by a group of entrepreneurs who made systematic efforts to elaborate and execute an integrated model of popular music production while extending their control over both the artists (products) and the market.7 These deliberate efforts in music production soon met with unexpected shifts in global market circumstances that led the entertainment houses to look abroad. However, K-pop producers’ decision to reorient their products to a global audience is not a moment that should be taken for granted. Comparing the divergent circulation of Northeast Asian popular music products—J-pop, C-pop, and K-pop—makes it clear that although digitalization widened the opportunities for each music industry to make a global mark, most producers would have chosen the path of less resistance, either by repeating what they had been doing for a long time or tweaking their activities or market focus to ensure viability. The following chart presents the normalized values for Google searches (eight-year averages for January 2010 through 2018) for select Northeast Asian musicians—some of the biggest names in Asian popular music during this period.8 The column displays the musician and the row displays the countries in which the Google searches originate. The figures indicate relative search volumes by singer.9 The chart makes apparent a few patterns in the distribution of consumers and market focus of each popular music genre. First, the widereaching nature of J-pop and K-pop consumption contrasts with the confinement of C-pop consumption to countries with sizable ethnic Chinese populations in East and Southeast Asia or in the West such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. Second, the search volume of queries shows that even the biggest names in C-pop net significantly smaller interests than K-pop or even J-pop singers. Although Google’s small market share in mainland China might have deflated these figures, the internal diversity within the greater Chinese market also likely led to a fragmented consumption of popular music, limiting the search volumes for each artist. Finally, between the global spread in the J-pop and K-pop related queries, differences are considerable. J-pop is consumed worldwide, but its center is still undeniably Japan. As Yoshitaka Mōri observes, it is “Japanese pop made in Japan by Japanese musicians for a Japanese audience . . . [that] dominates the Japanese market.”10 By contrast, most consumption of K-pop-related information takes place outside Korea, especially in Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, HOW K-POP WENT GLOBAL

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Normalized Online Search Volumes 2010 –2018.

Indonesia, and Cambodia but also across North and South America, North Africa, and the Middle East. The differential successes and geographical reach of the three Asian popular music genre suggest how, despite digital technologies heightening the possibilities that non-Western and nonmainstream producers would gain global visibility, digitization has not automatically guided the globalization of musical producers to the same extent. Although digitization destroyed the market for vinyl albums, traditionally the music industry’s key revenue source, C-pop and J-pop producers devised dramatically different organizational solutions from K-pop producers to compensate for potential losses.11 Rather than fully embracing digitization, 272

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Japanese music distributors built exclusive networked alliances that barred the new technology from taking off and slowed the destruction of the physical album market. J-pop producers also maintained their inward focus by continuing to produce domestically focused music that showed little responsiveness to global trends. As a result, J-pop, once regionally successful, was relegated to a niche product produced and circulated primarily within Japan’s domestic market. In contrast, Taiwan’s mandopop producers, as album revenues declined, sustained their activities by engaging in advertising, concerts, KTV, movies, and cellphone ring tone services while expanding their market focus within their ethnic market, especially toward the growing mainland Chinese market. However, unlike their Japanese or Chinese counterparts, Korean producers did not have the backing of a large domestic or ethnic market. Amid the fierce competition and rapid digitization that rendered the domestic market unprofitable, K-pop producers took on the ambitious and risky task of turning K-pop into an export product. EN TRE P RE NE U R S H I P A N D M A R K E T-M AK IN G O F KO RE A N E NTE RTA I N M E N T C O M PA N I E S

The Korean popular music industry, still insular as late as the mid-1990s, achieved regional and global success by 2010. Two developments are particularly significant for the global rise of K-pop.12 First are the entrepreneurial activities of entertainment houses, starting with the pioneering work of founder Lee Soo Man, in developing its production model. Second is the destruction of the digital market that led producers to reorient toward the global market around 2000. BI RTH A ND D E V E LO P M E N T O F T H E I N T EG R AT ED EN TE RTA I NME N T AGE N C Y

Until the middle of the 1980s, the Korean domestic media landscape was highly censored. In 1980, Chun Doo Hwan staged a coup, returned the country to dictatorship, and enacted the Basic Press Law that tightly controlled the media, closed down private broadcasting stations, and licensed two state-run television channels, Korean Broadcasting System and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation. These two channels had been the main platforms for musical promotion and talent discovery given HOW K-POP WENT GLOBAL

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that they took on the role of managing the entertainment industry. Their star system employed musicians through talent shows or open contests, maintained an in-house group of conductors and instrumental bands, and assigned to singers performances of songs that were often not copyrighted. This led to the absence of close associations between singers and songs. The singers were not “expected in real life to assume their stage persona” or to develop identities independent from the broadcasting station.13 Songs became popular only because they were sung widely. Although some successful artists did emerge during this period, Cho Yong Pil in the 1970s and 1980s and the balladeers Byeon Jin Seop, for example, the music industry was localized with genres such as folk singing and “trot” dominating the countryside and adaptation of Western genres such as ballads and rock starting to gain urban recognition. The small and marginalized industry, for the most part, pushed out lackluster products to connect with audiences. The late 1980s brought changes to the societal atmosphere and the popular music market. The Basic Press Law was repealed in 1987, allowing for the expansion of the private television market. Restrictions on international travel were relaxed in 1989 and Koreans could travel and be in freer contact with Western culture and ideas. After decades of suppressing consumption, the government liberalized the retail market and enacted policies to develop the domestic service economy. As more Western and domestic-branded retail outlets started appearing in cities, consumerism grew. In Korea’s budding consumerist and globalizing society, Western popular music steadily gained popularity as Korean musicians experimented with musical styles imitating hip-hop, reggae, house, and R&B. Most important of these was Seo Taeji and Boys, a three-person group that was among the first to introduce rap and revolutionize popular music. They debuted in 1992 and almost singlehandedly created Korean youth culture overnight. The possibility of a vibrant popular music market emerged. Responding to these changing market conditions, entertainment agencies formed and looked for ways to systematize popular music production. SM Entertainment’s founder Lee Soo Man, a former folksinger and DJ, was a pioneer in this regard. He studied in the United States during the 1980s and was heavily influenced by the rise of MTV and the age of music videos. On returning to Korea, determined to replicate 274

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the US entertainment system in Korea, he founded SM Studio in 1988. He imported digital equipment from Akai Musical Instruments, hired composers interested in electronic music, and started working on a new musical production system.14 His earliest experiment was Hyun Jin Young, whose first album failed to make a dent in the charts. According to Russell, “Lee kept on refining his techniques, confident that he could find the right formula for his young protégé. He switched Hyun into baggier, more hip-hop-like clothes, raised the music tempo, and added a stronger rap feel.”15 These efforts paid off, as Hyun’s next album was a big hit. This led Lee to learn the value of “producing” his artists. In the early 1990s, Lee experimented with a formula for popular music production. For example, he hired casting managers to identify potential talent from high schools and surveyed teenage girls to find out what they wanted in artists. SM Entertainment began to train and manage its performers in singing, dancing, and manners and interview skills. In 1996, they debuted a five-member boy band named H.O.T., composed of members with distinct strengths. The group emphasized visual appeal as much as musical talent and dance, put out memorable music videos showcasing repetitive dance moves, fashionable wardrobes, catchy tunes blending several musical genres, and saw instant success. These successes provided a basis for systematizing the production of K-pop during the next decade, for example, the formulaic recruitment and training system for which K-pop agencies are known. Following the success of SM, other entertainment agencies appeared by the middle of the 1990s and produced successful lineups by relying on similar recruitment and training strategies. This completed the threetier popular music agency system that dominates the market today. These three agencies, along with several other market-taking firms, collectively adopted a set of star production and management strategies that proved quintessential to the K-pop formula from the mid-1990s to 2000. Several notable features of the system follow. • Recruitment and training system: competitive, and often global, recruitment of trainees. In-house training and traineeship system that molds the entirety of the artists. • Long-term contracts (commonly referred to as “slave contracts”): contract periods expanded for the management companies to internalize training and recuperate the initial investment on debut.16 HOW K-POP WENT GLOBAL

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• Assembly line–like production model: integrated and mostly internalized and formulaic production model. For example, SM operates today as an integrated management firm that produces music, film, and records, manages events and concerts, and as a music publishing house. • Internalized creative development: artists depend on entertainment agencies for their creative development and commercial success as the agencies have complete control over the artists. • Production of hybrid music: music blending several genres with heavy emphasis on dance, repetitive hooks. • Branded entertainment houses: internally cohesive and recognizable image attached to company lineup and promotes the lineup as a whole. As the top entertainment houses mimetically and competitively implemented these organizational strategies and turned them into a regularized course of music production, the popular music industry in Korea was transformed. Gone was the centrality of the star system, TV station– initiated talent competitions, and genres such as trot, rock, or ballads. The flourishing music business now revolved around the entertainment agencies and their trend-setting abilities by producing dance-heavy tracks and debuting artists who could set new trends and lead youth culture, sell products, and have mass domestic appeal. As these trends continued, the market power of these largest firms to set the standards and drive the trends for the domestic music market increased considerably. Their influence has become so large that in 2008, the top three entertainment agencies produced twelve of the top twenty hits.17 D I G I TA L TU R N A N D T H E GLO B A L IZAT I O N O F K -pop

Despite the development of the integrated agency system through the 1990s, the creations of these largest agencies did not automatically go global. Instead, around 2000, a genre of music that became known as K-pop was strategically promoted as a global product. This period of the global K-pop expansion coincided with a period of revenue decline and digitalization in Korea. Between 2000 and 2007, the Korean domestic music market lost a third of its value, mainly due to the loss of album revenues from its peak of 400 billion in 2000 to only 78.8 billion in 276

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2007.18 Development of the telecommunications sector and infrastructural development was encouraged throughout the 1990s without any corresponding development in copyright protection. In the music distribution sector, new players such as Soribada emerged and changed the competition landscape overnight. In 2000, Soribada, a Napster clone, launched as a peer-to-peer file-sharing site and allowed anonymous users to share files free of charge. Three years after its launch, Soribada’s cumulative membership reached twenty million.19 By 2006, Korea had become the first major music market in which digital formats had reached a 50 percent market share. This led to an equally rapid decline of physical album sales, which before 2000 had been the primary source of music industry revenue. Amid the collapse of the traditional album-based revenue model, the entertainment companies had no choice but to shift their strategies away from the small domestic market and reliance on album sales. Although it wreaked havoc on the domestic market, the rise of internet platforms and digital-based distribution simultaneously opened up possibilities for the global expansion of Korean popular music. However, it was not the mere availability of these platforms but rather the conscious reorientation of production strategies around 2000 that ultimately contributed to the global rise of K-pop. Producers, for example, began taking into consideration the preferences of overseas markets during the design stage of the products rather than following the conventional internationalization strategy of internationally marketing products only after they had achieved domestic success. They now trained artists in foreign language skills, supported the production of foreign language albums, expanded overseas recruitment, diversified the revenue model, and incorporated more demand-responsive production strategies by moni­ toring digital traces left by fans online. One of the first overseas successes was BoA, an SM artist. On her debut in 2000, she was already trained to speak English and Japanese. She produced songs and albums in Japanese, Chinese, and English; worked with Japanese dance teachers, stylists, and producers who helped localize her music; and was assisted by the joint venture between SM Entertainment and overseas music firms including Avex for local distribution. She was one of the few artists ever to have six consecutive number 1 studio singles on the Oricon chart in Japan. Successful elements of this model have been applied more extensively to the production of HOW K-POP WENT GLOBAL

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recent artists, Dong Bang Shin Ki’s (TVQX) Japanese albums and by hiring Japanese managers who assisted with adapting them to local tastes. EXO, from the beginning had operated two separate acts— EXO-K and EXO-M—the former performing in Korean and the latter in Mandarin. Producers have also combined their in-house production model with external networked collaboration of crucial production steps. For example, SM expanded its collaboration with overseas songwriters and choreographers to increase the global appeal of musical products. As websites such as YouTube have become the primary platform for K-pop distribution and promotion, entertainment houses have restrategized their production methods. They have replaced the conventional multitrack album with digital singles and heightened the importance of the visual elements by producing awe-inspiring music videos of high production quality, featuring often impeccably synchronized dance routines, and aesthetically stimulating idols that lead to audience engagement. The role of entertainment agencies in vertically integrating multiple management, star production, recruitment, contracting and management functions is still apparent. However, some artistic functions— such as composition, choreography, and foreign representation—are increasingly being contracted out globally, leading to an insertion of K-pop hierarchies into global networks. Furthermore, the new media have encouraged Korean entertainment groups to become more demand-responsive as it encourages bottomup participation from the audience. K-pop has relied on fans’ participation in both online and offline communities in producing and sharing reaction videos, translating lyrics and interviews, and patronizing brands advertised by their favorite idols. Although these activities have an important network effect of circulating the content to newer locations and exposing K-pop to newer fans, their most important contribution is likely the digital trace these activities leave. Entertainment houses are now conducting data analyses of television and online content viewership and access rates, music download locations, and visitor IP information of webpages to monitor the fluctuations and patterns in demand and set their next market targets.20 Finally, with new media’s rise, entertainment houses shifted their revenue sources away from format sales and toward overseas concerts and merchandise sales as well as business-to-business (B2B) channels 278

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such as television and advertising appearances, content-use royalties, and commissions.21 SM Entertainment, for example, reports that 68.7 percent of its 2016 revenue came from star management operations and that only 31.3 percent from record and sound source business.22 YG Entertainment’s more detailed annual report shows 40 percent of its 2016 revenue derived from B2B activities of records and music (17.8 percent), concerts (16.9 percent), and merchandise sales (5.3 percent). The other 60 percent came from “renting stars out” for advertisements (12.7 percent), royalties (31.1 percent), television and show appearance fees (8.9 percent), and other commissions (7.3 percent).23 In these ways, K-pop has become a global product. Central to this shift has been the constant recalibration of production and distribution strategies by the entertainment houses to produce a global product appealing to ever-widening fan groups in the midst of the digital turn and opening new global potential. H OW K-p o p W E N T G LO B A L

The rise of digital technologies brought about a profound transformation in the media landscape and revolutionized the production and distribution of contents. These changes led some theorists to advance celebratory predictions that the gateless and equalizing nature of digital platforms would enable better circulation of cultural products worldwide and increase global visibility and popularity of nonmainstream and non-Western content. Although digitization did widen global market opportunities for nonmainstream producers, these perspectives fail to explain how some media producers rode the wave of digital technology more successfully than others did. They do not account for the varied roles and responses of media producers and how some globally responsive ones, often by virtue of changes in their own market contexts, strategized to realign their activities and products within the ever-fluctuating global market place, but others did not. Such capitalist strategizing, I argue, was central to the rise and global spread of K-pop. The entertainment houses ceaselessly strived to create a novel formula for popular music and improve their market circumstances, not only vis-à-vis previous market actors such as the broadcasting stations whose power they subverted but also artists and singers HOW K-POP WENT GLOBAL

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and their competitors. They applied methods of modern management to the popular music industry, systematized a production model for popular music to give way to a new form, and created a global market. These efforts transformed the domestic and global markets for popular music because they led to the development of a new musical genre that ultimately saw far-reaching global success. K-pop’s globalization demonstrates how popular music flows are patterned and mediated by the organizational activities of national producers. These producers’ strategies, however, do not emerge from a vacuum. They are instead based on the social and institutional contexts in which they are embedded and which they use to derive an organizational structure to produce and disseminate their creations. These processes are central to the constant flux within capitalist markets, to the rise and fall of certain market actors, the ever-changing consumer culture, and the constant reformulation of the way in which people go about doing things, including making and listening to music. N OTE S 1. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 3. 2. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. I (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996); Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Macmillan, 2005). 3. Jenkins, Convergence Culture; José van Dijck, “Users Like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content,” Media, Culture, Society 31, no. 1 (2009): 41–58. 4. Of course, there are precedents; notably Japanese pop culture products. Anime, videogames, and J-pop were popular in the 1970s and 1980s worldwide. 5. The idol production system originated in Japan and was modified to fit the Korean context. 6. Eun Mee Kim, Big Business, Strong State: Collusion and Conflict in Korean Development, 1960–1990 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). 7. Solee Shin and Lanu Kim, “Organizing K-pop: Emergence and Market Making of Large Korean Entertainment Houses, 1980–2010,” East Asia 30, no. 4 (2013): 255–272. 8. For a full comparative discussion of the patterns of production and circulation of East Asian music, see Solee Shin, “Niche, Ethnic, and Global Operations: Models of Production and Circulation of East Asian Popular Music,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (2017): 5–35. 9. Comparisons should only made between across-country values for a single singer. The country with the highest search volume is set at one hundred and the remainder charts the relative search volume in another country compared with the referent country that has recorded one hundred. The search volume on the last row allows for the comparison of global search volume between the different singers.

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10. Yoshitaka Mōri, “J-pop: From the Ideology of Creativity to DiY Music Culture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10, no. 4 (2009): 476. 11. Shin, “Niche, Ethnic, and Global Operations.” 12. This following section extensively draws on Shin, “Niche, Ethnic, and Global Operations.” 13. Keith Howard, “Coming of Age: Korean Pop in the 1990s,” in Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave, edited by Keith Howard (Folkestone, Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2006), 84. 14. Mark Russell, Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet Culture (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2008). 15. Ibid., 151–152. 16. The training period for 1990s groups like H.O.T., S.E.S., and Fin.K.L. lasted less than a year. Today, artists train for several years if not more than a decade before debuting. For example, Girl’s Generations Jessica and Hyo-Yeon have trained for more than seven years. See Shin and Kim, “Organizing K-pop.” 17. Ibid. 18. KOCCA, Music Industry White Paper, 2011, http://www.kocca.kr/cop/main.do. 19. Taehun Kim and Jeonghwan Yang, Soribadaneun wae (Seoul: Hyeonsilmunhwa, 2010). 20. YG Entertainment, 2016 Annual Report, CART: Financial Supervisory Service, https://dart.fss.or.kr. 21. Keith Howard, “Mapping K-pop Past and Present: Shifting the Modes of Exchange,” Korea Observer 45, no. 3 (2014): 389–414; Ingyu Oh and Gil-Sung Park, “From B2C to B2B: Selling Korean Pop Music in the Age of New Social Media, Korea Observer 43, no. 3 (2012): 365–397. 22. SM Entertainment, 2016 Annual Report, DART: Financial Supervisory Service, https://dart.fss.or.kr. 23. YG Entertainment, 2016 Annual Report.

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15

Toward a Global Community Dreaming High with K-pop Hae Joo Kim

The Korean Wave, or Hallyu, can be understood as a mode of globalization through which South Korea has joined a larger arena of pop culture—a mode that embraces both the national and the global through a competency in cultural forms. Hallyu has broadened the conversation on Korean identity in interesting ways, for embedded in its flow is an acute awareness of the Korean coupled with a cultural vocabulary that is more consciously and conspicuously global; it speaks to a cosmopolitan capacity that enables the country to communicate within a larger culture network. Many of the entertainment genres that have been at the fore of Hallyu have origins in the West and are created in South Korea with the imprint of these prototypes. This is unsurprising in light of the reach and impact that an industry such as Hollywood has historically had worldwide. In the case of South Korea, American entertainment served as a model and cultural significant other when the country was developing its own popular media genres.1 Indeed, much of South Korea’s pop culture output may be seen to resemble what comes out of the United States. Yet though comparisons can be made, South Korean genres have refashioned elements of the original to create versions of entertainment that are notably different, or recognizably not-the-same.2 If American 282

media exports have “set the frame” and “written the grammar” of international television, South Korean television has wielded this language to tell local stories, and the contemporary Korean television drama, or K-drama, is a rich platform where this can be seen.3 This chapter examines the K-drama series Dream High (Korean Broadcasting System 2011) with an eye to its use of music and how a familiar international genre is put into the service of a domestic context. The sixteen-episode Dream High significantly uses music to carry its message, one decidedly global in outlook. Although the drama does not refer explicitly to South Korea’s Hallyu phenomenon in the way that other dramas have, it celebrates Korean popular music and entertainment by integrating it intimately into the drama’s narrative.4 Dream High follows six high school students who train at a prestigious arts school in Seoul as they prepare to become performing artists and ultimately stars. As they hone their craft, their journeys are met with tribulation, rivalry, friendship, self-discovery, and love. The premise of the show resembles that of the American series Fame of the 1980s, which also dealt with the joys and trials of aspiring performing artists. But whereas the episodes of Fame largely focused on the drama that surrounded the path of each performer, Dream High culminates in a situation where the characters’ successes are more than just their own; they point to the success of South Korea through popular music—specifically, through the contemporary brand of music known as K-pop. This marriage of K-pop to K-drama makes Dream High an ideal Hallyu text. The first episode of Dream High opens in the year 2018 with news coverage of a historical moment: singer “K” is the first Korean to win a Grammy and is getting ready to perform at the Sixtieth Grammy Awards Ceremony at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, an event that a news anchor reports has riveted the national gaze. A sequence of shots reveals the bustling of standby preparations at the Grammys interspersed with news coverage of the occasion playing out on several exterior mega screens amid Seoul’s cityscape, after which we approach our singer backstage at the venue, in costume and looking at a photograph of high school friends one last time before taking the stage. Next to this photograph is a pendant with the letter “K”; it is a pendant, we soon find out, that was given to a promising student by the director of Kirin Performing Arts High School. Because the shot of the pendant and photo of friends is framed in a close-up that reveals only part of the artist, we do not To ward a G l o bal C o mm u nity

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know who K is, that is, which of the six friends in the picture has become K. Indeed, the pendant changes hands many times over the course of the drama, and though the trinket itself is a minor thread in the larger story, part of the drama’s fun is that we are left guessing until the end. Shortly after the brief opening segment that takes place in present-day 2018, we are taken back to the time at Kirin Performing Arts School implied by the photograph. In essence, the drama is one big flashback that leads up to the crowning moment we are given a glimpse of at the beginning, and revisit at the end. In many ways, Dream High is a musical; it is a drama in which singing and dancing play an essential role. Moreover, it works like a musical in the way that it insinuates the audience in the progression of musical growth and the ultimate success of music. In fact, Dream High displays several traits of the musical, in particular the Hollywood subgenre known as the backstage musical. Backstage musicals, Jane Feuer explains, are reflexive in that they incorporate the type of entertainment represented in the films themselves. These musicals are not only entertaining, they are also about entertainment, and this makes them self-referential. Within this frame of entertainment, the musical often sets up a conflict between popular and classical music—something Feuer calls the opera versus swing narrative—in which the popular style always comes out victorious. Thus, these musicals are not only self-reflective, they are also self–affirming in the way they applaud popular forms within their stories. Classical music, Feuer points out, is an element in the musical’s vocabulary, and the oppositional setup to popular music, part of the genre’s syntax.5 The juxtaposition of classical and pop styles (and ensuing outcome) has become a well-entrenched node in “supercultural film music,” which Mark Slobin describes as musical codes and conventions begun in Hollywood that have become standard and are taken for granted, in Hollywood and beyond. Certain conventions have traveled well and find themselves more frequently in other cinema cultures; the “classical-pop duel” is one such convention—recognizable, useful, and “alive and well, seventy years after the supercultural pioneers set it up.”6 The theme of elite art opposing popular art makes an appearance early on in Dream High as one of the main characters, Go Hyemi (played by K-pop idol Suzy), is forced to confront her disdain for popular music. Hyemi is a gifted classical vocalist who has studied under renowned soprano Sumi Jo; the first episode shows Hyemi and Sumi Jo 284

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(making a cameo) in concert, singing the famous “Flower Duet” from Delibes’ Lakmé. Hyemi has been awarded a chance to study at Juilliard prep, but because of her father’s financial debt must give up this golden opportunity. Through circumstances beyond her control, she finds herself applying to Kirin, a highly regarded arts school that has graduated many of Korea’s pop stars, but which Hyemi considers a “cesspool” that produces “trash not worthy to be called music.” Her mission, we understand, is to overcome her prejudice against popular music. The beginning of her transformation begins toward the end of the first episode, in an audition scene where she is insulted and outraged at her flat rejection. Dream High appropriates the classical-pop duel setup in persuading the audience of the value of pop. But it also takes advantage of other narrative units established by the Hollywood superculture, such as the audition scene. The audition scene, as Slobin describes it, is a sequence that captures “bored producers watching a chain of hopeless wannabes until they find the future star.” 7 This familiar scene crops up in Dream High and is used to effect, but not without a twist. After a string of auditionees, we arrive at Hyemi, who is undeniably talented. The litany of audition snippets is clearly meant to lead up to Hyemi’s audition, but they also serve to display an array of talented Korean youth, from saxophonists to pop singers to breakdancers to human beat boxes to traditional vocalists. Spanning pansori to hip-hop in the span of a few minutes, the lengthy sequence serves as a sampler of the diversity of genres in the contemporary Korean musicscape. These aspirants are not wannabes, but skilled musicians who demonstrate the high standards of the school, and several of them are granted admission along the way (results given on the spot). When we finally get to our star Hyemi, her song is given full time on screen as she and her friend sing their audition piece—the duet arrangement of a Korean pop song—from beginning to end. Hyemi has vocal chops but fails the audition. Her friend is accepted. Dream High takes the template of the audition scene to jumpstart our character’s career in popular music, as the scene is conventionally meant to, but the occasion does not come in a glorious moment of discovery; our star is not born at the top, amid a sea of other applicants who are hopelessly untalented. Rather, her moment begins at the bottom, when she fails because of a haughty attitude that clearly comes out in her singing style. It is technical and cold, especially in comparison with her harmonizing friend, Baekhui, who is warm, spontaneous, and emotive. To ward a G l o bal C o mm u nity

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Hyemi’s extended audition moment goes on to reveal her fatal fault. When she refuses to accept the results and challenges the school’s director, even questioning his ability to evaluate good singing, the director agrees to give Hyemi another chance: if she can identify what he plays on the piano, he will overturn the decision. He goes on to play an arrangement of Gershwin’s “Summertime” interspersed with an extremely famous Korean trot song, “I Only Know Love” (Sarangbakken Nan Molla).8 Hyemi recognizes the Gershwin (here representing classical music) but is unable to determine the second piece, although everyone else in the room—along with all the others in the building watching these open auditions on screens across the school—clearly knows; in fact, they wonder why the director would pick something so easy. Hyemi incorrectly guesses Saint-Saëns. When the director asks her audition partner for the correct answer, Hyemi is appalled that he would “dare” mix Gershwin with “crap like trot.” She fails this test not because she doesn’t recognize the song, but because she can’t conceive that the two (high and low forms) could possibly be mixed in one arrangement. This exposes her prejudice, which the director pinpoints as her critical flaw. The director explains that although the school accepts first-rate students, that is, those who have talent and work hard, and second-rate students, those who lack talent but work hard, they are not in the habit of accepting third-rate students, those who are biased. The director of the Kirin Arts School (and of the audition in question) is played by actor Bae Yong Jun, a well-known and nationally lauded Hallyu star who played the lead in Winter Sonata, a drama that significantly spearheaded the Korean Wave. Bae makes an extended cameo in Dream High to address Hyemi’s biggest shortcoming and deliver her first important lesson—that she must overcome her prejudice if she is to progress. This message resonates beyond the boundaries of the drama, and Dream High’s embracing of popular entertainment can be seen as an affirmation of Hallyu itself. The drama is a coming-of-age story of Hyemi, but also speaks to the journey of a country that once looked down on popular music in favor of traditional styles and Western classical forms, especially when it came to cultural identity.9 With the advent of Hallyu, popular entertainers, once derogatorily referred to as ttanttara, have risen in national profile, as the country now finds itself sponsoring, indeed proudly advancing, K-pop stars as national cultural ambassadors.10 Although Hyemi initially fails the Kirin audition, she is ultimately allowed into the school through its Special Admissions class because of 286

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a quota that the school must fill. The Special Admissions class is a degraded group of misfits and the school’s lowest rung of students, a place from which she eventually moves up. If at the beginning of Dream High, we are introduced to a character who is forced into popular music because she has no other choice, in the end, we are left with one who is transformed and enlightened about her path in music. After a year at Kirin, toward the end of the drama, Hyemi finds herself at a crossroads when she is met with another chance to go to Juilliard and resume studies in classical voice. This time she passes it up and decides to stay; that is, she chooses popular music. In a voiceover that narrates her journey over a montage of flashbacks revisiting events that have molded her musical identity (episode 15), we see that Hyemi has gone from stiff, impossible diva to approachable, caring friend; her realization elevates popular music and attests to its victory over its classical opponent. B ACKSTAG E A N D O FF S C R E E N : A RT REFER EN CIN G L IFE

Jane Feuer points out that the backstage musical—the most persistent subgenre within the musical film—usually involves kids “getting together and putting on a show.”11 A plot point like this makes it convenient for the musical to manifest its desire to “valorize” entertainment, as Feuer says. But it also, she explains, “demystifies” the production of entertainment by giving us a delightful (and often endearing) behind-the-scenes look. In essence, this revelation—the backstage perspective—gives pleasure to the audience by allowing us to witness the steps to its success. The “putting on a show” conceit cleverly exposes the mechanism of entertainment without destroying its magic. What is at work here is a “myth of integration” that gives audiences a sense of participation in the creation of, on one level, the show, and on another, the film itself. Feuer suggests that this myth works to make the collectively produced show seem like a cooperative effort that includes the film’s viewers. The film audience takes part in the team effort, which in effect cancels out the alienation inherent in the viewing situation.12 The myth of integration promotes audience identification, and in so doing conceals its status as mass art—a mere product of commercialism—and turns it into something more communal. In this way, “the musical film becomes a mass art which aspires to the condition of a folk art—produced and consumed by the same integrated community.”13 To ward a G l o bal C o mm u nity

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Surely one of the most appealing aspects of the backstage design is the way that the audience is made to root for the characters; we are invested in their success because we have been privy to their earnest efforts to put on their show. The connection between audience and character is established in Dream High through this convention. Dream High’s borrowing of the backstage pattern can be seen in the way that it relays the process to K-pop stardom. Indeed, the drama can be seen as an enjoyable how-to of K-pop, a manual that reveals its necessary steps through the experiences of characters that constantly tweak themselves—characters that we develop a fondness for, and ultimately root for. Whereas a Hollywood backstage musical typically shows rehearsals that lead up to a crowning opening night performance within the time frame of the individual film, the “putting on a show” effect is distributed over the episodes of Dream High. In Dream High, our Kirin trainees are seen putting on performance showcases several times over the course of the drama’s sixteen episodes—some showcases real, some fake, some successful, others failures with valuable lessons. In the larger picture, these showcases can be seen as rehearsals that prepare them for the ultimate showcase—the Grammys. And yet the backstageness and self-referentiality of Dream High are made to work on another level. As a drama about a specific type of entertainment—K-pop—it advances its message through casting: five of the story’s six main characters are played by real-life K-pop idols.14 Our opening would-be star, Hyemi, is played by Suzy, a member of the group Miss A; the rapper and street dancer Jinguk is played by Taecyeon of 2PM; Hyemi’s friend and audition partner Baekhui is played by T-ARA’s Eunjeong; the singer-dancer student from abroad, Jason, is played by 2PM’s Wooyoung; and the gifted vocalist Pilsuk is played by guitarist and singer-songwriter IU. Hyemi’s ultimate love interest and musical genius, Samdong, is played by Kim Soo Hyun, the only nonidol among the drama’s six main characters. Casting idols to play young characters that aspire to become idols blurs the line between characters and stars. It also pulls in a playful self-consciousness while infusing the drama with a special feeling of endorsement.15 It brings a level of familiarity as well, one that bleeds over into the fictional story and feeds into the audience’s relationship with the characters. Using idols to portray idols enacts an off-screen awareness that imbues the text with a fluidity and facility in delivering 288

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its message of entertainment. A similar type of cross-referential borrowing was once seen during Hollywood’s studio era. As Jane Feuer explains, musicals were known to invoke the audience’s memories of stars’ previous musicals. This was meant to evoke nostalgia, and such attempts were part of “the star system’s desire to erase the boundaries between star persona and character, between on-screen and off-screen personalities.” In this way, musicals used intertextuality and star iconography to manipulate audience response.16 The placement of some of the country’s most popular K-pop stars in Dream High plays on the audience’s familiarity of the idols’ careers off screen, which is factored into the drama’s overall effect. The cast becomes a community onscreen that extends a backstage view to the drama-watching community off-screen, inviting them to take part in the making of entertainment dreams come true. In this regard, K-pop is perhaps an ideal vehicle because of the way in which it is made to enlist the audience. K-pop intersects with the backstage nature of Dream High to build community with a Korean ethos. But before further exploring this aspect, we take a closer look at K-pop itself. BY WAY OF I N T RO DUC T I O N — T H E “ KO R EAN ” IN K-P O P

As a term, “K-pop” has been in use among overseas fans and diasporic Korean communities since at least the late 1990s, although it did not permeate domestic Korean media channels until later.17 The term was most likely created by the Japanese music industry, according to Hyunjoon Shin, and was probably used initially to differentiate it from “J-pop,” a term in existence since the late 1980s.18 Whereas J-pop was basically a domestic phenomenon, K-pop from the start indicates an external popularity, the term itself having been created outside Korea. K-pop has been the topic of an increasing number of studies that, on the one hand, recognize its growing fan bases outside Asia, and, on the other, note its resemblance to foreign (mostly American) styles and genres—an observation that, however indirectly, brings attention to the “K” of its title. John Seabrook describes K-pop as an “East-West mashup” with complex synchronized dance moves that accompany music that is Western: “hip-hop verses, Euro-pop choruses, rapping, and dubstep breaks.”19 Another music critic has written that K-pop borrows To ward a G l o bal C o mm u nity

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from American and European styles without carrying any “fingerprints”—this mélange being K-pop’s signature aesthetic.20 Indeed some have characterized K-pop as mere copy, a watered-down imitation of American pop. In a review of K-pop singer Rain’s concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden, New York Times music critic Jon Pareles writes, “If there’s anything beyond the lyrics that’s particularly Korean about Rain’s song, it’s not obvious,” further stating that “the obstacle to Rain’s intended United States career is that by the time Mr. Park [his manager] has figured out how to imitate the latest English-speaking hit, American pop will have jumped ahead of him.”21 As a marker of identity, the “K” in K-pop does invite examination beyond noting the language of its lyrics, and the criticisms levied against it point to a question worth considering: how Korean is K-pop, or what is so Korean about it?22 Certainly K-pop is one of many vibrant popular forms of music around the globe today that are heavily influenced by Western pop and speak its language without necessarily inflecting it with any “traditional sonic identity” of the home culture. As Motti Regev argues, assuming cultural identities through popular culture today involves absorbing a certain amount of otherness within the self: “in late modernity, many of the art works and cultural products that signify contemporary ethno-national cultural uniqueness routinely and intentionally include elements drawn from ‘outside’ the nation or ethnicity which they represent.” 23 K-pop instantiates this syndrome; it is a stream of pop music that is not ethnically or sonically “marked.” Its musical language is derived from Euro-American styles and reworked to fit a Korean context. A response to any questions regarding authenticity as it relates to identity would do well to also examine definitions of Koreanness as well as the shifting terrains of cultural authority and ownership in the global culture arena. Yet aspects of K-pop distinguish it from its Western counterpart today. Part of this distinction is the nature of the songs, which are generally more subdued than what is found in American popular music. K-pop groups may border on the sensual, but they rarely venture into the sexual. As Seabrook points out, “Neither the boys’ nor the girls’ lyrics or videos generally refer to sex, drinking, or clubbing—the great themes of Western hit-makers.”24 This is a characteristic that has drawn non-Korean audiences who join Seabrook (a self-proclaimed fan) in 290

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K-pop’s growing fan base. Caucasian American enthusiast “hammycatt” is a consumer of both K-dramas and K-pop and a member of fan community koreandramas.net.25 She explains why she enjoys K-pop: K-pop [is] somewhat “American” in feel . . . That was what hooked me . . . listening to Group S and Lee Jee Hoon, SS501, etc, I was taken back to the “feel” from my 1960’s pop music—yes, it was mass produced and probably somewhat cliché in theme—BUT in a good way—the music itself, it was fresh and happy—no message to push in my face, only love and loss, fun and sadness. Just pure emotion. I used to get so mad at all the people who dissed the Monkees because they were a “manufactured” group in the beginning. A constant criticism was they were not “real musicians.” But did it really matter? They were GREAT entertainers and the fact that their music was so “produced” is what gave them so many fabulous hits—and isn’t that what most performers want? To make hits that people like? That entertain, uplift or move them? K-pop always does this perfectly. It has an innocence, an exuberance that I love. I guess it’s kind of “American retro” and incorporates the best of American pop with a Korean feel. I think of it as “retro” because of its relative innocence in lyrics. . . . If there is anything sexual, it’s implied rather than “in your face.” I like that. I think the lyrics often have a beauty and subtlety that current American music lacks. . . . So while the music itself may somewhat be an imitation musically of some elements of American pop, I think Koreans [have] taken it to the next level!26

Love as portrayed in K-pop is often more romantic than sexualnonthreatening versions that fill a demand for those who have appetites for “US-led pop music” but don’t want the excess.27 Pareles may have mildly disparaged Rain as a “nostalgia act” in his review, but this very aspect is part of K-pop’s appeal and something that contributes to the “K” of its name. Another aspect to which K-pop’s “K” can partially lay claim is the actual process of making K-pop idols. K-pop idols typically sprout from comprehensive management agencies that develop a singer until the right time for a debut. In addition to taking care of an idol’s education, entertainment agencies provide singing, dancing, and acting lessons, tutoring in foreign languages, and coaching on how to behave and To ward a G l o bal C o mm u nity

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interact with the media. Agencies are known to house idols too, and management complexes include dormitories and eateries in addition to studios for practicing, recording, and producing. From composing and arranging to choreography, styling, and marketing, entertainment agencies integrate all, or most, aspects of production and management. The idol system appeared earlier in Japan with Johnny & Associates, but the system has been fine-tuned in South Korea with notable contributions from Lee Soo Man, founder of SM Entertainment.28 K-pop idols emerge from a formula that, at its worst, may seem like cloning. It is perhaps ironic to think that it belongs to Hallyu, a moment in South Korea that bespeaks a flowing of culture and implied creativity. But I would redirect focus not to the product (the “same-ish” idols that are often a target of criticism), but rather to the process. Yu In Chon, former South Korean minister of culture and veteran actor, has pointed to “design” and the capacity for creative adaptation, as part of contemporary South Korea’s cultural strength, and what it can offer to the theater of global culture.29 Yu’s words ring with relevance for the case of K-pop; South Korea may not be the origin of the musical language that K-pop is built on, but it has created a “laboratory,” as one commentator has put it, that seasons and packages singers to levels of excellence in the art of entertaining.30 Intertwined with the K-pop idol-making process is an ingredient that is perhaps the most crucial to an idol’s success, namely, hard work. Although idols must have natural ability to start on the road to K-pop success, much of their talent is not so much discovered as it is formed along the way. And because idol training entails a combination of rigorous regimens, the biggest talents that an idol can have are perhaps endurance and perseverance. Work ethic as a criterion is referenced in Dream High when a famous music label announces its application requirements in a call for aspiring stars—impossible requirements that include an original composition, a fully produced music video with English subtitles, fluency in at least three foreign languages, and awards from at least ten music competitions. Although none of the six main characters fully qualify, they all apply and surprisingly pass this first cut because, as we find out, the first cut was meant to gauge a candidate’s undeterred courage, aptitude for facing challenge, and capacity for endless effort, weeding out weaker applicants. 292

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These characteristics arguably make K-pop a unique brand of music today. But in examining its culture—and K-pop can perhaps be best understood as a culture rather than simply a genre—something warrants a closer look, and that is K-pop’s effect on the audience. What often goes unmentioned in discussions of K-pop where issues of authenticity and imitation take precedence is the community that tends to form around it. B U I L D I NG CO M M U N I T Y: T H E U R I O F K-P O P

One of K-pop’s most striking aspects is its visual appeal; it is not music meant merely to be listened to, but instead music to be watched. K-pop songs are a type of “total entertainment” that includes choreography, fashion, style, and personality, all of which are packaged into visually stimulating pieces. The music video (and attendant “dance practice” video) is very much a part of a new song’s release, and for many K-pop fans, especially those without access to the Korean language, the video is the point of the song.31 Slick and colorful visuals, catchy hooks, and mimicable signature dance moves give K-pop an energy that has the potential to activate onlookers. Simply put, K-pop is made to interact with its audience through dance, which can be learned through repeat watching on media platforms such as YouTube. Once a song’s choreography has been mastered, fans can reshare their versions of the song online and in this way dance in virtual togetherness. This is perhaps the very aspect that makes K-pop contagious; its infectious nature is driven not as much by the circulation of a song’s original video as by the cover versions posted by participants from all places and walks on the open community that is the internet. The shareability inherent in K-pop lessens the boundary between audience and performer because the initial allure of a group’s performance becomes an appealing invitation to replicate the choreography and dance along. The audience is a crucial part of the K-pop equation and one of the factors that drives its culture. Indeed, if American pop can be said to be “all about the artist,” K-pop can be understood as being very much about the audience. The importance of communal spirit is something that can readily be detected in Korean culture. In fact, the sense of an aggregate “we” is built into the language, where the distinction between “yours” and To ward a G l o bal C o mm u nity

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“mine” in common Korean parlance often defers to the collective “our,” or the uri.32 The idea of uri was important to many of Korea’s folk arts, to which audience participation was integral. For example, pungmulnori, a genre of percussion music that flourished as ritual and entertainment in pre-modern Korea, was based heavily on the concept of audience participation in performances that took place within a village’s open space—something known as a madang.33 The goal of a pungmul troupe was to interact with and raise the spirit of a crowd through performance in a madang that did not delineate audience from artist. Dance was a significant part of the pungmul tradition and engaged audiences through accessible rhythms and stylized gestures. To encourage a more organic experience with the audience, performances often included a cast of characters, together called japsaek, that represented various members in the community.34 Japsaek characters were meant to increase audience identification and were essential to initiating the “we” of folk performance because they were easy to relate to. As ordinary figures from the community, they facilitated the mingling of those gathered and stirred them toward the goal of collective excitement, a festive oneness that extended to everyone in the madang. In K-pop, the idea of a participating audience built around the component of dance can be seen in the fan communities that have formed around K-pop; and a look at group design reveals a similar pattern employed to promote audience identification and draw in these communities. The member formation of K-pop groups reflects a keen awareness of audience. Most K-pop groups are composed of several members (some more than twelve) as a technique to reach a wider audience, the thinking being that people will identify with at least one of them, especially given that members wear certain personalities or identities.35 This “ japsaek effect” has proved successful, and K-pop fans often zero in on, or develop a preference for, a particular member (known as a bias) after initial exposure to a group. Indeed, the six main characters in Dream High are built around a similar design, each character speaking to a particular trait.36 This is not to suggest that K-pop is the modern heir to the pungmul troupes of premodern Korea, but only to show that this consciousness can be found in an entertainment form such as K-pop; it has certainly been a crucial part of K-pop’s success. Nor do I mean to ignore the larger marketing strategy of a profit-seeking industry also at work here. 294

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It would be difficult to deny the presence of such tactics. But what remains left out of assessments that deem K-pop’s multimember design as mere moneymaking ploy is how the engineering of groups actually reaches out to audiences and the ensuing communities that form around them.37 Group structure may have something to do with maximizing profit, but the focus on creating music with hooks and digestible choreography that can stir audiences to join acknowledges a communal “we” on the way to generating K-pop’s energy, notwithstanding commercial imperatives, which are part and parcel of any modern pop culture industry.38 The spirit of uri is effectively captured on screen by mobilizing the diegetic audience in Dream High. Jane Feuer notes that audiences within a musical film have a vicarious function, that they often serve as a point of identification for audiences of the film; this works toward the larger effort of making the film appear less like mass art and more like something communal.39 One of the ways this is achieved is through scenes that actually show an audience—ordinary people, amateurs— involved in musical action.40 By implying that entertainment is from the folk, such scenes add to the musical’s aspirations to creating community. Feuer elucidates: “Audiences in the films suggest a contagious

Flash mob led by Kirin teacher ( JYP) and members of the group Dream High. Frame enlargement from Dream High, episode 16.

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spirit inherent in musical performance, related to the suggestion that the MGM musical is a folk art; the audience must be shown as participating in the production of entertainment.”41 In the last episode of Dream High, the energy of a participating audience is put to work much in the way that the audience-within-a-film is meant to, but it is inflected with the uri of Korean folk performance. Toward the end of the story, the six main characters are preparing to debut together under a professional management agency but decide to take the group’s publicity into their own hands when one of their teachers, Mr. Yang (played by the artist Park Jin Young, known as JYP), comes up with the idea of organizing a flash mob with their debut song. The flash mob takes place in an open space—a madang—and begins with Mr. Yang, who is joined by the group’s members one at a time. The flash mob is a sensation, and soon a large crowd is gathered; the moment has become a festive occasion where all are invited and take part. The spirit of entertainment permeates the crowd and, toward the end of the sequence, a division between performer and audience is no longer noticeable. The scene is one of the drama’s highlights. When the flash mob is posted on the internet, it goes viral; as Kirin’s teachers observe the phenomenon together on a tablet, the camera zooms in to show that the original song is quickly joined by cover versions. This, in essence,

The uri of K-pop: audiences participating in the “K-pop madang.” Frame enlargement from Dream High, episode 16.

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transforms the K-pop madang into a virtual madang—an extension of the physical space in cyberspace. The uri of K-pop’s physical madang here generates new energy through a synergy with online participatory culture. The building of community through the backstage design in Dream High converges with the uri in K-pop culture to integrate audience and turn the drama into a communal success, one that is culturally informed. Shortly after the culminating flash mob, the group Dream High is picked up by a television station and invited to make its live debut on national television. The drama concludes with the group’s success, but not before returning us to the beginning episode, backstage at the Grammys. DR E A MI NG O F T H E GLO B A L

Ending as it does at the Grammys in the United States—the world’s biggest music market—the drama’s “backstage feel” is introduced to an international stage, a beginning that is at once a victory and a challenge. Empowered by the potential of social media, the stage heralds an opportunity to interact with an even broader audience. This is the message of Dream High through its celebration of entertainment: it points to a larger community and aspires to the global through K-pop, yet keeps its cultural identity intact. The self-reflective musical, according to Feuer, “offers a vision of musical performance originating in the folk, generating love and a cooperative spirit which includes everyone in its grasp and which can conquer all obstacles.”42 The overcoming of obstacles in Dream High bears success not only for its characters, but for South Korea as well, through K-pop. Inciting flash mobs from Moscow to Paris to Toronto, and gaining visibility on high profile platforms, the aspirations of Dream High are being evinced in small ways around the globe, manifesting K-pop’s (and South Korea’s) desire to be part of a global uri.43 Given its fluency in a global cultural form, K-pop—and Dream High’s narrative—looks to an international platform, effectively relaying a goal of Hallyu, which marks a significant moment in South Korea, where Koreanness communicates cosmopolitan competence and wider cultural belongingness while displaying a badge of distinctiveness. By engaging the tropes and conventions of the musical, and by employing K-pop, Dream High illustrates the Hallyu ambition of participating in the global while maintaining a Korean identity within the worldwide flows of popular culture. To ward a G l o bal C o mm u nity

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N OTE S 1. Doobo Shim notes that Korea, in developing its cultural industry, “emulated and appropriated the American media system with the mantra ‘Learning from Hollywood.’ ” See Doobo Shim, “Hybridity and the Rise of Korean Popular Culture in Asia,” Media, Culture & Society 28, no. 1 (2006): 32. 2. Jinhee Choi has shown, for example, how films like the Korean blockbuster invoke Hollywood but differentiate themselves by appealing to a shared sense of Korean history and sentiment. Her discussion is not limited to cultural specificity or local content, but includes an examination of its cross-fertilizations with filmic and aesthetic conventions. She reveals how contemporary Korean cinema “creates, adopts, borrows, and transforms filmic practices and aesthetic norms as it addresses issues that are of immediate concern to Korean audiences.” She therefore argues that it would be hasty to conclude that something like Korean cinema is merely mimicking Hollywood. See Jinhee Choi, The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 11. 3. David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), 223 4. Since the mid-2000s, an increasing number of K-dramas have consciously incorporated the Hallyu phenomenon in big and small ways: for example, the female lead in My Girl (Maigeol, Seoul Broadcating System [SBS] 2005) starts out as a Hallyu tour guide; one of the main characters in Secret Garden (Sikeurit Gadeun, SBS 2010) is a Hallyu star who frequently leaves Korea to give concerts in Japan; King of Dramas (Deuramaui Jewang, SBS 2012–2013) features a main character who is known for his talent in producing successful Hallyu dramas; The Greatest Love (Choegoui Sarang, Munhwa Broadcasting System 2011) revolves around the romance between the member of a girl group and a top Hallyu actor who is courted by the likes of famed Hollywood director, “Peter Jason”; the female lead in My Love from Another Star (Byeoleseo On Geudae, SBS 2013–2014) is played by a real-life Hallyu star who plays a Hallyu star in the drama. 5. See Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” in Genre: The Musical, edited by Rick Altman, 159–174 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 54–57. 6. Mark Slobin, ed., Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), vii–62, 341. 7. Ibid., 47. 8. Known as teuroteu in Korean, trot (from the English word “foxtrot”) is a type of popular music that began in Korea in the early twentieth century and bears similarities to Japanese enka. 9. Okon Hwang states that popular music was, until recently, considered to be inferior by scholars as well. See “The Ascent and Politicization of Pop Music in Korea: From the 1960s to the 1980s,” in Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave, edited by Keith Howard (Folkestone, Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2006), 36–47. In another article, she briefly discusses the disparity of social status between popular musicians and musicians of Western classical music in South Korea. See Hwang, “No ‘Korean Wave’ Here: Western Classical Music and the Changing Value System in South Korea,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 31 (2009): 56–68.

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10. In colloquial Korean, ttanttara is a pejorative term used for entertainers that rings with a particular air of gaudiness. 11. Feuer, “Self-Reflective Musical.” 12. Feuer, Hollywood Musical, 17. 13. Feuer, “Self-Reflective Musical,” 168. 14. An idol in Korean pop culture generally refers to a young celebrity who has been trained and groomed for several years by a management agency before debuting, usually as a singer. Idols must have good looks and slender (frail or fit) physiques. They are active on many platforms in the entertainment industry (singing, acting, emceeing, brand modeling), and are central to the pop culture diet of tweens, teens, and young adults—groups that make up the bulk of their audiences. 15. Dream High plays with this meta aspect in moments that knowingly acknowledge reality within its fictional world. For example, in episode 2, one of the main characters, Pilsuk (played by IU, an idol in real life), is shown admiring a picture of her idol crush, Kim Hyeonjung, who is a real K-pop idol and supposedly a graduate of Kirin Arts School; Kim makes a cameo here as himself. In another example, Baehkui (played by T-ARA’s Eunjeong) is shown dancing to K-pop group Miss A’s hit song “Good Girl, Bad Girl” in a performance showcase in episode 4 as main character Hyemi looks on in resentment; the reference here is that Hyemi is played by Suzy, who is a real-life member of the group Miss A. Over the course of the drama, idols from Kpop groups Super Junior (Leeteuk, Eunhyeok) and 2PM (Nickhun) also make appearances, as themselves. 16. Feuer, “Self-Reflective Musical,” 170. 17. It is difficult to locate exactly when the term “K-pop” started to see common use among listeners overseas. Most Korean pop aficionados would probably agree that it began during the time between landmark groups Seo Taiji & Boys, who debuted in 1992, and H.O.T., who debuted in 1996; Seo Taiji’s group was still referred to as gayo at the time, but H.O.T. was called K-pop (by audiences outside Korea). Some overseas fans have retroactively referred to Seo Taiji & Boys as “classic K-pop” or “oldies K-pop,” although within the line between gayo and K-pop lies a difference in production system, distribution and marketing, and means of consumption. 2011 was the year when the domestic Korean media (news platforms, and music, entertainment, and variety shows) and domestic Koreans notably began, en masse, to use the term keipap (케이팝 or K팝), which has now largely replaced gayo, the older term for pop songs in Korea. 18. Hyunjoon Shin, “Reconsidering Transnational Cultural Flows of Popular Music in East Asia: Transbordering Musicians in Japan and Korea Searching for ‘Asia,’ ” Korean Studies 33 (2009): 106. The term “J-pop” was coined by Japanese radio station JWAVE in 1988 to refer to a new and fashionable type of Japanese pop song that catered to trendy, urban youth. J-pop music captured the sounds of Euro-American styles and often had English or “English-like” Japanese lyrics. This was a time of globalization in Japan when the prefix “J” was beginning to replace an older identity moored to the letter “N,” for Nippon/Nihon. See Yohitaka Mōri, “J-pop: From the Ideology of Creativity to DiY Music Culture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10, no 43 (2009): 475–479. 19. John Seabrook, “Factory Girls: Cultural Technology and the Making of K-pop,” New Yorker, October 8, 2012. 20. Jon Caramanica, “Korean Pop’s Singular Mélang,” New York Times, August 19, 2012.

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21. John Pareles, “Korean Superstar Who Smiles and Says, ‘I’m Lonely,’” New York Times, February 4, 2006. 22. The label K-pop has come to encompass many styles and genres of music that get swept under its blanket category. Just as A-pop would not be a useful, or appropriate, descriptor for contemporary American popular music (pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, house, techno, EDM, and so on), the term “K-pop” conceals a diversity of styles. Although many K-pop artists are known to mix various styles of music within one song, this is not always the case. From Apink’s bubblegum aesthetic in “No No No” to K. Will’s soulful ballads to Big Bang’s electro-techno feel in “Fantastic Baby,” K-pop artists and songs span the gamut. 23. Motti Regev, “EthnoNational Po-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism Made from Within,” Cultural Sociology 1, no 3 (2007): 318. 24. Seabrook, “Factory Girls.” Recent years have seen the appearance of some more sexually suggestive songs and videos that cannot be ignored because they are performed by K-pop idols and are considered to be K-pop; these frustrate the idea that Kpop is wholesome across the board. Hyun A’s “Ice Cream” (2012) is somewhat reminiscent of American singer Kelis’s “Milkshake,” although its display of sexuality is not as explicit. Trouble Maker’s “Now” (2013), and Gain’s “Bloom” (2012) and “Fxxk U” (2014) move into more explicit territory, Madonna-style. The music video to K. Will’s “Please Don’t” (2012) has a surprise ending that points to homosexual love, something that is still taboo in South Korean society. Although songs like these still represent a minority in the K-pop landscape, their hits continue to grow on YouTube, and it will be interesting to see if and how K-pop artists who push the envelope with content will affect the overall K-pop arena. 25. In January 2016, the Korean Drama Group (한국무리) closed its website and established a presence on Facebook. 26. Email correspondence, February 7, 2011. 27. John Lie, “What Is the K in K-pop? South Korean Popular Music, the Culture Industry, and National Identity,” Korea Observer 43, no 3 (2012): 356. 28. With his experience as a musician, producer, and radio host in South Korea, and his experience as a student in the United States, Lee had a good handle on different musical styles and was able to zero in on what would speak to youth in the Asian region at a time when South Korea was globalizing. His agency, SM, was responsible for developing H.O.T., one of Korea’s first-generation idol groups. SM is home to top tier K-pop artists such as BoA, Super Junior, TVXQ, Girls’ Generation, SHINee, EXO, and f(x). 29. Lecture at the Hallyu Academy, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, South Korea, October 2, 2007. 30. Robert Bound, culture editor at Bloomberg Monocle, has referred to South Korea as a “laboratory for the future of pop music.” See Bloomberg Monocle, “Kpop Industry,” YouTube, September 28, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 7HRtsMkhrZg. 31. In a feature on NPR’s Planet Money titled “Why K-pop Is Taking Over the World,” aired on October 16, 2012, reporter Zoe Chace provides a helpful explanation of K-pop’s appeal and the path to its rise in popularity; she brings to light the importance of video in K-pop and sees it as an aspect that has contributed to K-pop’s success abroad, remarking that K-pop is “well prepared to serve the video-obsessed, mobile phone-carrying” media population.

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32. Uri can be translated as “we,” “us,” or “our.” In everyday speech, Koreans commonly refer to things like country, home, and various family members with the possessive pronoun “our,” such that the phrase “my country” would be translated as uri nara (our country); “my home” would be uri jip (our house); and “my mother” would be uri eomma (our mother). 33. Also known as a pan (public arena), this open space—the madang—functioned not only as a physical space but also an important emotional and spiritual space where people gathered as one. Donna Kwon explains madang and pan as terms that are “imbued with evocative social connotations of communal gathering and embodied participation.” In Korean folk performance, the madang opens up the relationship between performer and audience, reinforcing a sense of solidarity in the absence of barriers. See Donna Kwon, “Music, Movement and Space: A Study of the Madang and P’an in Korean Expressive Folk Culture” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005). 34. For a good explanation of japsaek and the typical cast of figures that were an integral part of Korean pungmul drumming performance, see Katherine In-Young Lee, “The Drumming of Dissent during South Korea’s Democratization Movement,” Ethnomusicology 56, no. 2 (2012): 185–186. 35. K-pop groups are well known for having many members, some upwards of ten. Some of K-pop’s larger groups include Super Junior, which originally had thirteen members; Girls’ Generation, which originally had nine members; and EXO, which originally had twelve members. Other popular groups include AOA (eight members), After School, Monsta X, BTS, iKon, and Got7 (seven members each), T-ARA, Apink, and B.A.P. (six members each), and SHINee, f(x), Big Bang, Red Velvet, and 4minute (five members each). More recently, in 2016, SM Entertainment debuted a multimember group called NCT, with an indefinite, fluctuating number of members. 36. Each of the six main characters in Dream High clearly has musical ability, but they each also possess a weakness: Hyemi is talented but has a prejudice against popular music; Jason is talented but lacks discipline; Jinguk is talented but lacks vision; Pilsuk is talented but lacks physical beauty (she is overweight); Baekhui is talented but lacks confidence; and Samdong is a diamond in the rough—a country boy with a regional accent who is naturally gifted but lacks training and is unaware of his potential. Viewers will be able to relate to at least one of these traits, and by extension the characters, who with fine tuning ultimately go on to become the group Dream High. 37. John Lie is one critic who suggests that K-pop’s group structure is “dictated in part by cold-blooded business calculations.” In addition to faulting K-pop for its lack of specific cultural character (he suggests that one would be hard-pressed to find anything “Korean” about it), he regards K-pop as a project of “naked commercialism” where “financial and other business concerns consistently trump musical or artistic considerations.” Like those of Pareles, Lie’s comments seem to raise a more fundamental question—“What does it mean to be Korean?”—that in many ways defies a fixed answer in the wake of globalization. Criticisms regarding the profit-driven nature of K-pop would more appropriately be directed toward the “pop” rather than the “K,” as it would be near impossible to find any pop music that is not manufactured or commercialized in any country with a culture industry and a bottom line wanting to reach the widest possible audience. See Lie, “What Is the K in K-pop?,” 357–362. 38. The idea of being part of a collective entity can also be seen in the way that management agencies refer to themselves. Each of the three big agencies, for example,

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goes by a larger group identity: singers from YG Entertainment are known as YG Family, SM Entertainment singers are billed as SM Town, and artists from JYP Entertainment are together called JYP Nation. This idea of belonging to a larger unit is, in turn, extended to fans, who are welcomed into a larger “family,” “town,” or “nation” when they engage in K-pop. 39. Feuer, “Self-Reflective Musical.” 40. Feuer explains, for instance, that the “Skip to My Lou” sequence from Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) shows young men and women joining in a group dance that “projects a folk quality through and through.” Certainly, the use of a folk song lends an air of community bonding to the scene, but the mechanism of unrehearsed music and dance lend an inclusivity that further accentuates this feeling. The “Dancing in the Dark” sequence from Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953) to draw another example, is also convincing because Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse’s dance flows as a natural extension of a group of ordinary people dancing in Central Park. See Feuer, “Self-Reflective Musical,” 10, 168. 41. Ibid., 170. 42. Ibid., 168. 43. K-pop’s entry into an international pop consciousness has been growing steadily for several years, with milestones such as Big Bang’s winning of the Best Worldwide Act award at the MTV EMAs (European Music Awards) in 2011, and Girls’ Generation’s win at the first YouTube Music Awards in 2013, where they beat out the likes of Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and One Direction. Industry magazines have taken notice, too: Billboard and Billboard Korea together launched a K-pop chart (“Kpop Hot 100”) in 2011; and in 2013, Billboard inaugurated a separate K-pop column called “K-Town.” Rolling Stone magazine printed its first article on K-pop in 2012. Other visible events include the Wonder Girls opening for American band Jonas Brothers on their 2009 world tour and 2NE1 being crowned MTV Iggy’s “Best New Band in the World” in 2011. Girls’ Generation also made appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman and Live! with Kelly Ripa in 2012. More recently, Crayon Pop opened for Lady Gaga on her 2014 summer tour. And as of the time of this writing, PSY’s hit “Gangnam Style” has more than 2.8 billion views on YouTube.

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Thinking Outside the Canvas The Lost Art of Cinema Billboards in South Korea and India R o a l d Ma l i a n g k ay

Cinema billboards are like most forms of print advertising: they aim to attract the target consumer by announcing a product’s existence, emphasizing its uniqueness, and providing basic information on its value. Their purpose is to sell a product that will not offer any immediate benefit in dealing with the toils of everyday life but an enjoyable reprieve from them instead. At the same time, as with fads and fashion, they also promise a marker of positive social distinction to the many consumers wishing to remain informed on the latest developments in a particular area of popular culture.1 But despite the importance of making people believe that the product is something they ought not to miss out on, providing more than basic information is no option: the appeal of the product must be instantaneous. A degree of sensationalism, suspense, or the promise of something not shown elsewhere is therefore crucial to the success of movie billboards and related marketing media.2 Another critical factor these days is the use of digital technology to target consumers at any place and time. But while posters could build momentum by way of the careful distribution of particular information over time or appear virtually everywhere for a limited period, in the past painted cinema billboards tied the experience of a movie to a particular cinema, relying on their shape, size, and content for maximum impact.

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A cinema in Busan with billboards for Western movies, 1950.

Throughout many parts of Asia, painted billboards long embedded cinematic fiction in the reality of daily life. In the West, the majority of cinemas came to follow the practice of using white marquees with black movable type relatively early on, but until recently cinemas in South Korea and India attracted audiences using colorful, painted billboards in all shapes and sizes. They showed the names of the movie and its stars, close-ups of the protagonists and crucial scenes, and any novel technological features. Despite wide use of foreign symbols and sceneries, and often leaning on the general appeal of foreign movies, they ultimately were part of a localized experience. Studies of cinema often focus on celebrities and the texts and subtexts of specific movies, but the conditions of venues in relation to viewing experience are rarely considered. Yet, by catering to a particular type of audience, the conditions that cinemas provide determine not only the selection of movies but also their interpretation. In South Korea and India, painted billboards were an important part of the settings that cinemas entail.3 In Chennai, the capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for example, which was long considered the domestic hub of billboard production, some even replicated the size of the screens inside the largest theaters so as to provide passersby with a glimpse of the actual experience.4 In comparison with the arguably more self-confident black-and-white billing that relies 304

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on the use of other marketing media, painted cinema billboards demonstrated why movies had to be seen, and at the venues to which they were tied. This chapter examines the local demands of painted billboards in South Korea and India. Rather than on the artisanship and artistry of the painters, it focuses on the medium’s importance as an expression of the local culture. TH E CRA F T

In South Korea (Korea) and India, billboards have been used to attract vastly different audiences. Whereas those created in Korea after its independence advertised domestic and foreign (primarily Hollywood) movies to an audience that spoke one and the same language, those created in India were more diverse: apart from Bollywood and Hollywood movies, they promoted productions from a wide range of regional cinema industries in any one various languages, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, or Malayalam. 5 Online sources allow easy analysis of the development of movie posters, but studying the design and concept of painted billboards relies on the scant and scattered collections of street photography.6 Because of their large size, billboards were never collected, so very few survive.7 Because billboard painters also worked on movie posters, the two marketing formats converged somewhat, which allows one to consider the impact of particular styles, scenes, or celebrities on consumers, and thus the role of the billboards as part of a cinema’s marketing scheme as a whole. Even so, the two advertising formats differed in three critical ways. First, posters could build momentum through careful distribution over time. Second, although most posters had to conform to a particular shape and size to be reproduced, many billboards deviated intentionally from those criteria to maximize their impact. Their three-dimensional nature made viewing them a relatively more “real” experience. Third, billboards did not need to provide textual information and frequently comprised only a movie title and an iconic face or scene.8 According to Yongchae Park, cinema billboards began to appear in Korea around the time of the Korean War, but a city map for Japanese tourists from 1929 includes a small photo of Seoul’s central Daejeonggwan cinema showing large billboards above its entrance, similar to those used in Tokyo’s Asakusa district at the time.9 Few photos survive T hinking O u tside the C anvas

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of cinemas from the colonial period (1910–1945), but during and after the Korean War (1950–1953), US servicemen took many photos of public life, which on occasion include cinemas. Shortly after the war, when the nation struggled to recover from the widespread destruction, and countless casualties and displacement of people, escapism boosted sales of movie tickets. The growth in the number of cinema venues underpinned the demand for billboards, though roadside ones disappeared again around the early 1960s.10 In the 1960s and 1970s, a few decades before billboards and posters would come to advertise the opening of a movie in general, as opposed to one tied to a particular venue, movies premiered only at the main cinemas in downtown Seoul. The cinemas commissioned painters to create billboards as well as a poster for distribution on walls and telephone poles in the vicinity.11 The profession of billboard painter appealed to a fair number of failed artists, in the first instance because of the money, but also because in spite of its association with popular entertainment it was tied to a degree of prestige. Former billboard painter Gwangsik Choe recalls once having to audition and compete against several tens of competitors to finally get the job with Daehan Cinema.12 Usually, however, a new hire would start as an apprentice to the main artist, who was dedicated to only one or two cinemas.13 In 1977, when the number of cinemas had grown exponentially, a total of some 1,500 billboard painters were active, 40 percent of them in Seoul.14 Because most cinemas were located in the central district of Seoul, most of the painters could also be found there. Noted artists working here included Juntae Park (Gukdo [National] Cinema), Jeongbeom Gong (Scala), Gwanghyeon Go (Myeongbo Cinema), and Jongtae Cho and Jaebong Jang (Piccadilly).15 Many of them used a workplace inside the cinema to which they were tied.16 Over the ensuing two decades, competition from television and the multiplex format led to a decline in the number of cinemas. In 1993, the number of billboard painters active in Korea, and Seoul in particular, had decreased to approximately three hundred and one hundred respectively.17 By 2008, some years after the retirement of his former mentor Juntae Baek in the early 2000s, Yeongjun Kim (born 1958) had become Korea’s last active billboard painter.18 Earlier, in the late 1950s, the growing competition between theaters led to an increase in the size of the billboards, which in the early 1960s brought about all kinds of deviations from the standard rectangular 306

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shape.19 Uniquely shaped billboards with a protruding head, limb, or movie title became the new standard. The general size of billboards continued to increase throughout the 1960s until a 1972 government regulation brought the average size down again.20

The Hanil Theatre in Daegu, around 1972.

In the early 1990s, the size of billboards ranged between 3 to 6 meters high and 10 to 15 meters wide.21 According to painter Yeongjun Kim, the painting method did not change much over time. Sometimes slides were used, projected onto a canvas to draw the outlines, but the preferred method divided the image into blocks, usually of about 1 meter square, which were then drawn onto the canvas from a photo or poster that the painter held in his hand. The common practice of making billboards out of smaller blocks allowed easy transportation and repair. Kim told me that the overall size of the billboards was always set, save for the protruding parts. Although they were partly made of cloth, and usually comprised several parts, the weight of billboards was an important issue. Putting the billboard up outside was usually done by the painters themselves, most of the heavy lifting by their apprentices; it was the hardest part of the job, and dangerous, especially when Christmas lighting came in vogue and had to be added.22 T hinking O u tside the C anvas

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Whereas most billboards were used for only two weeks, they could take up to ten days to complete. Painters were therefore able only to complete two to three billboards per month on average. Indeed, although Jaebong Jang estimated that he had painted some five hundred billboards over a twenty-two-year period, amounting to about two per month, Juntae Baek recalled having painted double that number over a fortyyear career.23 For some time until the early 1970s, when competition between cinemas was particularly strong, painters would be paid an additional fee when a movie ran for a particularly long time, but the bonus eventually disappeared.24 Pay also differed depending on the venue. In 1977, painters would usually be paid approximately $205 (원100,000) for an average-size billboard (4 x 12 meters), but major cinemas located in the center of Seoul would pay double that amount.25 Around the mid1990s, cinemas would pay approximately $1,250 (원1 million) for a standard-size billboard, and in some cases as much as $6,350 (원5 million), but because most painters worked with assistants and had to cover the cost of materials, they rarely earned more than a few hundred dollars per billboard.26 According to Yeongjun Kim, the promotion materials provided to the painters commonly determined the design and concept of the billboard. Sometimes, however, painters would watch a pre-screening or request to read the scenario to know which scenes to highlight.27 Although they were careful not to disappoint either the fans of movie stars or the cinema director, they had to also abide by the ethical standards that were being enforced by the Public Performances Screening Committee (Gongyeon yunli wiwonhoe): Whenever a movie would come in, they always came with some twenty posters and stills. And so we would always paint in a style that kind of matched those [materials]. The film company would simply ask, “this is an action film, so please put emphasis on the action”. Just that; there were no special requirements. We definitely had to show them [our stuff] first, as in “this is what it will look like”. And besides that there was the Public Performances Screening Committee, who’d make sure it wasn’t provocative or . . . Basically making sure it wasn’t. So I always did a sketch first. The committee would otherwise make us take it down and fix it, like when it was too erotic, or because of a kiss. It was really silly back then. It was a dictatorship. That was at the time of Chun Doo Hwan. We’d been putting it up, and

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then below us these guys in black suits would come up [the scaffolding] and then immediately go down telling us that something was wrong. So we’d wait until they were gone to finish the job.28

Because foreign movie stars were less well known, both Juntae Baek and Yeongjun Kim found it easier to paint them.29 If they felt a drawing did not resemble the actual character, either cinema directors or, on rare occasions, people related to the film company would ask for corrections, which often required painters to work overnight.30 On occasion, however, actors or actresses would ask that they be included or for the size of their depiction to be enlarged. Gwangsik Choe recalls how around the time the movie Wokeo hil-eseo mannapsida (Let’s Meet at Walker Hill, directed by Hyeongmo Han, 1966) opened, leading actor Hanseop “Twist” Kim came to his workshop and shoved an envelope in his pocket asking him to paint his face large. Janggan Heo, who was known for playing villains, would frequently visit workplaces to take painters out for meals and drinks.31 Yeongjun Kim explained: Some of them would give some money, to be included in the billboard. And I was also often asked to make their image bigger. They would come to our workplace, give us an envelope and ask us to make their picture look good. Churyeon Kim did, for example. He now appears in many things, but that was at a time when he was looking for more work. 32

Churyeon Kim appears to have been particularly ambitious in his pursuit. Chuntae Baek also recalls Kim approaching him every night in 1977, shortly before Gyeoul yeoja (Winter Woman, directed by Hoseon Kim, 1977) would open, requesting to be drawn larger than leading stars Seongil Sin and Miheui Jang.33 According to Gwangsik Choe, in the 1960s and 1970s, when theaters regularly hosted singer galas that were broadcast on television, popular singers considered it critical to have their face appear large on a billboard. He recalls working for a cinema in Sinseoldong where singer Serena Kim was due to perform. When she found that her image did not appear large enough on the billboard, she refused to perform. Being a huge fan of hers, the executive manager subsequently had Choe put up a large billboard with the singer’s face above the flyover in front of the cinema in the middle of an icy winter.34 T hinking O u tside the C anvas

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In India, the heyday of painted cinema billboards began a decade later than in Korea. The number of senior painters active in the 1970s was considerable, presumably exceeding that of Korea manifold, but as in Korea they were all male.35 Here, a senior painter would also work with a group of assistants, who took care of much of the preparatory work, such as creating the frames, and preparing the paint. Most studios worked for a range of businesses producing both cinema billboards and other advertising hoardings. In the 1970s, some of the studios had more than one senior painter and employed as many as thirty-five people, including lettering artists who specialized in placing text on the billboards. Because they required much space, the companies usually had a studio of their own where they could welcome clients, store their work, and paint in daylight. The extra space also made it easier to project photographs onto canvases, the technique most commonly used.36 Whereas in 1991, artists could make up to $1,200 per month if they finished three billboards per day, by 2002 the pay had doubled.37 Andreas Weigelt posits that in part because Indian billboards were anonymous the profession was not attractive to artists, who actively refrained from signing their work.38 Indeed, as elsewhere, billboards would have been commonly considered undeserving of the accolade of fine art. After all, they were recreations of photographs, intended for public consumption, ephemeral, and associated with the posters that left walls and poles in disorder. Preminda Jacob argues that rather than being caused by a sense of embarrassment, the practice of signing with a studio name as opposed a personal one was driven by tradition.39 Because they worked on a prominent and crucial aspect of Indian daily life, Indian billboard painters enjoyed a degree of fame. Nevertheless, it was not until after the demise of the unique art form that masters such as K. Madhavan, Maqbool Fida Husain, and Balkrishna Laxman Vaidya would become fondly associated with it, even gaining international recognition.40 The style of Indian billboards differed noticeably from that of Korea. In India, for example, billboards usually highlighted the faces of movie stars and their expressions. Korean ones tended to arrange the image of stars looking away from the observer next to one or more scenes from the movie, whereas Indian ones commonly featured only the image of one or two stars, sometimes looking directly at the observer with considerable expression as if breaking the fourth wall in a mute yet emotional outburst. Another significant difference was that 310

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many Indian billboards were more photorealistic and violent because they depicted wrinkles and body hair as well as blood and sweat. Their realism was supported also by the relative size of the scenes depicted, as well as three-dimensional attributes, such as fabric, glitter, or sequins.41 In Korea, a billboard would feature only the main characters drawn to either a plain background, or a convergence of scenes in miniature, but in India a single scene could take up the entire space.42 Measuring between 3 to 30 meters wide and 12 to 25 meters high, some towering several stories above a cinema’s façade, Indian billboards were considerably larger.43 This may explain why, in Chennai, the painters themselves were rarely involved in putting up their work.44 And yet, although Korean painters may have been able to demand an extra fee for taking on the job of fixing the billboards, they did not have as many opportunities for work as those in India, where billboards for a wide range of products sometimes dominated urban street views. Korean billboard painters were required to abide by the government’s ethical standards, but they did not have to concern themselves with the political implications of a movie or celebrity. Stringent censorship would have been applied during the production process to weed out messages that did not align with the government’s objectives. Painters would make celebrities and crucial scenes stand out as much as possible by applying accepted contemporary standards of beauty and artistry. In India, painters equally followed set local norms, though they pushed the boundaries more often with their depictions of the female body.45 While some banners depicted actresses posing like fashion models, twirling to the details of their clothing, or in backlit close-ups that showed off stylish jewelry and novel hairstyles, more frequently the dress codes of the female protagonists were coopted to communicate the moral values the film endorsed. Fateful seduction, rebellious modernity, and youthful immaturity were visualized through “Western” apparel—tight trousers, shorts, miniskirts, and revealing blouses or dresses. Conversely, Indian garments and hairstyles commanded respect while communicating innocence, purity, and dutiful awareness of a woman’s role in society.46

Although the depiction of women could prompt the police to censor all or parts of billboards, on occasion a public outcry led to censorship regulations being further enforced.47 Because Indian billboards also T hinking O u tside the C anvas

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depicted “real” public figures, the issue of censorship was relatively complex. Jacob shows that because the cinematic and political realms in India have long overlapped, rather than abided relatively simply by centrally set and monitored standards, such as in Korea, censorship was a site of regional, religious, and political contention.48 Although most people in the industry regularly devoted their time and energy to a particular political party, sometimes the fan clubs of movie stars functioned as one of their cells. In one major political rally in Chennai in October 1990, for example, billboards were effectively used to highlight a political figure’s affiliation to a former movie star.49 As in Korea, a number of aspiring celebrities concerned themselves with how they were included on billboards, but their intentions were sometimes more directly political.50 LOCALIZED EXPERIENCE

Cinemas usually attract specific audiences, not merely passersby. People prefer visiting a venue associated with their social class or the one they aspire to, whether for its styling, facilities, movie selection, or location. In the case of multiplexes, which are commonly located near cafés, restaurants, and shopping outlets, the numerous defining markers mitigate undesirable associations with a particular social group. Even if the association implies a less than desirable offer of movies, experiencing a movie in the company of a preferred kind of audience, whose sociopolitical views one expects to have much in common with, has considerable attraction. A cinema therefore has some impact on the sociopolitical group that a particular movie may be associated with and, subsequently, on how its movies may be experienced. Srivinas notes the considerable difference in cinema audiences in Bangalore: “In the Cantonment, theaters that screen Hollywood movies in English attract large numbers of the educated and Westernized middle class. In the city, theaters that screen regional Kannada, Tamil, or Telugu-language films draw the nonwesternized, non-English-speaking population, including the lower socioeconomic classes.”51 The location of a cinema is never random and neither are its billboards or its digital displays. Anna McCarthy shows how marketing companies can set up television screens in particular urban locations to catch audiences from specific social classes.52 In India in the mid-1930s, Jithubai Mehta, a publicity agent who organized the 312

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distribution of handbills to people on the street, adjusted the bills to the area where they were handed out, so that, for example, those distributed in Mumbai’s southern neighborhood of Bhuleshwar, where many temples are located, would include a few lines from some ancient Hindu text, and those handed out in the affluent Nepean Sea Road area would include illustrations of attractive women. Even though billboards did not offer the flexibility of television screens or handbills, they were also counted on to make the cinema appeal with specific local audiences.53 Before the arrival of the internet and digital technology, cinemas advertised movies by using handbills, photos, posters, radio announcements, newspaper reviews, live music, and billboards. The last were the most prominent and spectacular. Although they were part of everyday life in Korea and India, the fashion and beauty that billboards displayed sometimes stood in great contrast to the reality of the surrounding street conditions.54 Promising splendor, service, and a touch of cosmopolitanism, they promoted a welcome reprieve for the worker or servant. They were part of a marketing scheme that tended to highlight the experience of a cinema rather than its offer of movies per se.55 By providing a form of visual synopsis, the billboard’s framing of key scenes affected the characterization of a movie by the local audience, who were accustomed to the interpretations of the artist.56 Although movie studios commonly provided guidelines in the form of stills and other promotion materials, local distributors and cinema directors ensured that the artists’ interpretations were commercial. In Korea, the overriding narrative of billboards regarded Korean traditional values and the perceived Western standards of affluence and individualism as ideal. In India, however, the narrative was often decidedly more local given the association with political parties and celebrities and the use of regional languages and religious symbols.57 Another aspect that affected the local quality of billboards was competition. In city centers where billboards could be easily compared, cinemas took a greater interest in the quality of their billboards than they did in rural areas. Jacob quotes the owner of a billboard studio as saying, “the Madras public is aware of films. They will think about what they see in a banner. In the rural areas all one needs is to advertise that a picture is being screened. They do not analyze the banner for the content of the film.”58 Styles did not travel easily across T hinking O u tside the C anvas

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larger distances. When a particular style became popular with local audiences, it set a standard. Chuntae Park recalls those in Gwangju and Jinju being relatively dark and subdued, and that those in Busan had a “rough and wild touch” reminiscent of the Japanese style.59 In Korea, the two main schools of painted billboards were the bokashi shading and the touch style. The former aimed at reproducing the shading of photographs by applying different gradations of the same color ink. The latter implied a more liberal approach that foregrounded the painter’s artisanship. Although photorealism would eventually become the norm, it was initially the less popular of the two styles, presumably because of its complexity.60 In India, many painters followed the style particular to their region. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Delhi-based painters developed an arguably rather violent style, with considerable blood and weapons and colorfully accented faces, which, perhaps ironically, could make very powerful male characters appear effeminate.61 In the absence of a practical alternative, the visual impressions of movies that billboards provided would have long been regarded as unavoidable substitutes for photographs, though not necessarily in a negative sense. Once audiences gained access to both a television set and the internet, it was no longer necessary to reveal much of what a movie was about, which allowed artists additional creative freedom. From the 1980s onward, therefore, when digital printing became possible, the painted billboards began to be increasingly associated with an artist’s eye, and thus with nonconformism and individualism.62 The digitally rendered ones, on the other hand, allowed images and colors to be blended into one another seamlessly, lending them a more contemporary, Western look. Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel argue that today’s billboards are more sophisticated, “defined by simplicity and elegance.”63 Because of their individual artistry, three-dimensional quality, and rarity, however, the painted ones now stand out considerably. In 2008, both the Busan International Film Festival and Seoul’s Dream Cinema commissioned Yeongjun Kim to paint billboards to highlight a special event. In the early 1990s, computer-printed satin screens began to replace painted billboards throughout Asia. In Korea, the complete transition took less than a decade. The shift coincided with a reduction in the number of cinemas as multiplexes became the new standard. All cinemas now use the satin screen type; painted billboards have become a 314

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Yeongjun Kim’s last assignment for Dream Cinema, November 2008.

costly alternative, used only ever so often for special occasions. In India, some billboard studios first took to replicating computer-printed designs, but eventually they were also forced to switch to designing and printing satin screens.64 Boutique cinemas may prefer painted billboards because they emphasize artistry and uniqueness, and maintain their vibrancy for several months.65 At multiplexes, however, where billboards are generally put up for shorter periods, they cannot compete with the practical benefits of the printed alternatives. They are lightweight, are therefore less difficult to put up, and can also reveal a pleasant glimmer when they are spotlit at night. Further, even though they are more susceptible to weather damage, they are much less costly to replace. These days, large visual advertising still exists in the form of banners, posters, plastic signs and digital displays in and on public transport, and around busy shopping districts. Advertising has come to focus on the movies as opposed to on the venue, but the venues are still important markers of sociopolitical ideals. Faced with little competition from competitors, however, it appears that cinemas have become complacent as far as their marketing is concerned. Whereas they once used painted billboards to make themselves stand out from others, their primary criterion is now convenience. The art printed on their poster canvases continues to show considerable creativity but is not tied to an individual, local, and three-dimensional touch, and their rectangular shape T hinking O u tside the C anvas

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and digital quality lack the impact painted billboards once had. They now emphasize the experience of a movie in more general and arguably more cosmopolitan terms. With the rise of multiplexes, movies are becoming increasingly consumed like fast food, with limited local specificity. It is likely to generate nostalgia not only for a lost tradition, but also for its role in setting landmarks at a time when the experience of going to see a Hollywood movie at either a Korean or Indian cinema was still distinctively communal. N OTE S 1. Perry Johansson argues that ads sell individual identity, “as well as a sense of belonging to certain groups, cultures, and lifestyles.” “Consuming the Other: The Fetish of the Western Woman in Chinese Advertising and Popular Culture,” Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 3 (1999): 377. 2. Posters that successfully built intrigue are, for example, those for Danny Boyle’s 1996 Trainspotting, and Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 sci-fi thriller District 9. Whereas the former showed one or all five of the leading characters taunting the observer underneath a nickname and ranking, the latter sometimes took the form of the public information posters that in the movie issued regulations regarding the treatment of nonhumans. 3. North Korea also has a long tradition of using painted cinema billboards, but photos and other documentation are difficult to find. It would appear that the billboards tend to be rectangular and of equal size, depicting only one character each. A photo of Pyongyang’s Daedongmun Cinema (with billboards) appears in Park Jaehu, “Pyongyang-eui 25-si” (Pyongyang’s 25th Hour), Bukhan (North Korea) 10 (1985): 121. 4. Preminda Jacob, Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 5. 5. Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 8–9; Lakshmi Srinivas, “Cinema Halls, Locality and Urban Life,” Ethnography 11, no. 1 (March 2010): 191. 6. Apart from a number of publications of reprints, many scans of Korean and Indian movie posters can be found on the Internet. Among the online databases is that of the Korean Film Archive (Han-guk yeongsang jaryowon), which holds an extensive collection of posters dating back to the 1950s. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum holds a collection of Indian movie posters, booklets, and billboards from 1943 onward, but the collection available for browsing online is limited to some seventy items. On eBay, on the other hand, at the time of writing thousands of Indian movie posters from the 1940s and later are listed under the category Bollywood. 7. In India, many discarded billboards were used as firewood or roofing for the poor (Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 4). 8. Asha Kasbekar notes that Indian billboards never name the stars on the basis that a well-informed consumer ought to be able to recognize them. Pop Culture India!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2006), 184.

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9. See Park Yongchae, “Yeonghwa heunghaeng ‘cheonwi’ jabusimman . . . geukjang ganpan hwaga” (Just Taking Pride in Standing at the “Vanguard” of Cinema Entertainment . . . Cinema Billboard Painters), Gyeonghyang sinmun 13 (February 1993): 11; Jobak annae jido balhaengsa (Korea Expo Informative Map Publishing Company), “Keijō shiga chizu” (Seoul City Map, created for the 1929 Korea Exposition) (Seoul, 1929). For photos of billboards on other cinemas, see Zenshō Eisuke, Heijōfu (Pyongyang Municipality) (Seoul: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1932). 510–511; reprinted as Han-guk jiri pungsokji chongseo (A Collection of Records on Korean Geography and Customs) (Seoul: Kyeongin munhwasa, 1989–2005), 163; and Wada Shigeyoshi, Dai Keijō toshi daikan  (Overview of Greater Seoul) (Seoul: Chōsen shinbunsha, 1937), 210. 10. Throughout the 1950s, non-movie-related businesses also commissioned painters to design billboards and hoardings, but by the 1980s the latter had all but disappeared from urban areas. 11. Son Daewon, Euiseong Seonggwang seongnyang gongeopsa-wa geukjang ganpan hwaga Baek Juntae (The Seonggwang Match Factory in Euiseong and Cinema Billboard Painter Baek Juntae) (Seoul: The National Folk Museum of Korea, 2012), 252. 12. Kim Eunhyeong, “Geukjang ganpan-e geurim-eun eopta” (Cinema Billboards Are No Longer Done by Hand), The Hankyoreh 21 (February 5, 2002). 13. Son Daewon, Euiseong Seonggwang, 251. 14. Gang Sincheol, “Yumyeong bae-u eolgur-eun sajin eopsido cheokcheok” (Without Hesitation Despite Having No Photo of a Famous Actor’s Face), Gyeonghyang sinmun 23 (April 1977), 5. 15. Park Yongchae, “Yeonghwa heunghaeng”; Kim Myeonghwan, “Yeonghwa ganpan hwaga Gong Jeongbeom-ssi” (Cinema Billboard Painter, Mr. Gong Jeongbeom), Joseon ilbo (Korea Daily), 26 (September 1997), 36. 16. Movie scenes taking place inside such studios feature in Chilsu and Mansu (Chilsu-wa mansu, dir. Park Gwangsu, 1988) and The Classified File (Keukbi susa, dir. Gwak Gyeongtaek, 2015). 17. Park Yongchae, “Yeonghwa heunghaeng”; Kim Eunhyeong, “Geukjang ganpan-e.” 18. Yi started out as an apprentice in the mid 1970s, under painter Song Dongcheol, before later joining Baek’s team. Yi Seonsil, “Han-guk yeonghwa yeongyog-eui sewol jikin sanjeungin” (A Witness to the Times of Honor and Disgrace in Korean Cinema), Wolgan munhwa yesul 2 (2002): 106–110; Kim Yeongjun, personal communication, November 27, 2008. Baek was commissioned to paint a set of billboards for the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, where they are on permanent display. 19. Gang Sincheol, “Yumyeong bae-u.” 20. Ibid. In the late 1960s, the size of movie posters was also reduced. To bring an end to the random pasting of posters on unused walls—a common practice in the 1950s and early 1960s—the government set up special poster walls, often nearby bus stops. Whereas many movie posters had become quite tall up to this point, made up of two rectangular sheets, the special poster set-ups only fitted one specific size to allow them to hold ten to twenty posters in rows of five or ten. Some cinemas such as Jeil geukjang (No. 1 Cinema), which chose not to rely on the limitations of such display stands, offered shop owners a free entry ticket (poseuta gwon) in exchange for the use of their display window. These days special poster walls continue to exist, but they are rarely used for movie posters.

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21. Park Yongchae, “Yeonghwa heunghaeng,” 11. 22. Kim Yeongjun, personal communication, November 27, 2008. 23. Gang Sincheol, “Yumyeong bae-u”; Gwak Aram, “40-nyeon-gan jeonsihoe 1000beon yeon hwaga isseulkkayo?” (Do You Think There’s a Painter Who’s Had a Thousand Exhibitions in 40 Years?), Joseon ilbo (December 9, 2011), A31. 24. Gang Sincheol, “Yumyeong bae-u.” 25. Ibid. 26. Park Yongchae, “Yeonghwa heunghaeng”; Joseon ilbo, September 26, 1997, 36; Son Daewon, Euiseong Seonggwange, 321. 27. Park Yongchae, “Yeonghwa heunghaeng.” 28. Kim Yeongjun, personal communication, November 27, 2008. 29. Ibid.; Gwak Aram, “40-nyeon-gan?” 30. Kim Yeongjun, personal communication. 31. Kim Eunhyeong, “Geukjang ganpan-e.” 32. Kim Yeongjun, personal communication. 33. Gwak Aram, “40-nyeon-gan?” 34. Kim Eunhyeong, “Geukjang ganpan-e.” 35. According to Weigelt, close to five thousand painters were still working for the major studios in Chennai in 2002, when the number of painters would have already begun to decrease. Andreas Weigelt, “The Dying Art of Painting Cinema Billboards in India,” Indo-Asiatische Zeitschrift: Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Indo-Asiatische Kunst 18 (2014): 83. Jacob claims that in the 1970s, the total number of people involved in billboard production in the state of Tamil Nadu was two hundred thousand (Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 258). 36. Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 23, 25–26. 37. Ibid., 31. 38. Weigelt, “Dying Art,” 84. 39. Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 20, 40; see also Lakshmi Srinivas, “Cinema in the City: Tangible Forms, Transformations and the Punctuation of Everyday Life,” Visual Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2009): 3. 40. Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 45; Weigelt, “Dying Art,” 83–84. 41. Weigelt, “Dying Art,” 85. 42. See Srinivas, “Cinema in the City,” 6–7; Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 25, 117, 137. 43. Srinivas, “Cinema in the City,” 2–4. In response to concerns over safety and aesthetics, in April 2008, the state of Tamil Nadu banned illegal and hazardous billboards with several other cities such as Bangalore and Delhi following suit (The Hindu, “Shaky Hoardings Loom Large over OMR Motorists,” September 10, 2012; New Indian Express, “BBMP Decides to Ban Hoardings, Remove Eyesores,” January 29, 2015). 44. Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 20. 45. Ibid., 140. 46. Ibid., 73. 47. Ibid., 72–73. 48. In Korea until the early 2000s, the criteria for censorship were not clearly defined, though painters would have likely been able to avoid committing major transgressions. Roald Maliangkay, “Kŏnjŏn kayo: South Korea’s Propaganda Pop,” in Korea: The Past and the Present, vol. 1, edited by J. E. Hoare and Susan Pares (Folkestone, Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2008), 172–173. 49. Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 5–10.

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50. Diwakar Karkare, who painted movie posters for several decades, recalls being offered a bribe of ` 25,000 by “a leading villain” to increase the size of his face. Anupama Chopra, “Caught on Canvas,” Times of India, January 2, 2010; see also Weigelt, “Dying Art,” 85. 51. Srinivas, “Cinema Halls,” 195, 198. 52. Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 101. 53. Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, 122–124. 54. Ibid., 8; Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 5. 55. Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire, with Sarah Stubbings, The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 114, 120. 56. After working for most of the major cinemas in central Seoul for twenty years, for example, the retired artist Choe Gwangsik became associated with the Seongnam Cinema in Yongsan District for another twenty years. Kim Eunhyeong, “Geukjang ganpan-e.” 57. Srinivas, “Cinema Halls,” 195. 58. Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 68. 59. Son Daewon, Euiseong Seonggwang, 252. 60. Kim Eunhyeong, “Geukjang ganpan-e.” 61. Alisha Patel, “The Art of Bollywood: Ode to a pre-digital era in Indian film poster art,” CNN Travel, May 25, 2010, http://travel.cnn.com/mumbai/shop/art-bollywood -935466. 62. See also Kim Toffoletti, Baudrillard Reframed (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 13. 63. Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, 179; Jacob, Celluloid Deities, 261. 64. Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, 179; Weigelt, “Dying Art,” 83. 65. Kim Eunhyeong, “Geukjang ganpan-e.”

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Contributors

Praseeda Gopinath is an associate professor of English at Binghamton University of the State University of New York. She is the author of Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (2013) and has contributed articles and reviews to Contemporary Literature, Oxford Bibliographies of Literary and Cultural Theory, Textual Practice, Journal of Celebrity Studies, and Studies in the Novel, among others. She is working on a book project titled The Quintessential Indian, on hegemonic middle-class masculinities and their relationship to the shifting discourses of the Indian nation-state, examining figures as diverse as the playful Bollywood star Ranveer Singh and the deadly serious right-wing ideologue and owner of the fabled 56-inch chest, Narendra Modi. Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyen is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His first project, The White Asian: Ordinary Desires and Queer Racialization in Transnational Thailand, explores the desire to embody and partner with “white Asians,” or light-skinned Asians from developed countries. His second project, Amazing Waves: Queering East Asian Popular Culture through Thailand, explores the impact of the Korean Wave and Cool Japan on the performance of Thai gender, sexuality, and race as well as queer Thai influence on other Southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines. Kareem Khubchandani is the Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies and the Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University. He holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University and previously served as the inaugural Embrey Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently working on a book project titled Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. He has published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Asian

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American Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Theater Topics, Theatre Journal, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Queer Dance. Hae Joo Kim is an assistant professor of music at the University of Utah Asia Campus in Incheon, Korea. Her research interests lie in the popular music and culture of Korea, and the music of film and television. She also works as a translator for Korean media. She has been a guest panelist at KCON and other conferences on East Asian pop culture. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University. Robert Ji-Song Ku is an associate professor of Asian and Asian American studies at Binghamton University of the State University of New York. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Asian Food in the USA (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014) and co-editor of Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (2013). His current book project is tentatively titled “Korean Food in the Age of K-pop.” As a recipient of a Fulbright US Scholar Grant to Korea, he taught in the American Culture Program at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea, in 2016. Born in Korea, he grew up in Hawai‘i. He currently resides in upstate New York. Akshaya Kumar is an assistant professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Indore. He earned his PhD in film and television studies from the University of Glasgow. He is currently finishing a manuscript provisionally titled Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in a Comparative Media Crucible, and his essays have appeared in Social Text, Television and New Media, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and various other journals. S. Heijin Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her research agenda explores the imperial routes that culture and media travel. In addition to completing her book manuscript, The Geopolitics of Beauty, which maps the discursive formation of plastic surgery in South Korea, Asia, and Asian America, she is co-editing Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia, which tracks fashion and beauty coming from and through Asia as formations of new Asian modernities. She has been featured in The Atlantic, Korea Times, and Southern California Public Radio discussing culture and politics in Korea and Asian America, and has been published in Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory and Frontiers: Journal of Women’s Studies. Roald Maliangkay is an associate professor in Korean studies and director of the Korea Institute at the Australian National University. Fascinated by the mechanics of cultural policy and the convergence of major cultural phenomena, he analyses cultural industries, performance, and consumption in Korea from the early twentieth century to the present. He is co-editor (with Jungbong Choi) of K-pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry (2015) and author of Broken Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of Korea’s Central Folksong Traditions (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017). Monika Mehta is an associate professor of English at Binghamton University of the State University of New York. Her research and teaching interests include new media and film studies; cinema in South Asia; theories of nation-state; feminist

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studies; postcolonial critique; and globalization and cultural production. She is the author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011). Her articles and chapters examining trans/national film regulation; globalization and cultural production in India; DVD compilations; music awards; cinephilia; and authorship have appeared in journals such as Cultural Dynamics, Velvet Light Trap, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, South Asian Popular Culture as well as edited collections such as Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance; Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity; Behind the Scenes: Contemporary Bollywood Directors and their Cinema; and Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies. Jane Chi Hyun Park is a senior lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the politics of minority representation and cross-cultural aesthetics in US and Asian Pacific popular media, particularly film. She is the author of Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (2010) and has published in journals such as Global Media Culture, Cultural Studies, World Literature Today, and Asian Studies Review, as well as a number of anthologies, including East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (2005), Mixed Race Hollywood (2008), and the Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy (2015). Lisa Patti is an associate professor in the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her research focuses on global media, multilingualism, and translation; contemporary media distribution; media studies pedagogy; and stardom. She is co-author (with Glyn Davis, Kay Dickinson, and Amy Villarejo) of Film Studies: A Global Introduction (2015) and co-editor (with Tijana Mamula) of The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference (2016). Kristen Rudisill is an associate professor of popular culture and director of the Asian Studies Program at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her research focuses on (mostly Tamil) theater and dance practices both in India and among diasporic communities and she has published a number of articles on those subjects. She has contributed to journals such as South Asian Popular Culture, Studies in Musical Theatre, Asian Theatre Journal, Text and Presentation, Journal of Popular Culture, and Samyukta as well as several edited volumes. Her current project concerns the construction of a global Tamil identity through both live and televised cinematicstyle dance competitions. Layoung Shin, a ASIANetwork-Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Asian Studies Program of Lewis & Clark College, received her PhD in cultural anthropology at Binghamton University. Her research focuses on the material interactions between queer subjectivity formation and media consumption (K-pop) and the hierarchies of sexuality and exclusion of queer subjects in South Korea through ethnographic fieldwork with young queer women, focusing on cultural activities such as fan-costume-play (young women imitating boy group singers) and Ilcha (one-day queer parties). Her next research project is on the intertwining of sexuality and digital media among queer youth. Solee I. Shin is an economic sociologist with research interests in development, globalization, production and consumer market processes, and Asian business organization.

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Her work examines the historical evolution of East Asian business actors and their engagement with global business networks, practices, and ideas and how these dynamics have informed the processes of Asian economic integration within the global capitalist system. Her work particularly focuses on the service industries in Asia including retail and consumer markets. She is currently an assistant professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore and affiliated faculty at the Global Production Networks Centre. Gohar Siddiqui is an assistant professor of screen studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research interests include film remakes, Hindi cinema, docudrama, and gender studies. She has published variously on remakes and Hindi cinema, and her articles appear in Jump Cut and Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media Studies. Valerie Soe is associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. Her experimental videos, documentaries, and installations, which examine gender and cultural identity and antiracism struggles, have exhibited worldwide. Her essays and articles have been published extensively in books and journals including Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism; Afterimage; Amerasia Journal, and The Independent, among many others. She is the author of the blog beyondasiaphilia.com (recipient of a 2012 Art Writers’ Grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation) that looks at Asian and Asian American art, film, culture, and activism. Her latest film is Love Boat: Taiwan. Samhita Sunya is an assistant professor of cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her monograph project, supported by the Mellon Humanities Fellowship and residence at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, builds on research conducted at the National Film Archive of India as well as the American University of Beirut, exploring south-south histories of cinema over the decades of the Cold War. Erica Vogel is an associate professor of anthropology at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California. She is a cultural anthropologist who conducts fieldwork in South Korea, Peru, and Mexico looking at issues of globalization, migration, and religious conversion. She is currently completing revisions on her book manuscript Global Conversions: Migrants Adapting Money, Religion and Cosmopolitan Projects between Peru and South Korea, which focuses on Peruvian migration to South Korea and return migration to Peru, and considers how global hierarchies are produced and transformed through religious, policy and labor channels. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine in 2011 and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign and Soka University of America.

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Index

200 Pounds Beauty, 231 2NE1, 55, 56, 57, 61, 68, 302n43 2PM, 29, 288, 299n15 Absolute Bollywood, 178, 189, 190, 191, 192 Adorno, Theodore, 16 affect, 10, 21, 43, 99, 100, 122, 127; between Korea and India, 235; labor of, 17, 57–58, 70, 85; and stardom, 89, 93, 135; through performance, 39 African Americans, 7, 93, 104, 171, 211 Aftab, Kaleem, 180 Ahn, Philip, 210, 224n5 AKB48, 272 alcohol, 205, 239 alcoholism, 204–205, 234 All India Bakchod, 134 Allison, Anne, 183, 190 Amago, Samuel, 201–202 Amazon (streaming video), 256, 263 American dream, 90, 109, 110 The American Music Awards, 97, 100, 101, 103 Anderson, Crystal, 2, 105 anti-Americanism, 98

Arashi, 272 area studies, 229 Arirang TV, 56, 61, 63, 64 Asian American studies 4–5, 6, 210, 212, 229 Asian Pacific Islander Americans, 98, 104, 116, 209, 219 Asian regionalism, 23, 24 Asian studies, 4, 6, 229 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), 24 Athique, Adrian, 87n17, 172 augmented entertainment, 2 aurality, 91, 93 Avatar, 141 Awarapan, 203 Baahubali, 142, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 174 Bachchan, Amitabh, 85, 90, 181 backstage musicals, 284, 287–289 Bae, Yong Jun, 286 Baek, Juntae, 306, 308–309 Baijaro Mastani, 257 Bajrangi Bhaijaan, 147 Band Baaja Baarat, 127

339

Bandyopadhyay, Ranjan, 179 Bangalore, 37, 42–44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 312 Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF), 48 Bangkok Love Story, 23 Bansali, Sanjay Leela, 180 Beeton, Sue, 196–197, 199 Bend It Like Beckham, 171, 235 Bhaji on the Beach, 235 “Bheegi Bheegi Si Hain Raatein,” 205 Bieber, Justin, 35n25, 105, 302n43 Big Bang, 56, 68, 272, 300n22, 301n35, 302n43 billboards: cinema, 303, 305, 307, 312; in India, 310–311; in Korea, 305–309, 311; painted, 247, 304, 314, 315; painters, 306, 314 A Bittersweet Life, 203, 212, 214 blockbusters, 92, 141, 146, 148; Bollywood, 145, 249; Hindi, 146, 147, 150; Hollywood, 222; Korean, 114, 231, 233, 241; regional, 172–174 BoA (Kwon Bo-ah), 277, 300n28 Boellstorff, Tom, 33, 67 Bol Bachchan, 145 Bollywood 3, 9, 12, 49, 73, 74, 78, 124, 138, 139, 150, 187, 195, 258, 264; audiences, 235; as crossover, 173; globalization of, 76, 77, 152, 236; and Hallyu, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 16, 174, 249, 250, 252, 263; and Hollywood, 17, 43, 75, 80, 81, 84, 140–142, 305; packaging of, 143–148; and pastiche, 85; remakes, 17, 73–76, 79–81, 145–146, 175, 202–203, 235, 237, 239, 241; style of, 81 Bollywood-for-You (B4U), 180 Bombay, 5, 127, 195; and Seoul, 201. See also Mumbai Bombay, 38 Bombay cinema 3, 7–9, 16, 90–92, 94–95, 171–174, 195, 198, 254; noir genre in, 81, 83 Bong, Joon-ho, 102, 106, 114 Bourdieu, Pierre, 125–126 Boys Over Flowers, 254, 263 Braun, Scooter, 102, 105

340

I ndex

Bride and Prejudice, 235 BTS (Bangtan Boys), 70n2, 272, 301n35 Busan, 304, 314 Busan Film Festival, 11–12 celebrity. See stardom Chadha, Gurinder, 235 Chan, Jachinson, 210–211, 216 Chan, Jackie, 180, 219 Chaser, 203 Chennai Express, 145, 146, 255 Chinatown, 80, 81, 202 Cho, John, 160, 213 Cho, Yong Pil, 274 Choi, Min-sik, 174, 209, 217–218, 224 Choi, Siwon, 261 Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai, 51 choreographers: South Asian, 173, 177–178; Korean, 278 choreography, 66, 100, 190–192, 278, 292, 293, 295 Chou, Jay, 272 Chow, Rey, 240 Chung, Hye Seung, 229 Cinemascapes, 195, 197–201 cinephilia, 73, 79, 81–82, 84, 196, 203 cine-tourism, 174, 195, 196–198 class, 94, 107, 123, 125, 127, 128, 140, 147, 236, 239, 250, 256, 312; conflicts, 10; middle class, 20, 22, 24, 27, 38, 39, 40, 46, 52, 78, 94, 121–122, 124, 126, 132, 134–135, 189, 198, 228, 268; working class, 7, 77, 114 Clifford, James, 16 Coffee Prince, 28, 31 Coffee Prince (Philippines), 29 Coffee Prince Thai, 28 Cold War, 99, 102, 229 comedy, 232, 235; Bombay, 11; as genre, 134–135, 175, 228; films, 145; groups, 40 computer-generated imagery (CGI), 75, 148–149 corporatization, 6, 74, 78 cover dance, 17, 25, 32 C-pop, 247, 271, 272 crossover: films, 138, 141, 142, 151, 171–176; K-dramas, 247; K-pop, 112

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 171 cruel optimism, 109 cultural identity, 178, 291 dance, 37, 38, 48–52, 55, 66, 68, 74, 102–104, 173, 190, 239; Bollywood, 177–181, 183, 191–192; competitions, 17, 31, 56, 61; K-pop, 276, 278, 289, 293, 294 David, Ann, 179, 183 Desai, Jigna, 171–172 Desser, David, 202–203, 229, 237 diaspora, 4, 5; Korean, 10; South Asian, 40, 139, 144, 147, 173, 178, 187, 256 digital: corporealities, 152; distribution, 140, 246, 249, 277; market, 273; media, 122, 246; platforms, 50, 90, 101, 257, 264; technology, 12, 92, 245–246, 265, 269, 272, 276, 279, 303, 313 distribution: films, 77, 139, 140, 141, 142, 150, 252, 253, 255–256; Indian dance, 188; media, 250, 263, 264; music, 271, 277, 278, 279; stardom, 92 diva, 46, 287 Dong Bang Shin Ki (TVQX), 278, 300n28, 301n35 drag, 40, 42–46, 50, 52, 156, 163–164 DramaFever, 249, 250, 251, 258–261, 264, 264n1 Dream High, 247, 283, 285; backstage pattern of, 288, 297; diegetic audience in, 295; K-pop stars in, 284, 289, 294, 297; message of, 297; as musical, 284 dubbing, 67, 152, 173 Dwyer, Rachel, 314 Dyer, Richard, 83–85, 89–90 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 156 emotion, 9, 93, 126, 232, 234–235, 254 Enteen, Jillana, 24 entertainment agencies, 2, 3, 56, 92, 274, 275, 276, 278, 291–292 Enter the Dragon, 211, 216, 219 Eros Entertainment, 246, 249 Eros Now, 250, 251, 255–258, 261

Eunjeong (Hahm Eun-jung), 288 EXO, 272, 278, 300n28 Facebook. See social media family, 10, 37, 136n12, 192; and emotion, 235; entertainment agencies as, 2–3, 301–302n38; and industrial logic, 91 fan-art, 156 fancos, 156–166; teams, 159 fandom, 6, 7, 8, 11, 17, 27, 31, 68, 155, 230, 246, 249–251, 259, 260–263, 289, 291 fanfic (fan fiction), 156, 158, 159–161 Fated to Love You, 254 female masculinity, 22, 29, 47, 156, 158–159, 164, 165 femininity, 21, 22, 25, 42, 43, 45–47, 129, 217, 234, 241 Fernandez, Leela, 125 Feuer, Jane, 284, 287, 289, 295, 297 Fiske, John, 7 flash mobs, 17, 55–59, 61, 67, 69, 70, 246, 296, 297 G-Dragon (Kwon Ji-yong), 68 Gangnam, 107–109 “Gangnam Style,” 57, 93, 106; horsey dance, 97, 116; music video of, 109–111: US media coverage of, 97–98, 115; and YouTube, 97, 101. See also PSY (Park Jae-sang) Gangster, 174, 195–196, 197, 199, 201–207 Ganti, Tejaswini, 74, 77, 85n3 gender, 16, 20, 22, 23, 26, 30, 32, 33, 39, 50, 94, 158, 164, 228; roles, 228, 236 genre, 17, 73, 92, 110, 156, 202, 229, 233, 234, 249, 276, 282, 289; comedy, 134–135, 175, 228; gangster, 74–75; gukgeuk, 158; music, 100, 187, 188, 271, 272, 274, 275; romcom, 232 GI Joe: Retaliation, 218; The Rise of the Cobra, 218 Girls’ Generation, 64, 66, 67, 281n16, 300n28, 301n35, 302n43 global capitalism, 77, 93, 233 globalization, 3, 4, 39, 57, 58, 60, 62, 67, 70, 76, 93, 146, 214, 233, 272, 282. See also Bollywood; Hallyu; K-pop global gay, 17, 39, 95, 159, 166

I ndex

341

global noir, 17, 201–203, 229, 237 global realm, 62–64, 69 glocalization, 233, 236, 239 Goliyon Ka Raaseela, Ram-Leela, 127–128, 130–131 Gopalan, Lalitha, 84 Gopinath, Gayatri, 54n15 gukgeuk, 158–159 Gunawardene, Nileeka, 189–190 habitus, 123, 126, 135 Halberstam, Jack, 15–16 Halberstam, Judith, 164 Hallyu, 1, 60, 105, 110, 175, 245, 249, 252, 282, 283, 297; in Asia, 97, 229; and Bollywood, 1, 4–6, 8, 16, 174, 250, 263; changing demographics, 213–214; in China, 105; fans, 111; and Hollywood, 209, 213–214, 247; in Japan, 24; and K-dramas, 261, 286, 298n4; Korean films, 2; and K-pop, 106, 292; and globalization, 16, 67, 93, 115, 224, 231, 261, 241, 282; in Latin America, 63; in Mexico, 55–58, 64; origin, 105; stars, 91–92, 286; in Thailand, 32, 33; and translation, 229–233; trope of imitation, 230 Hallyu 2.0, 106, 245, 246 HallyuMex, 55–62, 65–68 Hallyuwood, 12, 230, 231, 236 hatke cinema, 73–74, 78, 79, 81, Hawaii Five-0, 105 Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, 205 Heirs, 259 hijra, 38, 41 Hindi: blockbusters, 146, 147; cinema, 41, 44, 72–75, 77, 80–82, 84–85, 124, 131, 139, 142, 146, 150, 180, 205, 207, 236, 250, 258; dubbing, 141, 148, 152; film dance, 183; remakes, 79, 145, 202 hip-hop, 7, 52, 102, 106, 161, 190, 239, 289; African American, 104; Korean, 274, 275, 285; rap music, 97, 100, 102, 111, 134, 289. See also music. HIV prevention, 25

342

I ndex

Ho, Swee Lin, 64 Hollywood 1, 2, 3, 73, 89, 140, 173–176, 236; Asian men in, 210–213, 215, 221, 224; corporatizing effect of, 76–78; and Hallyu, 209, 249; hegemonic status of, 173, 282; and Hong Kong cinema, 79; in India, 141–142, 151; noir, 81, 202; remakes, 233, 235, 238, 241; and stardom, 122; transnationalism of, 132, 139; tropes, 247, 284 homophobia, 44, 49, 131 homosexuality, 15, 26, 28, 36n35, 156–158, 216; and male romance genre, 156, 159–161, 216, 300n24. See also queer Hoskins, Janet, 5 The Host, 106, 114, 222 H.O.T., 156, 275, 281n16, 299n17, 300n28 Hulu, 259, 262, 263 Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Hung, William, 99 Hunt, Leon, 79 Hyde, Lewis, 111, 115 iban, 157, 161, 164, 165 Inden, Ronald, 87n17 India, 42–44, 125, 173, 177, 179–180, 182–184, 199, 256; audiences in, 75, 237, 238; billboards in, 310–312, 313, 314–316; cinema of, 78, 91, 138, 139, 142, 143, 148, 150–152, 184, 198, 200, 250; economy of, 16, 126; and globalization, 140; and Korea, 1–11, 174, 175, 237, 247, 304; as market, 141, 264; neoliberalization of, 125, 131, 236; queer, 38–39, 52; satirists of, 133; scholarship about, 4 Indianization, 73–74, 75 International Film Festival of India (IFFI), 200 International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Committee, 160 intertextuality, 73, 74, 80–82, 84–85 iTunes, 259

IU (Lee Ji-eun), 288, 299n15 Iwabuchi, Koichi, 229 J-pop, 29, 247, 271, 272, 273, 289, 299n18 Jackson, Michael, 102 Jacob, Preminda, 310, 312–313 Jacobs, Gloria, 156 Jameson, Fredric, 83 Japanese Americans, 212, 215; internment of, 212, 219 Jenkins, Henry, 268 Jethwani, Jennie, 178, 189–192 Jewel in the Palace, 59, 62, 228 Jin, Dal Yong, 245 Johansson, Scarlett, 209, 218 Johnny Gaddaar, 17, 72–74, 78, 80–85 Johnny Mera Naam, 72, 83 Jolie, Angelina, 180 Joo, Rachel, 104 Jung-Kim, Jennifer, 237–238 Jung, Sun, 62–63, 162, 214, 217, 221, 224 K-dramas, 3, 9–10, 12, 26, 28, 29, 69, 245, 283; digital distribution of, 249–255, 259–261, 264; K-pop stars in, 62, 91; as tourism advertisement, 111; K-pop, 29, 68, 106, 166, 269, 283, 294; and backstage, 289; branding of, 24, 261; dance, 32, 55, 56–57; fans of, 7, 31, 61, 278, 293; globalization of, 61–63, 214, 270, 276, 277, 279, 297; and hybridity, 2; and LGBTQ communities, 15, 17, 20; merchandise, 69; in Mexico, 55–60; as postmodern pastiche, 230; production of, 270–273, 275; as tourism advertisement, 111; and Western music, 290 K-pop idols, 15, 20, 22, 278, 291; fashion of, 162; global demand for, 270; in K-dramas, 288; making of, 292; masculinities of, 22; as role models, 16, 20, 28, 29, 95; and Western markets, 246 K-pop World Festival, 67 Kaante, 73–76, 78–81, 84, 86n4

Kalaria, Honey, 178, 179, 181–192 Kang, Sung, 213 Kannada, 205, 312 KCON, 7 Kennedy, Elizabeth, 107, 165 Khan, Shah Rukh, 90, 130, 143, 144, 146, 174, 191 Khorana, Sukhmani, 172 Kill Bill, 79 Kill Dil, 127, 130 Kim, Daniel Dae, 105 Kim, Elaine, 212 Kim, Ho-sik, 231, 234 Kim, Soo Hyun, 288 Kim, Yeongjun, 308–309, 314–315 Kim, Yunjin, 105 King and the Clown, 27 King, Barry, 90, 122 kkonminam, 26, 162 Klein, Christina, 100, 102, 106, 114 Kollywood, 47, 186, 188, 189, 192 Korea, 3, 4; billboards in, 306, 310–314; as capitalist subempire, 99, 105, 109; and compressed modernity, 109; economic development of, 110, 270; entertainment system in, 275, 282; as film-shooting location, 199–200, 205; and globalization, 104; homosexuality in, 157, 158, 160, 166; imports from, 69; and India, 1–11, 174, 175, 237, 247, 304; and Mexico, 56, 60, 61–63; modernization of, 227; and plastic surgery, 107, 111, 230; protests in, 113, 114, 115; technological achievements of, 245, 276, 277; and Thailand, 23, 31, 32; as tomboy paradise, 28–29; tourism to, 174; and United States, 98, 99, 100, 114, 233 Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), 63 Korean Americans, 11, 211, 213, 264 Korean Broadcasting System, 273 Korean studies, 6 Korean War, 105, 109, 305–306 Korean Wave. See Hallyu Korean Wave machine, 57–58, 63, 67, 69–70

I ndex

343

Korpanese, 24 Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, 171 Lady Gaga, 58, 132–133, 302n43 La Ola Coreana, 56 Lagaan, 179 Lage Raho Munnabhai, 145 “Lamha Lamha,” 205 Lee, Bruce, 105, 211, 216, 219 Lee, Byung-hun, 174, 209, 218–222, 224, 226n31 Lee, Mi-ja, 12 Lee, Soo Man, 274 lesbian, 20, 22, 25, 160, 164–165 Let’s Meet at Walker Hill, 309 LGBTQ, 15, 16, 37, 39, 40, 41, 47–49, 157, 160 Lim, Bliss Cua, 233 Lin, Dennis, 22 liquid modernity, 140 A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf, 106, 107 Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, 262 London, 39, 177–180; 182–183, 187, 188, 190–192 Love of Siam, 23, 28 Lucy, 209, 217, 218 Malayalam, 39, 148, 256, 305 Malhotra, Sheena, 180 mandatory military service, 26, 62 mandopop, 273 MANiFEST, 45, 47, 48 Manorama Six Feet Under, 72, 74, 78, 80–82, 84, 202 Marchetti, Gina, 217 Marshall, David, 124 masculinities, 46, 67; Asian, 26, 27, 29, 93, 99, 158, 162, 166; Asian vs. African American, 103–104; in Bollywood, 122, 124; cinematic, 130, 210, 217; in fancos, 161; female, 157–158, 159, 164; and femininity, 47, 132, 234; “flower,” 162; and gay men, 21, 32; and heterosexuality, 22; hypermasculinity, 129, 130, 220; Kollywood, 47; Korean, 63, 155, 209, 214, 221, 224; of K-pop

344

I ndex

boy bands, 163; middle class, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132; “soft,” 20, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 162; performance of, 156, 159, 164–165; and stardom, 130, 135; transnational, 93, 94; “versatile,” 63, 67 MBLAQ, 56, 58, 61, 63–64 McCarthy, Anna, 312 MC Hammer, 97, 100, 101, 103–104, 112 media studies, 89 media, 1, 2, 24, 50, 58, 60, 63, 121, 122, 157, 158, 161, 166, 171, 229, 236, 252, 283; American 1, 97, 111, 112, 282; Asian, 19, 20, 32, 33, 173, 245; British, 180; convergence, 268, 269; global 39, 57, 60, 65, 67, 159, 160, 175, 202, 249–250, 253, 263, 264; Indian 6, 77, 179, 257, 258; Japanese 27; Korean, 24, 26, 28, 31, 70, 91, 92; 102, 155, 230, 233, 273, 279, 289; Korpanese 25; Mexican, 58, 65, 70; new, 268–269, 278; platforms, 2, 44, 131, 135, 293; regimes, 1; Thai, 33 Meet the Pink Divas, 49 Meeuf, Russell, 92 Mehta, Rini Bhattacharya, 236 melodrama, 37, 74, 87, 139, 143, 201–203, 231, 232, 233, 235 Mexico, 55, 58, 60, 64, 70 Mexico City, 56, 57, 59, 65, 67, 69 military, 6, 26; Korean ties with US, 100, 102, 105, 112–115; mandatory service in, 26, 62; protest against US, 93, 97–98, 112 Miss A, 66, 288, 299n15 modernity, 4, 24, 109, 111, 204, 228, 231, 234, 236, 290 modernization, 158, 227, 233, 236 Mohany, Chandra, 77 Mollywood, 43 Monsoon Wedding, 171 Mori, Yoshitaka, 68 Morris, Meaghan, 241, 243n28 movie posters, 257, 260, 303, 305–306, 313, 315 MTV, 274, 302n43 multiplex cinemas, 76–77, 78, 140, 142, 147, 306, 312, 314, 315, 316

Mumbai, 145, 150, 190, 195, 197; as global city, 238; LGBT scene of, 41. See also Bombay Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), 198 Mumbai Film Festival, 198 Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation, 273 music: American, 93, 97, 100, 102, 110; African American, 93; Indian, 3, 6, 9, 41, 177, 182, 191, 239, 257; Japanese, 273; Korean, 12, 24, 56, 67, 213, 269, 275–277; popular, 6–7, 155, 173, 257, 270–272, 274, 285, 290; queer, 13. See also hip-hop; K-pop My Sassy Girl (2001), 175, 202, 227, 231–233; (2008), 228, 233­–235 My Wife Is a Gangster, 231 Nadana Rajas, 178, 186 Nakamura, Lisa, 103 national cinema, 92 neoliberalism, 4, 104, 122, 123, 198, 237; of Bollywood, 50; of global cities, 203; of Indian economy, 16; of stardom, 121, 124 neo-noir, 79–83 Netflix, 9, 11, 144, 175, 213, 246, 249, 250, 252–255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264 new media, 33, 122, 268, 269, 278 New Queer Cinema, 38 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 5 Ninja Assassin, 215, 216, 220 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 236 Oh My Venus, 260, 261 Okja, 213 Oldboy, 202, 217, 227, 233, 237 Ono, Kent, 210–211, 216 orientalism, 79, 175, 209, 210, 215, 217, 221 Park, Geun-Hye, 15 Park, Grace, 105 Park Jae-sang. See PSY Park, Jin Young (JYP), 296

Parreñas Shimizu, Celine, 212 Parwaana, 72, 82, 83 pastiche, 2, 74, 79, 81–85 Patel, Divia, 314 Pham, Minh-ha, 101, 112 Pham, Vincent, 210–211, 216 Pink Diva, 48–50 pleasure, 84, 138, 287; of popular culture, 5, 8, 9, 99, 115, 247 popular culture, 1, 4–8, 16, 155, 213, 217, 247, 269, 290, 303; American 1, 7, 111, 212, 282; Asian, 20, 33, 230; global, 229, 238, 297; Indian, 192; Japanese, 27, 33; Korean, 10, 12, 14, 27, 28, 69, 105, 111, 166, 282; queer, 16, 23, 157, 159, 161; South Asian, 173, 178, 179 protests: anti-American, 97, 112, 113–115; against gender oppression, 27; queer performance as, 38 PSY (Park Jae-sang), 93, 97–116, 296; “Gangnam Style,” 57, 97–98, 106–116, 118n40, 120n51; and MC Hammer, 97, 100–101 Queen, 11–12 queer: bodies, 12; gaze, 95; Indians, 37–52; Koreans, 157–166; K-pop, 17; media, 32; performances, 16, 37, 53n4; politics, 15; popular culture, 20, 23–24, 95; subjectivities, 15; Thais, 33 queered effeminacies, 22 Rai, Aishwarya, 179, 180 Rain (Jung Ji-hoon), 67, 174, 209, 214–218, 220, 222, 224 Raja Harishchandra, 91 Rao, Shakuntala, 235, 239 rap music. See hip-hop Raphael, Raphael, 92 Raveendran, Jeya, 178, 185–192 Regev, Motti, 290 regionalism, 24, 124, 125, 178, 236, 247, 256; Asian, 23–24, 229; global, 253, 254, 264 regional languages, 42, 75, 87, 140, 313

I ndex

345

regional media, 39, 147, 172–174 remakes, 17, 28, 73, 74, 76, 146, 175–176, 202–203, 228; My Sassy Girl, 233­–235; Ugly Aur Pagli, 237–240 Reservoir Dogs, 73 romantic comedy (romcom), 175, 202, 228, 231–233, 234, 235 Rowdy Rathore, 145 Russell, Mark, 275 same-sex sexuality, 22, 23, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 166 Sandglass, 10, 11, 228 Seabrook, John, 289–299, 300n24 sentimentality, 139, 143, 146, 148, 150 Seo, Dong-Jin, 160 Seo Taiji and Boys, 274, 299n17 Seungri (Lee Seung-hyun), 68 She Was Pretty, 261 Shin, Min Ah, 260 SHINee, 56, 66, 300n28, 301n35 Shiri, 212, 233 Singh, Greg, 84–85 Singh, Navdeep, 81 Singh, Ranveer, 94, 121, 257; and fashion, 131, 133, 135; and heteronormativity, 129; as neoliberal man, 131, 133, 135; as new feminist man, 134; and new middle class, 125–128; and stardom, 122–125, 132 Singh, Satyaveer, 82 Singham, 145 Singham Returns, 145 Sinnott, Megan, 20, 25 Sivaji: The Boss, 147 Sixteen Candles, 99 Slobin, Mark, 284–285 SM Entertainment, 274 Smith, Iain Robert, 203, 237 Snoop Dogg, 104 Snowpiercer, 171, 209, 223, 224 social media, 2, 44, 59, 90, 106, 112, 121, 186, 245, 246, 297; Facebook, 56, 106, 186, 245, 246; Twitter, 106, 122, 186, 245, 246. See also YouTube “Sonagi,” 239 Song, Kang-ho, 174, 209, 222–224

346

I ndex

Soribada, 277 special effects, 86n4, 95, 140, 141, 142, 234 spectacularity, 138–139, 150, 152; as crossover form, 141–148 Speed Racer, 215 Srinivas, S. V., 147, 172 stardom 6, 89, 94, 139, 152; American 91, 121, 122, 133, 135; in Bollywood, 47, 121, 122, 131, 132, 138; and celebrity, 32, 90, 92, 93, 104, 114, 122–123, 124, 133, 135, 163, 304, 311, 312, 313; commodification of, 90; and gender, 95, 122, 123, 124, 130, 131; in Korea, 155, 288; packaging of, 142, 143, 151; transnational, 89, 92, 95 Status of Armed Forces Agreement (SOFA), 113–114, 119n50 stereotypes: of Asian Americans, 219; of Asian men, 99, 103, 104, 210–212, 215, 216, 218, 233; “butch,” 164, 165; of feminists, 240; gender, 67, 237; homophobic, 131; of Korean women, 108, 165 streaming videos, 92, 246, 250, 251; DramaFever, 258–261; Eros Now, 255–258; Netflix, 252–255; Viki, 261–264 Super Junior, 56, 69, 261, 299n15, 300n28, 301n35 Suzy (Bae Su-ji), 284 Taecyeon (OK Taec-yeon), 288 Take Care of My Cat, 231 Tamil, 39, 145, 149, 178, 186, 188–189, 192, 255, 256, 312; billboard production in, 304; choreographers, 173; cinemas, 95, 146, 148, 172, 173, 174, 187; cowboy, 46; dubbing, 75, 141; songs, 37 T-ARA, 288, 299n15, 301n35 Tarantino, Quentin, 73, 74, 79–80, 128 taste, 24, 94, 112, 124, 125–126, 132, 172 teenage women, 155–156, 161, 161, 162, 275 Telugu, 75, 141, 145, 256, 305; cinema, 95, 146, 148, 172, 174, 187, 312

Terminator, 141, 239 Terminator: Genisys, 218 territories, 145, 150, 151 Thailand, 19, 23, 28, 29; ontological fixity in, 21; role of media in, 32, 33; social norms in, 16 Thussu, Daya Kishan, 184 Titanic, 239 toms, 16, 20, 23, 29, 31 tourism, 198, 199, 200–201, 207; India, 42; between India and Korea, 174; Korea, 31, 107; Japan, 305; medical, 111; New Zealand, 197; Singapore, 197. See also cine-tourism transgender, 21, 25, 41 translation, 76, 81, 156, 229–235, 240–241, 249, 262, 263 transnationalism, 4–6, 73, 80, 87, 138, 196, 197, 207; of Asian films, 229; and audiences, 76, 172; of Bollywood, 77, 94, 151; circulation of, 58, 122, 203; of cultural nationalism, 236, 264; of Hindi cinema, 85; of Hollywood, 123, 151, 175; of India, 82; of K-pop, 60; of markets, 17; and masculinity, 93, 124; of media, 65; between Mexico and Korea, 70; mobility of, 51; of popular culture, 99, 115, 247; of sport, 104; of stardom, 89, 92, 95, 132; versus transregional, 143–148 transpacific studies, 5 transregionalism, 143–144, 151 trickster, 93, 99, 111–116 trot (music), 12–13, 274, 276, 286 “Tu Hi Meri Shab Hai,” 205 Twitter. See social media Ugly Aur Pagli, 228, 237–240 U-Kiss, 56, 64, 68 United States: and armed conflicts, 210; Asian American demographics in, 209; Asian male sexuality in, 104; audiences in, 241; box office in, 216,

222; Chinese immigration to, 212; fan activities in, 156; Korean American culture in, 213; K-pop in, 7, 98, 214; lesbian festivals in, 38; and LGBTQ, 160; masculinities of, 93 in relation to India and Korea, 4–5; relationship to Korea, 100, 105, 282; social imagination of, 111; video distribution in, 253, 255 uri, 293–297, 301n32 “Urvashi Urvashi,” 188 US military, 6, 26; Korean protest against, 93, 97–98, 112; Korean ties with, 100, 102, 105, 112–115 Viki, 246, 249, 250, 258, 261–263 viral videos, 51, 97, 106, 296 The Walking Dead, 105, 213 Wang, Yiman, 76–77 Watson, Jini Kim, 106–107 Web 2.0, 268 We’re Here and Queer (WHAQ), 45, 46 Wilson, Ara, 26 Winter Sonata, 68, 286 Winter Woman, 309 Wooyoung (Jang Woo-young), 288 World War II: Japanese internment, 212, 215, 219; propaganda films 210 wuxia, 239, 240 “Ya Ali,” 205 Yeopgijeogin Geunyeo. See My Sassy Girl YG Entertainment, 279 Yi, Seonsil, 317n18 You’re Beautiful, 28, 29 YouTube, 12, 39, 41, 42, 44, 51, 56, 106, 134, 186, 245, 246, 259, 262, 263, 268; K-pop on, 58, 61, 97, 101, 278, 293 Yeun, Steven, 105, 213 Zinda, 202, 237

I ndex

347