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- Convenors:
-
Markus Schleiter
(University of Tübingen)
Mara Matta (University of Rome 'La Sapienza')
- Location:
- Room 212
- Start time:
- 28 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the differing forms of consumption of Asian popular media in South Asia. It looks at audiences' media practices and at the emerging of specific infrastructures that favour the circulation of cultural products from East and Southeast Asia.
Long Abstract:
With the assumption that films, tv serials, music and fashion from East and South East Asia are being increasingly consumed within many South Asian mediaspheres, this panel aims at investigating the cultural and social effects of media and aesthetic forms imported from the 'East'. It asks how these media are nurturing new forms of East Asian imaginaries and cultural aspirations in various parts of South Asia (van der Veer 2013, Pachuau and van Schendel 2015). From consuming Korean horrors, Japanese pop music, Hong Kong martial arts, Chinese fashion-shows, up to the creation of romantic perceptions of Thailand and Malaysia as the exotic Other, the inputs coming from East and Southeast Asia are fashioning new media practices among South Asian audiences, often associated with ideas of 'modernity' or a 'global (Asian) togetherness'.
This panel examines the circulation of images and media from East and South East Asia in the subcontinent as a way of fostering new - sometimes hybrid - identifications that go beyond region, community or nation. Departing from the Occidentalism that has seen the West at the centre of the consumerist and voyeuristic needs of South Asia audiences we aim at discussing the imagined 'East': do Eastern 'cultures' and imaginative geographies translate into a reshaping of aspirations? And to what extent are such 'imaginary East(s)' becoming part of mediating divisions - new and existing - within South Asia?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The present paper investigates how Bollywood horror films imitate, appropriate and incorporate elements from SE and East Asian horror films and the cultural functionality and significance of these elements in contemporary Indian horror cinema.
Paper long abstract:
It would not be an overestimation to say that the most popular cinematic genre to emerge from East Asia in the past two decades is the horror film. It is evident not only from the ever increasing consumption of Asian horror cinema (most notably Japanese and South Korean, and more recently, Thai and Malaysian) worldwide, numerous Hollywood adaptations, but also from a vast body of academic researches dedicated to the subject. The most recent scholarship on the Asian horror films usually employs the analysis of circulation, dissemination and appropriation of various aesthetical and narrative elements within and outside the genre and implementing concepts like 'global gothic' or 'Asian gothic'. Curiously enough, the Indian horror film industry is almost exclusively omitted in these debates - despite the fact that in the past twenty years Indian horror cinema reanimated itself from B grade to the big budget Bollywood production, remaking or borrowing number of elements from East and South East Asian horror films. Taking into consideration some of the most recent Bollywood horror films (13B, Ragini MMS, Click, Alone) the present paper investigates how these horror films imitate, appropriate and incorporate elements from SE and East Asian horror films. In analyzing the cultural functionality and significance of these elements in contemporary Indian horror cinema, the paper especially aims to address the issue of placement and / or misplacement of Indian (gothic) horror in a global and Asian horror contexts.
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses recent Indian martial arts films and their relationship with Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema through a postcolonial lens. The analysis will further discuss this genre as an example of an emerging pan-Asian sensibility within popular Indian cinema.
Paper long abstract:
The focus of this paper is the analysis of Indian martial art films and their relationship with Hong Kong cinema. Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema has been popular in India since the 1970s (Srinivas 2012: 66) and it has had a profound influence on the Hindi action films of the 1970s-1980s (Banerjea 2005; Vitali 2006). More recently, as films such as Krrish (Rakesh Rohan, 2006), Drona (Goldi Behl, 2008), Chandni Chowk to China (Nikhil Advani, 2009), Brothers (Karan Malhotra, 2015) and the upcoming crossover film Kung Fu Yoga (Stanley Tong 2016) testify, martial arts have been increasingly integrated within Indian popular film narratives. What is the appeal of martial arts in Indian popular cinema? Drawing upon Tasker's analysis of Honk Kong films as anticolonial narratives (1998), I will focus in particular on the resonance of Hong Kong film within India and I will discuss the insertion of martial arts within Hindi films as an attempt to promote a sense of pan-Asianness which cuts across regional and national boundaries. Moreover, the analysis will focus on films' engagement with Orientalist narratives and their legacy in popular culture.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Bangladeshis consume and imagine 'East Asia' through the connections between Korean cinema and Bangladeshi audiences. It locates the spectatorship of this cinema in Bangladesh through empirical evidences, and how these audiences construct a notion of Asian modernity.
Paper long abstract:
As globalization faded the geo-cultural boundaries between nations in Asia in recent years, East Asian, such as Korean and Japanese films which depict quite distant and different societies for Muslim-majority Bangladesh, have gained popularity among the audiences. This paper is then an early effort to analyze the imagination and construction of the 'modern' Asia by these East Asian film authors and how these are shared by young Bangladeshis jockeying for a shortcut to some perceived notions of Asian modernity. While similar modernist generations in the 1980s-90s looked at the European art cinema as a reference and model, why and how the generation of the 2000s-10s moved to South Korean cinema—this is the question that I attempt answering here. I start with a simple question: why and how the youth in Dhaka perceive and receive Korean films. What kind of cultural proximity is perceived by the Bangladeshi youth when appropriating contemporary Korean films mostly through DVDs and downloads? What does 'Korea' mean to the young cinephiles and students here? How does the imaginary world of South Korean cinema help these audiences reflect on themselves? The paper thus focuses on the utilization of Korean screen media, ranging from K-Pop to Kim Ki-Duk, in a particular context of South Asia, that is, the not-so-modern megacity called Dhaka. It also destabilizes the notion of national modernity in Bangladesh by proposing a version of Asian modernity that is looked for, and being appropriated by the youth in Dhaka through a 'Korean' window.