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.