“Gangnam Style” in Dhaka and inter-Asian refraction

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the political implications of the flash mob dance in Dhaka, Bangladesh performed in response to the 2012 global viral sensation of South Korean rapper PSY’s “Gangnam Style” music video. The global fame of “Gangnam Style” has much to do with its success online and in the U.S. popular music industry. It, however, also solicited suspicion from popular culture critics that the images of comical PSY worked successfully thanks to unchecked consumption of the racial stereotypes of Asian men. While recognizing these problems as more than valid, this essay simultaneously calls for a more transnational and inter-Asian understanding of the material to argue for a productive quality of PSY’s performance. Using “refraction” as a mode of thinking about inter-Asian circulation of pop culture, this essay considers the flash mob performed in Dhaka, Bangladesh as an important yet underexplored case study that shows different performative practices associated with “Gangnam Style” deeply rooted in historicity of colonialism and nationalism. The case study shows that the circulation of “Gangnam Style” materialized through a performance in Dhaka enlarged contemporary discourse among young urban Bangladeshi spectators around Bangladeshiness and its cultural identity. This complicated an easy assumption about “Gangnam Style” and its success in the U.S. mainstream pop culture, while simultaneously displacing the Bangladeshi cultural subjects from the immobile position of “the Other.”

KEYWORDS:

• Gangnam Style
• PSY
• K-pop
• Bangladesh
• flash mob
• dance
• performance
• Asian male
• minor transnationalism
• refraction

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joshua T. Chambers-Letson, Sunhye Kim, Gayoung Chung, and the peer review group led by Tessie Liu at the 2015 Mellon Dance Studies Summer Seminar at Northwestern University, for sharing invaluable feedback on the earlier drafts of this essay. I also thank Munjuli Rahman for giving me insights into flash mob practices and global pop culture in urban Dhaka, and Kemi Adeyemi for her sharp editorial comments and suggestions. Lastly, I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments. Much of the revision of this article was done during my postdoctoral associate year in the Council on East Asian Studies at Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University.

Notes on contributor

Soo Ryon Yoon is an assistant professor of performance studies in the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. Her research interests include dance history and transnational circulation of performance in the context of contemporary racial politics and political economy in South Korea. A Fulbright scholar, Yoon holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She was a postdoctoral associate in the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University in 2016–2017.

ORCID

Soo Ryon YOON http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1277-5378

Notes

1 Some English translations of “oppa” tend to simply denote its literal meaning, “a big brother.” Likewise, commentaries on PSY’s global sensation more or less skip over the male/masculine subject that narrates the story described in the lyrics, who identifies and interpellates himself as “oppa.” This translation often fails to accurately capture the gendered nature of the title reserved for an older man used by a woman, and therefore misses its opportunity to further engage in “Gangnam Style” and its gender politics. In a more specifically cultural context, general uses of “oppa” also connote a romanticized heteronormative relationship that always already assumes an older man-younger woman hierarchy, in which the man is referred to as “oppa.”

Stretching this cultural basis of “oppa” even further, K-pop boy band idols have also been referred to as “oppa” by their women fans, though the fandom may or may not be younger than the male idols by default. In such cases, however, the fandom does not always assume the more “docile” feminine subject position vis-à-vis the presence of “oppa,” but rather proactively uses “oppa” as a direct way to express their desire for intimacy and familiarity with the idol. Therefore, “oppa” in PSY’s “Gangnam Style” should be read to consider multiple ways in which the title is used in relation to gender politics in Korea. Regarding contemporary gender politics of the word “oppa,” see Kim-Yi and Park (2001) on the problematic cultural politics of hailing female pop culture fans as “oppa”-obsessed feminine subjects; Jeon (2008) on the gendered hierarchy among male and female progressive college activists in which the position of “oppa” is assumed by the male activists; and Nah-Im (2004) on everyday politics and practices of “oppa.”

2 During the Joseon dynasty until the nineteenth century, Gangnam was a peripheral village, distanced away from the center of Seoul where major political, cultural, and commercial exchanges historically took place. Encompassing three major districts (Gangnam, Seocho, and Songpa located in the south of Han River), Gangnam became the center of the 1970s’ state-led housing development and gentrification projects on a massive scale. This led to a real estate boom in the 1980s and it has now become the home of the nouveau riche populations, high rise apartments, and upscale commercial spaces.

3 Others have explored diverse social and cultural implications of “Gangnam Style” and its unprecedented global viral sensation. While their multi-axial analysis of the phenomenon informs this essay, performative elements of the song, music video, and its memes are rarely read closely as core supporting evidence to their arguments. I briefly offer annotations of each work as this essay responds to the same phenomenon while proposing an inter-Asian reading of “Gangnam Style” in the form of performance research, which privileges the body, performance, and choreography. Tan (2015) sees the transnational circulation of the easy-to-appropriate form of “Gangnam Style” as an exemplar of what Zygmund Bauman has famously dubbed as “liquid modernity,” the conditions of which work in “the porosity of the local, the global, and other ‘locals’” where the impact of “Gangnam Style” can be located (Tan 2015, 87). In this circulation at the “porous” borders, Hu (2015) interrogates how the durability and ephemerality of the viral sensation as well as the off-line performance parodies of “Gangnam Style” are intricately linked with the American mainstream media’s treatment of Asianness in motion. Here, Asianness in circulation is to die out as soon as it is consumed, while the specific parody performances are both resisted and embraced particularly by Asian American viewers themselves. Howard (2015) returns the discussion back to the political context of South Korea, focusing on the effacement of “Gangnam Style”’s potentially subversive messages of class and politics particularly in the broader history of misogynistic K-pop practices. While the scholarly take on the circulation of “Gangnam Style” offers nuanced insights into the phenomenon, it misses the opportunity to throw into sharp relief the primary reason why “Gangnam Style” has been taken up offline following its viral sensation: the performance.

4 The expression “class-B” or b-geup often used in South Korea, in economic terms, tends to indicate non-mainstream, low budget cultural productions. In aesthetic terms, it indicates works that are subcultural and experimental in nature, affectively and formalistically similar to kitsch.

5 William Hung, a Hong-Kong born Chinese American man, appeared on an episode in American Idol in 2004. In the show, he sung Ricky Martin’s hit single “She Bangs” and became an instant sensation in the U.S. shortly thereafter. His unpolished dance movements and off-key singing were objects of both ridicule and desire.

Long Duk Dong, performed by Japanese American actor Gedde Watanabe, is a character in John Hughes’ 1984 coming-of-age movie Sixteen Candles. Long Duk Dong has become a symbol of an awkward foreign Asian man, whose heavily accented English and lack of social skills are objects of mockery. On pop cultural representations of Asian/Asian Americanness in the context of xenophobia, immigration exclusion, and institutional racism, see Cheah and Kim (2014), Espiritu (1997), Lee (1999), Meizel (2009), and Nguyen and Tu (2007).

6 The circulation of “Gangnam Style” was well received and documented in Bangladesh. The cases in point are: a parody music video, “Qurbani Style” (2012) produced by the Bangladeshi FM radio station Radio Foorti; the national cricket team’s “horse dance” in celebration of their win against West Indies cricket team in 2012; and “Gangnam Style at BUET HD (Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology),” an outdoor performance staged by the BUET students in the fall of 2012. While K-pop fandom in Bangladesh within which “Gangnam Style” was first circulated is beyond the scope of this article, I acknowledge the general popularity of both “Gangnam Style” and PSY at the time of the song’s circulation as part of the larger K-pop fandom, as demonstrated by a number of K-pop and K-drama-related groups on Facebook, for example.

Bangladesh may be of another importance with regard to its political-economic relationship with South Korea fraught with class and racial politics. This warrants another in-depth discussion that will not be explored in this paper in the interest of its focus on “Gangnam Style.” South Korea has long been a destination for Bangladeshi migrant workers since the 1990s, with the introduction of the industrial trainee and temporary work visa. A broader context of global neoliberal economy also connects the two countries. For example, cheap labor in the garment industry was globally outsourced in South Korea in the 1970s and the 1980s, followed by the rise of even cheaper sweatshop labor in China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. The tragic collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh illuminates these traces of global mobilization of labor that connect South Korea and Bangladesh. While the arrival of “Gangnam Style” in Bangladesh could be viewed as yet another case of a U.S. billboard hit, the political-economic relationship that shapes the connectivity between the two countries predetermines the meaning of the “Gangnam Style” parodies in Bangladesh.

7 A number of works that investigate both the political potentials as well as (in)efficacy of flash mob, also call our attention to how the performance form is increasingly embraced as commercial marketing tools as opposed to its “grassroots” characteristics since its introduction. See Anderson (2013), Gore (2010), Houston et al. (2013), and Sorochan (2013).

8 See The Project’s Facebook page.

9 Movement descriptions based on The Project’s flash mob video on YouTube (The Project 2012).

10 See The Project’s Facebook page.

11 See Hoek (2016) and Karim (2014) on the urban landscape of Dhaka in a constant fluctuation, as it is appropriated by its inhabitants who negotiate with their sexual desires and media consumptions.

12 See The Project’s Facebook page.

13 See The Project’s Facebook page.

14 See Tourism Promotion Department (2016).

15 See “Flash Mob Buet … ” (2012) and Jahangir (2014).

16 See “ICC World Twenty - Chittagong University … ” (2014), “Official ICC World … ” (2014), Mahmud et al. (2016), and “ICC world Twenty20 - Flash Mob Videos … ” (2014).

17 See “First Hotel Flash … ” (2016), Haque (2014), and flash mob videos submitted as marketing tools for Sunsilk hair product company danced on campus or in large public spaces including the Bashundhara City Mall, such as “Sunsilk FLASH MOB at CITY UNIVERSITY” (Onee 2014) and “Sunsilk Flashmob by ‘Fusion Girls’” (2014).