Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Camillo Diaz Pino, Dima Issa and Wikanda Promkhuntong (part 2)
/Camilo Diaz Pino
Round 3
Dima, I think your noting of the idea of “normalcy” is fundamental for our field to grapple with. Because while as investigators it is often incumbent on us to emphasize the “news” – that is to say, the novelty – of either the phenomena we are investigating or the angles we are investigating from, part of what I’ve been consistently impressed by in my own experiences looking at the Chilean and wider Latin American media landscape is precisely how normalized these diverse trajectories of media flow have become. And likewise, it is in instances such as these that what we might assume are idiosyncratic processes can be seen likewise as more “normalized”. I find your mentioning of Grendizer’s popularity and use as a means of illustrating debate surrounding the Syrian war fascinating insofar as it corresponds with what I’ve seen as a terrible oversight in the dominant narratives surrounding anime’s broader global history. Namely, that anime’s circulation as a “cheap” alternative to animation from the US and Europe made it incredibly spreadable throughout the Global South (and beyond the Iron Curtain) to an extent that we could consider Japanese animation’s global, transnational circulation a precedent to a whole variety of contemporary media phenomena that are considered otherwise unprecedented.
From my own perspective as a scholar of anime’s global circulation in Latin America, I would be very interested to see and participate in more transversal scholarship that emphasizes anime’s global cultural impact before and outside its eventual integration with mainstream Anglo-American pop culture. I see this as a line of investigation that, while not ignoring or downplaying Japanese animation’s transnational ties with the Anglo-American sphere, can also speak to anime’s popular history from the imaginaries of the global south.
To this end, and also in accordance with what you’ve touched on, Dima and Wikanda, I was also wondering if you could speak a bit to how the transnational nature of the media phenomena you study corresponds with other parameters of popular quotidianity. For example, while K-pop’s popularity in Chile has been discussed as a broadening of the popular imaginary breaking with certain Anglo/Eurocentric principles (I myself discuss this in my own work as mentioned above) there also something to be said about how such shifts intermingle with entrenched ideologies and demographic tensions.
As noted by Wonjung Min for instance (“Mis Chinos, Tus Chinos: The Orientalism of K-pop Fans”, International Communication Gazette, (83)8, 2021, 1-19) K-pop’s success in Chile, while broad, has done little to either minimize the exoticizing and/or othering of Korean Chileans, nor has it really affected the all-too common conflation of all East Asians in the region colloquially as “chinos” (Chinese).
Along similar lines, the integration of Turkish TV (Fig. 1) throughout Latin America, while indeed making many Chileans more interested in Turkish culture itself, has arguably only further confused things with regard to the broader population of Chileans with Middle-Eastern roots. As with the synecdoche conflating Chinese people with all East Asians, Middle Eastern people in Chile are often referred to universally as Turks – a confusion first created by a wave of Palestinian immigration that arrived in the country in the early 20th century bearing Turkish passports. As with your noting of Shakira as an unacknowledged Lebanese global icon Dima, I’m wondering where we may see the “limits” of the phenomena we are looking at, and how we can go about understanding, negotiating and integrating these into our perspectives of them?
Fig. 1 - Chilean ad for the Turkish drama Is it Fatmagul’s Fault? (2010)
References
Min W. “Mis Chinos, Tus Chinos: The Orientalism of K-pop Fans”, International Communication Gazette, (83)8, 2021, 1-19
Wikanda
Camilo and Dima, I really enjoy learning about the Latin American and Arab contexts of media flow and fandom from your exchanges. I have limited knowledge on these geographies, except in certain areas of cinema that I came across via my work on transnational film reception and authorship (i.e. the reception of Indian and some Thai martial-art films in the Arab world or the shared situation of film festival funding for independent cinema in the case of Latin America.)
Camilo asked me about notions of cultural proximity and history that might have shaped the landscape of media flow in the context of Thailand. The areas of historical fandom and transnational media distribution should definitely be expanded more from research on Thai fandom which focus largely on the fan phenomenon of the day. I think the historical aspect and cultural proximity can be explored in terms of the cultural ties shaped by stages of political domination by various hegemonic powers. There are some interesting work that are related to this i.e. Thanes Wongyannava’s (2009) discussion of hybrid Italian food in Thailand and stages of cultural contact.
In the area of film and media distribution, scholars have begun exploring the localization of Indian films in Thailand through various methods. In the Cold War period, the first wave of Indian Films were dubbed with added local poetic style as well as political ideology (see Ingawanij 2012). The second wave emerged recently with the growth of digital TV. Interestingly the majority of content is highly curated by distributors with the exclusion of musical sequences and the selection of well-known religious myths and classical epics (see Suwansukhum 2018).
One of my students is currently looking at the import of Hong Kong films to Thailand and the mediated roles of dubbers in the 1990s in making these content nationalistic (changing the jokes and contexts in the films to the local ones). In the process, the dubbing can also reveal a kind of internal class resistance that responds to internal colonialism. In the case of diasporic Hong Kong media fans, the reception and appreciation of Hong Kong 1980s and 1990s stars has recently emerged via social media. This coincides with the circumstances of changing policy, economic success of the Chinese diaspora and cultural acceptance that led to the revisit of various subcultures.
A poster of the 1965 film Black Dragon, a Thai-Hong Kong co-produced film.
Through Camilo and Dima’s exchanges, I’d also like to reflect on something which has been in my mind. It is about the way fans of Japanese/Korean media I came across sometimes used their interests in Asian/Eastern popular culture (primarily Japanese, Korean, Chinese) and their desire to learn the associated languages and cultures to counter the frustration/limitation with the English language and Western ideologies. There seems to be a divide in the sense of self formed through the West (largely American cultural products) and the East (Japanese and Korean culture). Hence, there is almost a kind of personal chosen center(s) adopted to navigate one’s own identity. I like the quote Camilo mentioned from Hamid Dabashi. I think with the media landscape today, there are definitely coexisting multiple centers at once and the colonized world has been navigating it, not only from the macro political level but also the micro identity politics.
Dima, thank you for your reflection on mae-yok. I agree that the term allows us to expand from limited perceptions on fandom when thinking through English-language terms such as groupies. Your discussion of the case of the October 17 uprisings and the soundscape in Lebanon is fascinating! Apart from the borrowing of Japanese and American popular culture, the recent political movement in Thailand is also driven by music and performance arts. The band ‘Rap against Dictatorship’ is one of the leading groups which has been incredibly active in releasing their works and performing at rallies. Their single Prathet Ku Mee 🇹🇭 (My Country Has) was made inaccessible on YouTube if viewing from Thailand, but was later made available again, now with over 100 million views.
The band and their songs have also gained international recognition; receiving the 2019 Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in Oslo. Responses through audience comments also reveal praises and solidarity from Myanmar, USA, India, Bhutan, Australia amongst many countries. Prathet Ku Mee’s music video, which reenacts a scene of a lynch mob, draws connections between the current struggle for democracy with the struggle by a collective of students, farmers and workers, which led to the 6 October 1976 massacre by the authoritarian government. Remnants of the Cold War soundscape also come back today with the military-led government releasing their own songs and commissioned new cover of old nationalistic tunes. This has led to mockery comments by netizens as well as the repercussions of deporting a long-term expatriate, a French singer/business owner who created a parody version of a junta song.
On a final note, I’d like to make a point on the need to include the notions of the global south, inter-regional and cross-cultural links via media flow as part of Thai education. When I was growing up, kids learned to navigate English vocabulary in everyday names of things and Japanese culture with manga and animation. Yet, the school-level curriculum was (and still) highly nationalistic (shaped by the historical context of the country insistence on having never been colonalized, although various accounts have explored how Siam/Thailand was part of the colonial economy and adopted its own version of internal-colonialism led by the ruling class). Apart from the dominant nationalism, there is also a complex relation of positioning the global north of America and north Asia (Japan, Korea, China) at the center of cultural and ideological power when they are seen as the successful Other, which led to privilege and stereotypes. While there has been a media campaign of #realsizebeauty and #reallifebeauty, the ‘white’ skin beauty is still the standard promoted in commercials and celebrity culture, which shifted from the 1990s Thai-Western mixed look aka Luk khrueng to today’s ‘Japanese’ or ‘Korean look’.
Upon entering Thailand at the Suvarnabhumi International Airport in 2017, the Korean Snail White whitening skin cream can be found greeting passengers.
Hence, in the context of Thailand, fandom for empowerment (through the appropriation of their objects of interest for identity negotiation and political expressions) also exists hand in hand with the trade and commerce targeting media audiences and fans that continue to reproduce certain problematic ideologies.
Dima
Camilo and Wikanda, I have really enjoyed these rounds of discussions, as they open up so many interesting topics that allow for a more transnational and cross-cultural understanding of fandom. At times these topics diverge, but quite often experiences seem quite similar. This ‘countering frustration’ with the English language and Western ideologies is something that you speak about Wikanda and is also something that I have found in my years of research. Funnily enough Camilo, my Master’s thesis was on Turkish soap operas and the lives of Arab diaspora in Doha and in Peoria, Illinois a, town in the US and so I just want to bring that up, because it touches upon some of the points you both made in the last round.
Firstly, Turkish soap operas were and are still popular across the Arab world and in my conversations with participants; I found that it was mostly because their plotlines appealed to more conservative audiences. This cultural proximity that you spoke about Wikanda was prevalent. The people I interviewed made references to the commonalities in culture and this focus on the family unit, whereas they saw Western soap operas as removed from quotidian experiences. I remember speaking with an eighteen-year-old girl, who was just starting college. As someone who was from a Muslim background, she was really struggling to position herself among the sorority college life of drinking and casual sex. So the soap operas allowed her to feel a sense of belonging that she otherwise did not feel in her environment. Another interesting example is when I spoke to two women from Armenian backgrounds who were fans of the Turkish soap operas, although as Armenians they harboured political tensions with Turkey. The women brought up the cinematography and framing of the landscape and how it reminded them of Armenia, something they felt was enjoyable to watch.
Main characters from one of the first Arabic-dubbed Turkish soap operas Noor (Gumus)
Secondly, even though a number of soap operas are produced in the Arab world, namely in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, they found the production quality of the Turkish soap operas were at a much higher standard. They were also impressed with the acting and the costumes. Thirdly, these soap operas are dubbed in the Syrian dialect, which made it appealing for pan-Arab viewers, since they felt the language was easy to understand and listen to.
Camilo I also wanted to quickly touch on what you were saying regarding anime and how it is overlooked in much Western research. Anime was a huge part of our lives in the Arab world. I mostly grew up in Qatar and my husband grew up in Lebanon. Anime took over most of our afternoons after school. The shows were dubbed in Arabic and at times they were the only forms of animation we were exposed to and so I completely agree with the fact that they need to be given importance, especially in terms of cultural identity and global impact. Unfortunately, I don’t have much data regarding K-pop and its influence in Lebanon, since it is a relatively new phenomenon, but I do agree that it is something that should be looked into and researched. When my students talk about K-Pop it’s mostly contextualised within their general acquisition of popular culture, but there have been cases where they have used K-pop as signifiers to navigate certain gender and sexual dynamics.
Navigating gender and sexuality through K-Pop
Finally, I just wanted to clarify my point regarding Shakira. Shakira is definitely recognized as Lebanese and the Lebanese are proud of her accomplishments. However, unlike Fairouz she is not seen as a pan-Arab figure, most likely because she does not appeal to the more conservative audiences in the Arab world.
