Pop culture freaks identity mass media and society

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Image 7.1. Fleur Delacour, a French student from Beauxbatons who competed in the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Source: Everett Collection).

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Translating Harry Potter GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

INTERNATIONAL FRIENDSHIP AND THE OPPRESSION OF HOUSE-ELVES

Magic knows no national boundaries. We learn this from the novels and films of the world of Harry Potter. The magic that young Harry possesses, and learns to hone during his studies at Hogwarts Academy of Witchcraft and Wizardry, would seem at first glance to be particularly British, drawing on the lore of the Celts and other tribes who shaped the history of the British Isles. But in the fourth novel of the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling 2000), we get our best taste of the international wizarding world, when the school is

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visited by students from Beauxbatons Academy of Magic in France and the Durmstrang Institute, located somewhere in northern Europe (possibly Nor- way) (see Image 7.1). These students have come to participate in the Triwizard Tournament, a competition among Europe’s three largest schools for magic: Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and Durmstrang. We also learn in the same novel of an unnamed school in Brazil and of the Salem Witches’ Institute. The online Pottermore, an interactive space in which users can further explore the world of Harry Potter, tells us of a school in Japan called Mahoutokoro.* So the se- cret world of magic is an international one to be sure.

An intriguing aspect of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is that it blends the story of the Triwizard Tournament with the story of the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (S.P.E.W.), the brainchild of Hermione Granger, known to some as the brightest witch of her age. S.P.E.W. offers Hermione the opportunity to argue for the rights of house-elves, a species of magical creatures who were enslaved to magical families. In the earlier novel Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry frees a house-elf named Dobby from his cruel master, Lucious Malfoy, by tricking Malfoy into handing Dobby a sock (Rowling 1999). The only way to free a house-elf is to give him or her an item of clothing. Harry earned a loyal friend thanks to his success at freeing Dobby. But Dobby is not the only house-elf in the magical world, and Hermi- one’s creation of S.P.E.W. allows her to petition for the freedom of house-elves everywhere, beginning with those working in the kitchens of Hogwarts. She chastises Harry and Ron for their ignorance of the plight of house-elves: “You do realize that your sheets are changed, your fires lit, your classrooms cleaned, and your food cooked by a group of magical creatures who are unpaid and enslaved?” (Rowling 2000, 239).

The oppression of house-elves is just part of the matrix of domination and oppression—to borrow the phrase from Patricia Hill Collins—that struc- tures the wizarding world. In the wizarding world, species-ism and other in- tersecting magical oppressions supersede, but never fully replace, the Muggle matrix of race, class, and gender.† The most privileged of the magical world are wizard-born wizards (pure bloods) with strong magical abilities. By

* http://www.pottermore.com. Visitors must become members to explore the site. Information revealed on Pottermore is summarized on the Harry Potter Wiki, in- cluding the information about Mahoutokoro: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/ Mahoutokoro. † In the Harry Potter novels, the term Muggles refers to nonmagical people.

Kidd, Dustin. Pop Culture Freaks : Identity, Mass Media, and Society, Routledge, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=1848479. Created from rit on 2018-09-17 21:49:09.

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comparison, Muggle-born wizards and witches, half-bloods (those with one magical parent and one Muggle parent, often derisively called mudbloods), and squibs (those who have magical families but lack the gift themselves) ex- perience less social power and greater stigma. But identity and inequality along lines of race, class, and gender are also still present. The Weasley family, for example, is mocked for its shabby home, particularly by the wealthy Malfoys.

One important lesson of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, presented through both the story of the Triwizard Tournament and the story of S.P.E.W., is that although identity-based inequalities are universal, their dimensions and character do vary from one cultural setting to another. The goal of this chapter is to extend our sociological analysis of the relationship between popular cul- ture and identity to the global level. The key issues vary in any given setting we might turn to, because both the meaning of identity and the structure of the culture industries vary across societies. So the task ahead is enormous. We will not look at every national setting or every variation of identity. This chapter simply provides a series of snapshots taken from a sociological tour of popu- lar culture destinations around the globe. How will we manage such treacher- ous terrain? Headmaster Albus Dumbledore says it well when he bids farewell to the students of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang: “Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open” (Rowling 2000, 723). So throughout this chapter, as I examine popular cul- ture in contexts that may seem quite unfamiliar, I keep my eye on my central research questions even as I remain open to variations by culture and context.

THEORIZING THE GLOBAL LOCAL

Before we begin to think about the differences in popular culture around the world, it may be useful to think about common human experiences of identity that can help us better understand those differences. I turn here to the most micrological set of theories within sociology, symbolic interactionism, which is a theoretical paradigm that examines the way meaning shapes the behav- ior of individuals toward the objects and persons in the world around them. Symbolic interactionism is similar to interpretive sociology in its emphasis on meaning as a shaper of human life. But in symbolic interactionism, the focus is on the power of meaning to shape individual behavior, whereas in interpretive theory the focus is on the power of meaning to shape institutions and groups. Symbolic interactionism is most associated with George Herbert Mead, who developed its central tenets while teaching at the University of

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Chicago between 1894 and 1931. Mead’s work was significantly influenced by his early teachers, Charles Horton Cooley and John Dewey. Mead, who never completed his dissertation, influenced many young sociologists who later be- came important in the field, but he never wrote a full treatise on symbolic interactionism. Several of Mead’s students worked together to publish many of his lectures and collected writings after his death. One of his students, Her- bert Blumer, elaborates on Mead’s work in Symbolic Interactionism: Perspec- tives and Methods (1969).

In symbolic interactionism, the most basic unit of human behavior is the act, and acts that are social in nature—involving two or more persons—are gestures. The most sociologically significant gestures are what Mead calls sig- nificant symbols, which are layered in shared meanings. The person making the gesture and the person receiving the gesture both understand its meaning. Extending a hand is a significant symbol so long as both parties understand that a handshake is being invited, and that this handshake constitutes friend- ship, connection, and trust.

It may seem as though I am drawing on some very different ideas in this chapter: Harry Potter, global comparisons of popular culture, significant sym- bols. . . . “Where is he going with this?” you ask.

Popular culture is one of the greatest producers of shared meanings, that is, significant symbols. Through popular culture, microexchanges between creator and audience, mediated by cultural objects, become mass phenomena. Within a given social unit, such as American society, the likelihood that the creator and the audience will recognize the same meanings in the gesture of the cultural object is quite high. But as we move across social units, and as culture moves across political boundaries, the risk of misinterpretation in- creases significantly. So the global trade in cultural objects is much more than just an economic process. It is very much a cultural process, in which mean- ings are repackaged and repurposed as they are bought and sold around the world. The globalization of culture must be understood as an act of symbolic interactionism. When a work enters a new context and finds a new audience, what kinds of meanings are shared, and what new meanings emerge?

To understand this process, we must examine the dynamics of interna- tional cultural exchange, which is a form of globalization. Globalization is often discussed primarily in economic terms, with a focus on massive global conglomerations that have become so powerful they appear to supersede state powers. But globalization also has political and cultural dimensions that over- lap with economic factors. One of the foremost scholars of these intertwining

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globalizations is the sociologist George Ritzer, whose work provides a mod- ern extension of the theories of Max Weber. Ritzer is perhaps best known for developing the concept of McDonaldization, a way of thinking about con- temporary forms of capitalist production (Ritzer 1993). According to Ritzer’s theory, processes of production and consumption have taken on four major characteristics:

Products are produced and made available to consumers in the Harry Potter are printed

in mass quantities and distributed primarily through major booksellers

Calculability: Producers use a range of quantitative methods to assess the market for various products, track sales, and predict the success of fu- ture goods. The rise of Harry Potter from a small English novel to a worldwide multimedia blockbuster is the story of very careful market research and development, a story that is told in detail in Susan Gune- lius’s book Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon (2008). She points out that 64 publishers around the world have been involved in the printing and distribution of the books. From an orig- inal printing of 500 hardback copies the book really has reached all corners of the earth, thanks to a massive marketing strategy.

Predictability: Consumers can anticipate the quality and content of the products they are buying because the production process has been standardized. I know that I can find the Harry Potter books when I walk into the bookstore. I knew, back when each book was first being released, that they would be prominently featured at the front of the store. I know now that I can find them in the young adult section, even though many of the readers do not fit into that category. The system is routinized so that consumers and sellers know exactly what to expect.

Control through Nonhuman Technology and Deskilling of the Labor Force: The corporations that produce the goods we consume are get- ting more and more powerful and the role of the labor force is rapidly declining. With books, for instance, we talk about the publishing com- panies, most of which are part of larger global media conglomerates, but we rarely talk about the printing process and the people who make it happen. In college, I briefly worked for a printing company that mostly produced self-help books for a particular publisher. I worked

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there briefly because the work was grueling and felt fairly mindless. An order would come in for a particular number of copies of a particular book. Copies of the sheets of pages had already been produced at an- other location and sent to us. My job was to go to each stack of sheets and count the number that had been ordered, lay them on a belt in just the right order, and pull a lever that sent them into a machine to be col- lated, cut, and bound. I remember going to bed every night unable to stop the endless counting. We talk about Harry Potter as a major suc- cess for Bloomsbury, the original English publisher, and for Arthur A. Levine, the division of Scholastic that bought the US rights to the se- ries, but we do not discuss the printing companies like RR Donnelly and Sons that made the actual books because the control of the process is very much held by the corporations and not by the labor force that makes these cultural goods (Martin 2007).

McDonaldization is not a theory of globalization per se, but rather of eco- nomic production; it is useful for thinking about, and describes a process that certainly contributes to, globalization. In addition to the McDonaldization of production, Ritzer is also interested in changes to processes of consuming. He describes these changes as the new means of consumption, a range of con- sumption spaces like megamalls and online stores that allow us to consume at a frenetic pace (Ritzer 1999). What makes these means of consumption so new is their focus on making the process of consumption so central to daily life, rather than a secondary process that supports other aspects of our lives such as family and career.

Both McDonaldization and the new means of consumption are cultural- economic forces that are being exported around the globe (Ritzer and Malone 2000). I use the term cultural-economic because the two dimensions are insep- arable in these processes. Economic drives are present in both processes, but both also change the way we make meaning in the world, deciding what and how to value.

Popular culture, like many other industries, has been McDonaldized, and its consumption does happen within the new means that Ritzer discusses. Just today I downloaded a television show through my Amazon Prime member- ship, read a comic book on my iPad after purchasing it from iTunes, and played several video games on my phone. The processes of exporting American pop- ular culture globally and of importing culture from around the world are char- acterized by both McDonaldization and the new means of consumption.

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197Translating Harry Potter

GLOBAL IDENTITIES

In principle, we might presume the ratio of men to women in the world to be 1:1. A number of variables affect this ratio, including the genetic predisposi- tion to have girls or boys, as well as changes in the timing of childbirth in the life course, which can also impact the sex of the children produced. These variables tend to offset one another across generations, keeping the ratio at roughly 1:1. However, a number of patterns across the globe are currently trending against the likelihood of female births, including a variety of cultural patterns that lead to preferences for males and the increased availability of contraception and abortion. The current sex ratio worldwide is 102 males for every 100 females,* based on population estimates from 2010. Despite being almost half the world’s population, women’s life chances are limited by social norms that powerfully favor men. These social norms begin with birthrates and extend to every facet of human life.

Estimating the global population of racial categories is especially problem- atic. The racial categories used most often in the United States reflect partic- ular histories of difference that cannot be safely extended to the entire world. We may say, for example, that colonialism is a product of the West, rooted in white European culture. But only some cultures in Europe participated in the project of colonizing the world. The notion that all traditional European cultures are white is a kind of retroactive application of a modern conception of race that ignores the complex, diverse groups that have populated the Eu- ropean continent. Measuring the black population of the world would require that we specify which African countries are racially constituted as black and then add to that the number of black-identified individuals who now live on the other continents of the world. This is an impossible task. There are popular infographics floating around the Internet that claim to accomplish just such a thing, but they are endlessly disputed, and their data sources are questionable. An attempt to racially categorize all persons currently living on the continent of Asia would similarly constitute a misuse of a largely American notion of racial categories while also ignoring the migration patterns that bring people to Asia from other parts of the world. The fact remains that all kinds of people live in all kinds of places on the six populated continents of the earth. Never- theless, racial and ethnic hierarchies do exist. But what those hierarchies are, what categories they embody, and what they mean culturally vary greatly.

* http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_gender.aspx.

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Similarly, class inequalities are found around the globe, but there are no salient worldwide class groups. The economic power of political or finan- cial leaders is very different from one country to the next. What we do know about class is that the level of global inequality is tremendous. The vast major- ity of the world’s wealth is held by a tiny fraction of the world’s richest people. Some level of inequality exists in every country, as measured by a tool called the Gini score, but this is a variable. Some countries are more unequal than others. Gini scores can be found online for comparison purposes.* The lowest Gini scores (the least amount of inequality) are found in European societies.

Disability is yet another concept that is not universal, nor do those cul- tures that acknowledge it agree on what it means or how it is defined. On the one hand, we know that more economically developed countries have better health care and greater access to health insurance, which might lead us to ex- pect that disability would be less prevalent in those countries. But it is precisely in these economically developed countries that the bureaucratic order requires a rigid system for determining who counts as disabled, so that state benefits can be appropriately disbursed. The development of a system for labeling— and subsequently stigmatizing—disability goes hand in hand with economic development. Furthermore, advanced technologies of industrial production, transportation, and military warfare have broadened the nature and scope of the disabilities that may be acquired during the course of a lifetime.

Finally, sexual identity is also difficult to quantify across societies. I think we can safely say that every society has had men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women. But the meaning of that sexual behavior can vary widely. Gay and lesbian are terms that describe much more than just particular sexual behaviors. They also tacitly describe the social position of the people who engage in those behaviors, the culture associated with this social position, and the biases embodied by the larger culture. If American gay commentary increasingly wonders about the “post-gay” possibilities of a world in which gay marriage may be federally recognized across the United States (ignoring other sexual inequalities like LGBT homelessness, suicide, job discrimination, etc.), in many other societies the appropriate term might be “pre-gay”—not because same-sex sexual experiences are absent from them, but because their cultures have not determined fully what those experiences mean and how they will be incorporated into the larger social structure.

* http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI.

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I am saying that it is nearly impossible to make global claims about sex- uality, disability, class, race, and gender. This fact in no way diminishes the importance of these systems of inequality, both internationally (in every na- tional setting) and globally (looking across nations). From an intersectional perspective, globalization is a long historical process in which one matrix of inequality encounters another (or several others), and a series of negotiations occur about what new system of inequality will emerge. From a global per- spective, intersectionality begins with hierarchies of state power that allot varying levels of privilege to some states and varying levels of oppression to others on an international stage. In this sense, globalization and intersection- ality are both lenses through which we can understand the process of sym- bolic interaction at the level of groups and states.

POSTCARD: THE WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER

Harry Potter is at once both an inspirational boy hero and “the centerpiece of a global corporate strategy” (Goff 2006, 34). Consider the level of cross- promotion that has occurred with Harry Potter, made possible in large part by the complex horizontal and vertical integration manifest in Time Warner:

1. The seven novels 2. The associated books like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,

Quidditch Through the Ages, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard 3. The eight films (the last novel was split into two films) 4. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park at Universal Orlando 5. The soundtracks from the films 6. The countless toys and figures associated with Harry Potter, including

several Lego sets 7. The video game series made by EA, including one for each film, plus

Lego Creator: Harry Potter and Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup 8. A range of associated websites, including • http://www.jkrowling.com • http://www.pottermore.com • http://harrypotter.scholastica.com • http://www.mugglenet.com 9. The Whimsic Alley Wizard Cruise, run by Princess Cruise Line along

the California coast 10. The hundreds of books about the Harry Potter phenomenon

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And there is much, much more. Harry Potter has reached a level of cross- promotion never seen before, and it is now the model for other cultural goods. This global corporate strategy is a profit generator in countries all around the world. Harry Potter, we might say, is not only a global force; he is even a glo- balizing force, because his popularity as a product has helped to open new cultural markets.

In her analysis of Harry Potter from an international relations perspec- tive, Patricia M. Goff offers an excellent analysis of the role of international governments in supporting the production of and building the market for popular culture, both at home and abroad: “[T]he globalization of culture . . . is not solely the result of impersonal market forces or technological advances, which governments cannot control. Rather, government action can influence the pace and direction of some key aspects of cultural globalization” (2006, 27). She explains that cultural production is a growing component of inter- national trade relations, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

But what is the meaning of Harry Potter, and how does this meaning vary around the world? What are the lessons of these novels? What do the fictional characters tell us about what it means to be a boy or girl, a woman or man, in the “real” Muggle world? A common perception about meaning in works of art or culture is that the creator decides on the meaning, instills it into the ob- ject, and then sends the meaning on its way, wrapped in the container (book, CD, performance, episode, etc.) that delivers it to the audience. Once the con- tainer is opened, the meaning is delivered. As I have stated at various points throughout this book, that model overlooks the many ways that meaning is created and transformed by a variety of agents throughout the processes of production and reception.

When we think about the creation and distribution of meaning in a global context, the role of audiences becomes even more complex. The concept of globalization tends to elicit images of a massive globalizing force homogeniz- ing the world. Scholars of globalization balance that notion of a universalizing force with increasing attention to the local and particular dynamics of con- sumption. The concept that has emerged from this work is called glocaliza- tion. Glocalization provides a way to pay special attention to what happens when an object produced in one cultural context and distributed in a global marketplace is consumed in a variety of unique local settings.

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Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Peter Mandaville, scholars of international relations and government, respectively, use the idea of translation to study the forces of glocalization: “Translation might be thought of as the effort to take something that is meaningful in one context and reproduce it so that it is meaningful in another context” (2006, 46). As they explain, there are two ideal types of translation: literal and free. Literal translations focus on main- taining the form of the original as closely as possible, whereas free translations focus on the essence. Take the Bible as an example. Many modern translations have focused on approximating a literal translation—as closely as possible given that the original languages either are no longer extant or have changed dramatically—and differ only because they look to different scholars and scholarship for the best literal equivalent of the meaning of the original. The New International Version (NIV) is a widely used literal translation of the Bi- ble (Holy Bible 2011). In stark contrast to the NIV is The Message, by Eugene H. Peterson (2002). This is an idiomatic, free translation that claims to capture the spirit of the text. The implication of the title is that literal translations lose the overall message—the forest—amid the minute, detailed meanings of each individual word—the trees.

Popular culture faces similar issues when it is translated across cultures. Translations take many forms. Adding subtitles to a film is a kind of trans- lation that raises questions about whether the subtitles selected are literal or free translations. Dubbing a film in a new language using voice-overs is an- other kind of filmic translation. Both subtitles and dubs can be distracting, in different ways. But dubbing tends to incite the most criticism, because the performance embodied in the original actor’s voice is lost.

Another way to translate a film is to remake it entirely. When a film is remade, it can be recast entirely, rescripted, and rebranded in the image of the culture receiving it. One of my favorite films is the 2006 Martin Scorsese drama The Departed. I have seen this film several times and always thought it was a great American, and distinctly Bostonian, epic. But as it turns out, it is a translation, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. Obviously a remake is a free translation, rather than a literal one, at least in this case. The essence of the film was translated into the idioms of American and Boston culture.

The act of translation is both deeply problematic and incredibly ordinary. It is problematic because something is always lost in a translation, regardless of whether it is free or literal. But it is ordinary in that it happens all the time,

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in ways we rarely even recognize. When we read a novel that was written in an earlier time period, an act of translation occurs, even if that novel is part of our own cultural history. Translation is an element of both the production and reception processes, and it highlights how impossible it is to pin down meaning, even though meaning is incredibly powerful.

Using this broader conception of translation, we could say that the Harry Potter novels are among the most translated cultural objects in contemporary global society. According to the New York Times, the books have been trans- lated into at least seventy languages.* Harry Potter book sales have surpassed the 450 million mark. Worldwide box office sales for the eight films is nearly $8 billion. The total production budget for the films is $1.2 billion.† The eight films are all among the Top 40 worldwide highest grossing films of all time, holding positions 4, 16, 18, 20, 21, 26, 30, and 40.‡

Perhaps most surprising is that these English-language books had to be translated for American audiences. In England the title of the first book is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. In English mythology, philosophy is associated with the practice of alchemy, the quest to turn ordinary objects into gold or into stones than can extend youth and preserve life. In Amer- ica, philosophy is associated with abstract and esoteric college professors— nothing magical about them at all. So when the novel was sold to Americans, the title was changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, because sorcery has that magical connotation that the author wanted to achieve. The title was not the only thing that was changed. Throughout the novel, terms that were deemed too English were Americanized. Sellotape became Scotch tape, car park became parking lot, biscuits became cookies, and so forth. These are minor changes in some ways, but they are still an act of translation. American readers still understand that the story is set in Britain, but they read this Brit- ish tale through a lens of Americanized English.

Harry Potter can be understood as a migrant, moving from the Muggle world to the magical world at regular intervals across the course of a year. This way of thinking about Harry is pointed out by educators Catherine L.

* http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/complete_coverage/harry _potter/index.html. † http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Harry-Potter. ‡ http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/worldwide.php.

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Belcher and Becky Herr Stephenson in Teaching Harry Potter (2011). In one chapter they focus on reading and teaching Harry Potter in bilingual class- rooms along the border of the United States and Mexico. The novels, avail- able to kids in either English or Spanish, are quite popular, even though the educational system set up for nonnative English speakers—particularly for Hispanic students—is based on a presumption that these students are not in- terested in reading and not even especially interested in education. The au- thors find, from talking to these students and their teachers, that the kids are very interested in good stories. One teacher describes bribing her students to study hard for the California Standardized Test by promising that they could spend their afternoons reading Harry Potter if they had productive mornings of test preparation. In this way, the experience with the novels helped to mit- igate the frustrating focus on teaching as preparation for standardized tests. But the experience of reading Harry Potter collectively, as a class, mostly with the teacher reading it to them in Spanish, was much more than just an escape from test preparation. The teacher explains:

A lot of time went into reading the book; we had to talk about it a lot. I read it in Spanish, but felt Harry Potter gave the students a chance to connect with this “other” English culture they were living in because they could connect with the kids and school in the book. Potter provided a way to connect with a friendly English environment. The bilingual class is a bubble, and many were going to transition to English the next year, which can be scary. Our class was also safe because I speak Spanish, and no one was going to tell them “you have to speak English!” They needed to make a connection to the English-speaking world, though, and I thought this book could help them. (Belcher and Stephenson 2011, 41)

In this border town classroom, Harry Potter becomes a model of the immi- grant experience as well as a welcoming face in an English-speaking world, presented to the students through a Spanish translation.

Suman Gupta (2009) explores Harry Potter’s reception around the world in the second edition of Re-Reading Harry Potter. In one chapter he explains the seemingly peculiar “Bulgarian connection” to Harry Potter. The connec- tion hinges on Viktor Krum and the Bulgarian National Quidditch Team as they appear in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The summer before he comes to Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament, Viktor Krum competes

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in the Quidditch World Cup finals for his native Bulgaria.* In terms of the Harry Potter chronology, the Quidditch World Cup would have been held in 1994, the same year that Bulgaria reached fourth place in the FIFA World Cup, drawing attention to the country from around the globe. According to Gupta, Bulgarian readers recognized Viktor Krum’s surname as a reference to Khan Krum, an early-ninth-century Bulgarian ruler who expanded the king- dom and introduced Bulgaria’s first legal code. Khan Krum is recognized as a major heroic figure in Bulgarian culture. A Bulgarian-born (English-raised) child actor named Boris Mitkov was cast as one of the students in Gryffindor in the film version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, although his role is small enough that he is not credited. And another Bulgarian-born actor, Stanislav Ianevski, was cast as Viktor Krum in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. To Bulgarian audiences, Rowling seemed to be giving their country an enormous plug at a historical moment when Bulgaria was actively rebranding itself on the international stage to gain entry into the European Union. This is a level of meaning that Bulgarian readers drew from the books that was not relevant to English or American readers, and it is a reminder that the meaning of the books and of the Harry Potter phenomenon is not fixed in place by the author, but is instead created anew as fresh audiences receive the works.

POSTCARD: SOUTH KOREA

The journalist Mark James Russell offers an excellent overview of South Ko- rean (hereafter Korean) popular culture in Pop Goes Korea (2008), covering the growth of film, television, music, and comic books. Although all of these industries have lengthy histories in Korea—popular films were screened at least as early as the 1920s—the culture industries of Korea saw a particular boom in the 1990s. As with American culture industries, the trend is toward a very small number of massive conglomerates that control production and distribution in a number of media formats.

The story of Korean film is particularly interesting. As in many smaller countries, the tendency in South Korea for the past several decades has been

* The fact that Viktor Krum is from Bulgaria should not be taken as evidence that Durmstrang is located there. Durmstrang appears to have accepted students from across Europe, and the details that we know of Durmstrang indicate that is located too far north to be in Bulgaria.

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protectionist, which means that the government instituted policies to pre- vent Korean culture from being overrun by external influences. In film, the Motion Picture Law of 1962 allowed distributors to import just one foreign film for every three domestic films made. This helped to encourage domestic film production, as long as the law was enforced. Excitement about showing particular foreign films meant that film distributors had good reason to invest in making or distributing South Korean films to earn the right to bring in the foreign ones.

The Motion Picture Law was revised in 1985. The new rule required movie theaters to screen Korean films for 40 percent of the year. This was reduced to 20 percent in 2006. So over time the protectionist inclination has diminished, though not without pushback from Korean cultural defenders. Even as the re- quirements have relaxed, Korean cultural production has increased, with per- haps as much as 60 percent of films shown in South Korea being domestically produced. That cultural boom had not yet begun in the early 1990s. Russell says of that period:

The movie industry was, to be polite, disorganized. At times, to be less polite, it bordered on organized crime and impending anarchy. Instead of competing to make the best movies and getting as many people as possible to watch them, the movie business was focused on protecting itself from risk—keeping costs down and competition weak. (2008, 8)

He looks at particular industry leaders to help explain the dramatic comeback of South Korean popular culture.

One of the most important leaders of the film industry is a company called CJ Entertainment, founded by Jay-hyun and Miky Lee, a brother and sister who are the grandchildren of Samsung’s founder, Lee Byung Chull. CJ En- tertainment is a subsidiary of CJ Corp., a former member of the Samsung family of companies that split off in 1993 and was placed under the leadership of Jay-hyun Lee. Lee wanted to build a strong entertainment portfolio for CJ Corp. and began by making a surprising and dramatic investment of $300 million in Dreamworks SKG—an investment that allowed both Dreamworks and CJ Entertainment to come into existence. The deal gave CJ Entertainment most of the Asian distribution rights for Dreamworks productions as well as a significant level of prestige as it entered competition for Korean audiences against older and more established South Korean entertainment companies.

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The economic crisis of the late 1990s was tough on CJ Entertainment and nearly destroyed it, but the company survived while other similar ones dis appeared. CJ Entertainment emerged from the crisis as one of the most powerful entertainment companies in Korea. It split from CJ Corp. in 2000 and quickly began acquiring additional holdings beyond film, including the following:

• Multiplex chain CJ CGV • Music channel M.Net • Cable channel division CJ Media • Cable service provider CJ Cablenet • Online gaming service CJ Internet • Music publishing service M-Net Media • Xbox distributor CJ Joycube

CJ Entertainment even bought one of its rivals, Cinema Services. This left CJ Entertainment one of just three major media companies in South Korea, along with Orion and Lotte Cinema. CJ Entertainment has since returned to the family of CJ Corp. and remains closely connected to Samsung.

Throughout the late 1990s and into the 2000s, South Korean film produc- tion increased dramatically. Russell identifies the first Korean blockbuster as Shiri, which opened in February 1999. It made $36 million and sold 6.2 mil- lion tickets. This placed it well ahead of Titanic, which was out in Korea at the same time and sold 4.5 million tickets. Shiri was expected to succeed, but that level of blockbuster success was unprecedented. The word shiri was suddenly appropriated for everything from clothes to household items and restaurants. It was a Korean phenomenon. Shiri’s success was followed just over a year later by another blockbuster, JSA: Joint Security Area (2000). These two films, like many successful Korean films, focused on tensions and relationships be- tween North Korea and South Korea. That focus sets these films apart from both early Korean films and those that have found the most success in the global market. For the most part, it has been Korean horror films like Host (2006)—also now the biggest blockbuster success in South Korea—that have had the largest market worldwide. However, at least at the time Russell wrote his book, the most successful Korean film to hit Western markets was the quiet, meditative drama Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring (2003).

The organization of South Korea’s cultural industries is increasingly simi- lar to that of the United States, and both follow a model that may become the

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global standard. But the content of South Korean popular culture reflects the unique character of Korean society and the particular anxieties and aspira- tions found there.

POSTCARD: ARGENTINA

Why are so many young women apparently captivated by sexist music? I was asked once to visit a sorority to give a talk about representations of women in music. Before introducing me, the organizer played a series of clips from songs that she thought were particularly troubling, in the hopes that I might address some of them. One of the songs was “Ho” by Ludacris, which opens with the lines:

Hooooooooo (Ho) Youza Hoooooo (Ho) Youza Hoooooo (Ho) I said that youza hooooo (Ho) (Ludacris 2000)

As these opening lines played, the women in the room starting pointing at each other and singing or lip-synching the lyrics, while I watched in horror. The talk I gave did not directly address the song “Ho,” but I used the question and answer period to turn the tables on the students and ask them what that moment was about. I can only paraphrase their answers, but they basically played it off and said that it was a fun song, and that they point at each other during the opening lines as a kind of humorous bonding moment. In other words, they definitely did not believe that they were calling their sisters slutty just by pointing at them and saying “youza ho.”

I wasn’t buying it. But perhaps surprisingly, an analysis by a team of schol- ars studying popular music in Argentina has given me new ways to think about how young women respond to sexist lyrics. This research is summarized in Troubling Gender, by Pablo Vila and Pablo Seman (2011). These scholars were focused on a particular subgenre of Argentine popular music called cumbia villera. The larger genre of cumbia has its roots in nineteenth-century Colom- bia and blends African, Amerindian, and European musical elements. The cumbia villera style became popular in Argentina in the 1990s and is musi- cally distinctive for its incorporation of synthesizers and drum machines. But what really sets cumbia villera apart from other musical styles is the sexual content of the lyrics. Consider these two songs, translated into English: “Your

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specialty is oral sex / you do it quite well / Don’t pretend to be classy / Because they saw you sucking dick in a truck.”* Or “And I see you with my friend, handing over your ass. / Is this the way you love me? Fucking my friend. / Is this the way you love me? Fucking my friend. / Fuck you! Fuck you!”†

It seems obvious that these lyrics are sexist. They reduce women’s lives to their sexual relationships with men and suggest that women are endlessly seeking sex. But is the meaning of the lyrics the same as the meaning of the music? Where is meaning actually located?

Vila and Seman argue that we must look for meaning in the context of mu- sical performance and reception, not simply in the lyrics. Although cumbia villera can be enjoyed at home, the genre is really associated with dance halls and is either performed live by the bands or played by DJs. To understand the meaning of the music in this context, Vila and Seman conducted a number of interviews with audience members to compare what males and females had to say. They found that many men reproduced sexist notions of women as they made sense of the song lyrics, particularly by suggesting that the songs simply portray women as they really are. Some men offered more nuanced views of the lyrics or suggested that the lyrics do not apply to all women. Some men expressed frustration with the repeated messages about women and sex. But what the men did not do, as compared with the female respondents, is turn the meaning of the lyrics around.

The female fans of cumbia villera demonstrated a range of strategies for interpreting the songs they listen to. At stake for these women is that this mu- sical style is important to their social worlds and provides many of their social experiences. Many were able to see that the lyrics present a distorted view that is really harmful to women overall. Some women expressed feelings of shame with regard to the lyrics, but stressed that this music is about dancing, and the lyrics are really secondary to the experience. Some women interpreted the lyr- ics as a joke, simply refusing to believe that anything so over the top should be a cause for concern. The interviews with women also highlighted the fact that many women go to these performances to dance alone and with each other, rather than dancing with men. This fact diminishes the role of the songs as mediators of a sexual or romantic encounter between a woman and her male

* From the song “Que Peteas” by La Base Musical. Quoted in Vila and Seman (2011, 55). † From the song “Entregadora del Marron” by Flor de Piedra. Quoted in Vila and Seman (2011, 59).

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dance partner, instead suggesting that the songs mediate friendships and re- lationships among women. Women may even feel empowered by these lyrics as signs that their sexuality is real and powerful and need not be protected or patronized. Vila and Seman refer to what they call the “activation of women,” which is the increased agency that women possess and the increased role they play as aggressors and sexual beings. They conclude:

What may look like girls’ becoming accomplices of the enthusiastic recep- tion of their own objectification, celebrating themselves from the point of view of a sexist male gaze, can have a completely different meaning from the perspective of young women whose character decodes the lyrics and the behaviors in the baile [dancehall] from a very different standpoint. (Vila and Seman 2011, 158)

Vila and Seman make an important claim about the ways that we study cultural reception. It is very tempting to think of our trained academic eyes as authorities that will discover what audiences are doing and report their behaviors back to them if they happen to take our classes. But if these scholars had tried to make sense of cumbia villera simply by reading lyrics written on a page, they never would have captured the incredible dynamics of what the au- diences are actually doing, especially the female audience members. We have to take our cues not from the books and articles we have read, but rather from the people whose social worlds we are trying to understand. Any attempt to make sense of cultural reception needs to begin by asking very open-ended questions of the audience members themselves.

POSTCARD: INDIA

The Indian commercial music industry began in 1902, right after the advent of commercial recording in the world. The Gramophone Company of India (GCI) was one of several early recording companies, but it became dominant early on. This story, and the larger story of Indian popular culture, is told in Asha Kasbekar’s Pop Culture India! (2006). Despite being British owned, GCI gained dominance in 1908 by opening a record press in Calcutta—the first on the subcontinent. GCI, with its label HMV (His Master’s Voice), was pur- chased by the international conglomerate EMI in 1931. HMV continued to hold the lion’s share of the Indian music market until the entrance of Polydor in 1961. Even then, HMV remained the major label in India, with 60 percent

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of the market. The two companies managed to stave off other competitors for several decades. A “cassette revolution” in the 1980s brought a level of democ- ratization, letting more people become creators and distributors of music with their own simple recording devices. This allowed for a new flourishing of re- gional and religious devotional music. Nevertheless, the Indian music indus- try maintains a close relationship to the film industry. The arrival of satellite television in the 1990s allowed pop music to gain a larger share of the market thanks to music television (including MTV and the India-based Channel V) and music-focused competition shows. Kasbekar cites a 2003 industry report indicating that 61 percent of the Indian music market consists of film songs recorded in Hindi, as shown in Table 7.1.

According to Kasbekar, India is the third largest book market in the world, the third largest producer of English-language books, and the seventh largest producer of all books. India has eleven thousand publishers and produces seventy thousand books per year, making it a billion dollar industry. After the country gained independence from Britain in 1947, the major dilemma facing the Indian publishing industry was whether to publish in English. Hindi was declared the national language, but English was well established as a major language for publishing. Initially the industry preference was for Hindi, but Salman Rushdie’s 1981 publication of Midnight’s Children helped to solidify the return of English. Now English is used for everything from the pulp fic- tion novels of Shobhaa De to the comic books of Anant Pai, both of which are discussed in Kasbekar’s work.

The Indian television industry began in 1959, experiencing its most signifi- cant growth in the 1980s and 1990s. Kasbekar counts 224 channels by the year 2003, making it a sizeable pop culture outlet. Soap operas are the most popular form of entertainment television and are modeled on the Latin American tele- novela more than the American soap opera. But American soap operas like The Bold and the Beautiful have also been popular with Indian audiences. There are

TABLE 7.1. Distribution of the Indian Music Market

Film Music: 66% Nonfilm Music: 34% Hindi: 61% Regional: 5%

Devotional: 10% International: 8% Pop Music: 8% Other: 8%

(Source: Cited in Kasbekar 2006.)

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a growing number of regional, national, and inter national news channels. India exports its television programming to Indian audiences around the world—an estimated twenty million people living outside of India. One of the major func- tions of Indian TV has been to produce a level of national consciousness in a very diverse nation comprising many languages, ethnicities, and religions. This televisual consciousness tends to reflect the values of northern India, the Hindi language, and the Hindu culture more than the values and cultures of the rest of the nation.

The popular culture format that India is perhaps best known for is film, thanks to the global popularity of Bollywood. Bollywood refers both to the important role that Mumbai (formerly Bombay, the Hollywood of India) plays as a center for film production and to a particular genre of Indian film that features spectacular music and dance numbers combined with epic stories. As Kasbekar explains, film is the largest and most important component of Indian commercial culture. India is the largest producer of films in the world, averaging eight hundred to a thousand films per year. Although Bollywood films dominate the market, India has several regional film centers, and Indian films are made in all eighteen national languages. Chennai and Hyderabad are two of the biggest film centers outside of Mumbai. Exportation of Indian film poses a major challenge to Hollywood’s hold on the global film market.

George Ritzer would probably argue that Indian commercial culture has been McDonaldized. Although the survey of Indian culture provided by Kas bekar reveals a tremendous amount of diversity, it is not reflective of the massive complexity of Indian cultures. Over time each of these industries has narrowed its usual processes to make the practice of producing film, televi- sion, books, and music more efficient and more predictable. The question remains whether this McDonaldizing process hampers creativity by homoge- nizing the culture or fosters it by making the creative industries economically viable.

POSTCARD: NIGERIA

Africa is a continent comprising forty-five countries (including adjacent island nations), yet we have little scholarship in English about the commercial culture they produce and consume. As scholars like Karin Barber have pointed out, this is because of an odd and unfortunate binary in scholarship about African culture that tends to divide African cultures into two categories: traditional (de- fined as tribal and premodern) and elite (defined as Western and high) (Barber

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1997). But there is a tremendous amount of popular culture in African coun- tries that fits neither of these categories. African countries are modern, and they are continuously engaged in new forms of cultural production:

What this binary paradigm has obscured is the cultural activities, pro- cedures, and products of the majority of people in present-day Africa. There is a vast domain of cultural production which cannot be classified as either “traditional” or “elite,” as “oral” or “literate,” as “indigenous” or “Western” in inspiration, because it straddles and dissolves these distinc- tions. In recent years, Ghanaian concert parties have toured thousands of towns; Yoruba popular theatres have broken into film, television and video; young men and women in Nairobi have read Mbatha and Rabeke; Tanzanian writers have published hundreds of detective novels in Swa- hili; cartoonists in Cameroon have celebrated the egregious antics of polit- ical thugs; Basotho migrant workers have sung about their experiences in South African mines; and men and women have composed Chimurenga songs to help them mobilize against the Rhodesian Front. These genres are not repositories of some archaic “authenticity”: on the contrary, they make use of all available contemporary materials to speak of contempo- rary struggles. . . . They are the work of local cultural producers speaking to local audiences about pressing concerns, experiences and struggles that they share. (Barber 1997, 1–2)

I quote Barber at length here both because she provides an amazing tour through some of the popular cultures of Africa and because Barber is so elo- quent about the need to disrupt the traditional/elite binary and the myth that anything contemporary in African culture is merely a result of Western influ- ence. African cultures are active players in the contemporary world. They are producers of a tremendous range of cultural forms, and they are audiences to a wide spectrum of contemporary media.

Wikipedia maintains a “List of Television Stations in Africa”* that in- cludes about three hundred stations spread across the forty-five African na- tions, ranging from just one in several countries to a few dozen in Nigeria. As Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi (1997) explains in her analysis of Nigerian dramas, Nigerian television began in 1959. The dramas that frequently appear on Ni- gerian television are a continuation of those created by the Nigerian culture

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_stations_in_Africa.

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of traveling theater that developed in the 1940s. To understand the content of these dramas, we have to understand the roots of the theater movement that both predates television and continues to this day. These theatrical and tele- vised dramas are almost entirely authored by men and place women in what Adeleye-Fayemi refers to as the “either/or” position. “If a woman is portrayed as a powerful priestess, it is to show society that women have the power to give and destroy life, and if they are shown as good time girls, in a didactic sense, it is supposed to teach other young women a lesson and to ask men to beware of them” (128). Throughout Nigerian dramas, Adeleye-Fayemi finds women who are represented as either holy or wholly corrupt, whereas men seem to linger in a vast middle ground between these polar positions. As theater, these dramas were presented by and to lower economic groups. Moving them onto television allowed them to reach a more middle-class audience without chang- ing the class of the characters, which means these dramas tell a powerful story about both class and gender to a privileged middle-class audience.

POSTCARD: AL JAZEERA

Al Jazeera is an excellent example of a transnational cultural format that is swiftly globalizing and not rooted in the American culture industry. It is a me- dia outlet, known best for its television news. Al Jazeera was created in 1996 in Qatar, after the closing of BBC’s Arabic-language station, thanks to a large investment by the Emir of Qatar (Miles 2005). According to Allied Media, Al Jazeera has an Arab audience of about forty million.* The viewers skew young, male, urban, and low income. Al Jazeera English launched in 2006, offering Web- and satellite-based programming in English to an audience that is esti- mated by the network at 250 million households in 130 countries. Its programs can be streamed online, and the network also maintains an active YouTube channel. Al Jazeera began its US launch in 2013.

American political leaders and American audiences have a complicated relationship with Al Jazeera. In the late 1990s Al Jazeera was praised as an independent news source that could escape the censorship and propaganda of the various state television networks in the Arab world. But the association of Al Jazeera with the Arab world made it a target after the attacks of September 11, 2001. When it aired tapes made by Osama bin Laden, it was accused of supporting terrorism. Journalist Hugh Miles is quick to point out that there

* http://www.allied-media.com/aljazeera/al_jazeera_viewers_demographics.html.

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is an important difference between airing the voice of terrorists and actually supporting them:

The network has never supported violence against the United States. Not once have its correspondents praised attacks on coalition forces in Iraq. The network has never captured an attack on the coalition “live,” and there’s no evidence Al Jazeera has known about any attack beforehand. Despite claims to the contrary, the network has never aired footage of a beheading. . . . Allegations of supporting terrorism remain just that— allegations. (Miles 2006, 20)

The network’s format is known for presenting extreme points of view, not un- like American cable news programming. Al Jazeera may take strong stances against the United States at times, but it also takes strong stances against Arab state leaders. Despite being demonized by Western political leaders in the early years of the twenty-first century, Al Jazeera is again being seen as a legitimate news outlet, particularly as it continues to win major journalism awards. In recent years Al Jazeera has won the Columbia University Journal- ism Award, the Huffington Post Ultimate Media Gamechanger Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and many others. Al Jazeera, like the Bollywood films of India, offers an important reminder that the globalization of popular culture is not limited to the global- ization of American culture.

WRAP-UP

As this short list of postcards indicates, it is difficult to maintain a strong grasp on popular culture practices around the world. But making compar- isons across nations is important for at least three reasons. First, when we examine a system of popular culture that is different from our own, we see that another way is possible. It is by no means a given that we must make our popular culture in the style that we do now. Second, when we find similar- ities in popular cultures across the world, we begin to understand the truly global power of the massive transnational cultural conglomerates. Although it is possible that international economic and political forces may one day break up these massive corporate forces, the trend is still moving in the opposite di- rection. Global cultural conglomerates are becoming bigger in size and fewer in number. Third, globalizing forces like immigration, mass religion (Islam,

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evangelical Christianity, Catholicism), international academic exchange, global politics, and global economies are making it increasingly important to understand popular culture at the global level. If popular culture is indeed one of the primary sources, if not the main one, of meanings about identity and everyday life, then it is imperative that we understand each other at least partly through the lens of popular culture.

RESOURCES

Resources for Examining Global Identities

• The Global Identity Project: http://www.global-identity.org. • Gender Across Borders: http://www.genderacrossborders.com. • Pew Analysis of Gay Marriage Around the World: http://www.pewforum

.org/Gay-Marriage-and-Homosexuality/Gay-Marriage-Around-the -World-2013.aspx.

• Washington Group on Global Disability Statistics, a United Nations ini- tiative: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/washington_group.htm.

• World Population Data Sheet: Available as a download at http://www .prb.org/ (Click on “Doing Research” > “Data Sheets”).

• UC Atlas of Global Inequality: http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu.

Resources for Examining Global Popular Culture

• Darcy Paquet’s site on Korean Film: http://koreanfilm.org. • WWiTV, World Wide Internet Television: http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu. Live

streams of television from around the world. Includes a page on Nigerian television at http://wwitv.com/tv_channels /b6475-Channels-TV.htm.

• Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com. • National Geographic’s World Music Site: http://worldmusic.national

geographic.com. Includes a page on Argentine music: http://worldmusic.national geographic.com/view/page.basic/country/content.countryargentina_13.

• Translating Harry Potter, an Internet resource: http://bytelevel.com /global/translating_harry_potter.html.

• Bollywood Hungama: http://www.bollywoodhungama.com.

Kidd, Dustin. Pop Culture Freaks : Identity, Mass Media, and Society, Routledge, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rit/detail.action?docID=1848479. Created from rit on 2018-09-17 21:49:09.