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Belonging to Class: Hindi Film and the Formation of Middle-Class Audience in Bangladesh

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Consuming Cultural Hegemony

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Abstract

Stephen Hughes has argued that “from about the mid-1970s, ‘spectatorship’ began to emerge as a central problem for film studies and was predominantly theorized within a general framework of semiotics” (2011, p. 299). Spectatorship was used as a theoretical concept to consider how film viewers are constituted, positioned and fixed by the textual aspects of films. In earlier studies, audiences had been assumed to constitute a homogenous category and were positioned within the media texts. Laura Mulvey’s (1975) screen study, for example, set a trend in screen theory “which has overall placed emphasis on the power of film texts in constituting spectators through a series of subject positions of identification” (Hughes, 2011, p. 300)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    McQuail (2005), for example, listed a host of gratifying needs that direct viewership. Some of the needs he mentioned are entertainment, information, escaping or being diverted from problems, relaxing, getting cultural or aesthetic enjoyment, filling time, emotional release, sexual arousal, identifying with others and gaining a sense of belonging, finding a basis of conversation and social interaction, having a substitute for real-life companionship, enabling one to connect with friends, family and society, finding models of behavior and identifying with valued others.

  2. 2.

    The creation of distinction is not only a middle-class phenomenon; it can form in every class from the lower to the elite. It works simultaneously within and across class. As my research was limited to middle-class audiences, I discussed the cultural practices of the middle class along with their habitus and cultural capital.

  3. 3.

    Mofo indicates backward, uneducated and gauche (see Hoek, 2014, p. 27).

  4. 4.

    Guy Debord (1994) looked into the transformation of society from mode of production to mode of consumption. In the mode of consumption, infrastructure such as a shopping mall becomes a spectacle of visual consumption. George Ritzer (2005) also showed how the urban spectacle, such as the shopping mall, rationalizes market economies and expedites consumer culture.

  5. 5.

    The jhal-muri metaphor is similar to the masala metaphor, which says like the spice mix known as masala, a Bollywood film is made up of various genres, such as comedy, action, romance, drama and melodrama.

  6. 6.

    This is a competition based on Bollywood film song lyrics in which a competitor must think up a line from a Bollywood song that begins with the last syllable of the line sung by the previous competitor; if they fail to do so, they are eliminated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and Sociology, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Harisur Rahman

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  1. Harisur Rahman
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Rahman, H. (2020). Belonging to Class: Hindi Film and the Formation of Middle-Class Audience in Bangladesh. In: Consuming Cultural Hegemony. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31707-2_7

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