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MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE Strategies, Debates and Good Practices brown dyed hair and appropriates the western New Yorker looks and style. The singer stands during all the video at the center of Bangkok’s train station. The location is not casual, rather strategic. As a meeting place where the flow of people enter and depart from Bangkok, this location may be coded as a space of “in- betweenness” (Homi K. Bhabha, 1994) where local (Thai) and global (foreign), encountered (physical) and imagined (virtual) communities intersect. The first words of the song are in Thai; Da Endorphine immediately states, “There isn’t any other place that is like our home, There is no other country” and as the music beat increases, she switches to English and sings “It’s Bangkok City”. The choice of using English is not casual and one must question to whom the message is addressed and what cultural codes are being used. Bangkok is translated in Thai as ‘village of wild plums’ and is widely misunderstood by foreigners as meaning “The City of Angels”. Thai people use instead the name Krung Thep Mahanakhon, which literally translates from Thai as the “City of Angels”. It seems that at this point of the analysis, the intercultural dialogue between the east and the west is not taking place since cultural codes are received differently by the two cultures. For non-Thai language speakers, it would not have been possible to access the initial message of the singer if it were not translated in English subtitles; Thai people who are told that there isn’t any other place like their home and country must cope with a name for their city that is not even the original one they use. As the video unfolds, images of Bangkok continue to appear both on full screen and split screen. Thaitanium rap in English and start their ode to Bangkok by clapping and singing “Bangkok City, This is for you”. From the next scene, the music video gives the impression to be a trip advisor for foreigners. Thaitanium sing in English that this is “The only city where you can ride on the back of the elephant, sip Champaign, look at all the skyscrapers, Ya know what I am talking 49
MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE Strategies, Debates and Good Practices about”? No, we are not sure of what they are talking about! Who is doing this in Bangkok? The lifestyle promoted by the rappers reminds instead of the Hollywood film “The Hangover II” (2011), rated by Bangkok Post film reviewer Kong Rithee as one of the worst sequels he has ever seen, yet celebrated because set in Thailand is drawing big crowds. After the release of the Hollywood movie, the Internet was inundated with tourist promotional websites of Bangkok and Thailand. Travel Happy.info is an interesting example to refer to because it both identifies the places represented in the movie, and critically acknowledges how the media and Hollywood industry manufacture and distort reality. Many of the places represented in Hangover II do not exist in reality, rather were built in Los Angeles as interior sets. This note brings us back to the functioning of systems of representation and the social construction of meaning. Stuart Hall (1997) defines representation as “the way in which meaning is given to the things depicted (…) Your work of representation is your measuring of the gap between what you think is the true meaning of an event or object and how it is presented in the media” (p.6). Media literacy is key in measuring this gap and investigating representations critically from within. The Bangkok City music video alternates outdoor and indoor shots. Da Endorphine, who is never outdoor and who is always dressed in black, lifts her finger up to the sky (as it also happens in Empire State of Mind) and invites Thai people to “Announce for the world to know that this is Bangkok City, Explain it so they understand, That this is the city of the Thai people”. What we see at this point in the video (and in later scenes) is on one hand the strong sense of belonging to the “Chat Thai” (the Thai nation) and “kwam pen Thai” (Thainess); on the other hand, the promotion of these values through the re-appropriation of the dominant codes and systems of representation (looks, rapper style, English language, glamorous life, money, ideas of modernity, technology and so on) that are best understood by the west. This nexus of local and global allows us to configure the Thai community as transnational. Vertovec and Cohen (1999) maintain, “people who embody transnationalism weave their collective identities out of multiple affiliations and positionings and link their cross- cutting belongingness with complex attachments and multiple allegiances to issues, peoples, places and traditions beyond the boundaries of their resident nation- states” (p.189). This video becomes a hybrid space where strong pride and allegiance to the nation is manifested, yet multiple affiliations beyond the nation- state are also established. The intercultural dialogue that takes place between Thai and non- Thai people and the physical or mediated mobility of individuals in social spaces (east and west) play an important role in the configuration of new identities. The concepts of culture and identity are inseparable and co- constitute each other. Stuart Hall envisions cultural identities as “symbolic articulations that are a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’, having histories, yet undergoing constant transformation. Far from being externally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (cit. in K. Woodward, 1997, p.54). The symbols that are in the texture of cultures operate to form identities and build societies. One may argue that the strong western- centric discourses that permeate everywhere in Bangkok (omnipresent 50
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