“Local” Hybridity and the “Translocal” Identities of Korean Subalterns and Asian Migrant Workers: Looking at the South Korean Film, Banga, Banga!

Abstract

As part of redeploying the theoretical potentiality of hybridity, I hold that more attention should be given to the discursive location of Asian minor locales against the discursive power of global metropolitan diasporic location. This attention leads us to a task of localizing hybridity, which can posit the concept of Asian “local” hybridity. The South Korean film, Banga, Banga!, is a cultural text that embodies it vividly. Korean subalterns and Asian migrant workers in the movie speak to people located in global metropolitan cities as well as Asian metropolises. To listen to them attentively, it is necessary to propose the concepts of sub-imperialism, Asian local patriarchy, and translocalism. The marginal city of Ansan emerges as a locale engaging in constant dialogue, exchange, and contestation with the sub-imperialistic and gendered political–economic structures of South Korea. Within such space, Korean subalterns and Asian migrant workers create another language through singing together in spite of their social and cultural differences and conflicts. As they traverse various axes of identity including ethnicity, race, class, and gender, they show their translocal identities and agencies to contest and oppose the sub-imperial Asian local patriarchy. As such, Asian “local” hybridity embodied in Banga, Banga! demonstrates something that is other than mere interstitiality, something that is a kind of other Asian identity with its own specific consciousness of language and self as well as its own dialogic and negotiatory capabilities through its translocal identities and agencies.