The Concert for Bangladesh: The Global Circulation of Celebrity Capital in a Time of National Disaster

This paper takes The Concert for Bangladesh, helmed by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar in New York City in 1971, as a springboard to examine the politics and mediatisation of disaster as it travelled from South Asia to North America. Scholarship has rarely focused squarely on the concert, despite growing literature on the global dimensions of Bangladesh’s emergence as an independent nation-state. As a corrective, I foreground the concert and offer the analytic of ‘global circulatory celebrity capital’ to account for the complexities marking its declaration of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) as a site of disaster, beginning with the Bhola cyclone in 1970, and leading up to its imminent independence. Adding nuance to the orientalist reading of Harrison and Shankar’s role in this spectacularisation, I consider them as celebrity ‘go-betweens’, translating musical traditions and fundraising across geographies, yet largely detached from the local politics to which they were ostensibly responding.