Hero Alom and the politics of cringe: Bengali-networked publics in the age of platform visibility

This paper examines the digital reception of Bangladeshi internet celebrity Hero Alom to explore how the discourse of ‘cringe’ operates as a gatekeeping mechanism within contemporary Bengali networked publics. While Alom is routinely mocked for his low-budget music videos and perceived lack of aesthetic sophistication, the intensity and consistency of this mockery reflect deeper anxieties around class, masculinity, and cultural legitimacy. Situating Alom’s reception within the longue durée of bhadralok hegemony and the logics of platform capitalism, the paper argues that ‘cringe’ serves as a shorthand for enforcing normative standards of Bengaliness. Alom – rustic, Muslim, and self-fashioned – operates outside elite taste-making networks and is thus marked as symbolically illegitimate. Through a close reading of user comments on Alom’s YouTube videos, the study shows how networked publics use sarcasm, irony, and aesthetic disdain to reaffirm classed and caste-inflected boundaries of cultural respectability. These practices of performative disavowal allow for the consumption of vernacular subaltern figures while denying them legitimacy. Cringe, in this context, emerges as an affective and aesthetic technology that both enables visibility and enacts exclusion – reproducing the coordinates of cultural authority in the age of algorithmic publics.