Global Media, Culture, and Identity

Theory, Cases, and Approaches

Rohit Chopra, Radhika Gajjala, Rohit Chopra, Radhika Gajjala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415877916
• eBook ISBN: 9781136512834
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited volume examines the ways that global media shapes relations between place, culture, and identity. Through the included essays, Chopra and Gajjala offer a mix of theoretical reflections and empirical case studies that will help readers understand how the media can shape cultural identities and, conversely, how cultural formations can influence the political economy of global media. The interdisciplinary, international scholars gathered here push the discussion of what it means to do global media studies beyond uncritical celebrations of the global media technologies (or globalization) as well as beyond perspectives that are a priori dismissive of the possibilities of global media.

Some of the key questions and themes that the international contributors explore within the text include: Is the global audience of global television the same as the global audience of the internet? Can we conceptualize the global culture-media-identity dynamic beyond the discourse of postcolonialism? How does the globalization of media affect feelings of nationalism? How is the growth of a consumer "global middle class" spread, and resisted, through media? Global Media, Identity, and Culture takes a comparative media approach to addressing these, and other, issues across media forms including print, television, film, and new media

Chapter 1

Introduction

Media, Culture, and Identity in the Time of the Global

Rohit Chopra

Chapter Description

The introductory chapter to the volume presents a case for the significance of the relationship between media, culture, and identity in our global times. Identifying some challenges posed by each of these terms, and engaging with relevant scholarship from media studies and other disciplines, the chapter outlines a theoretical approach for the study of global media, culture, and identity. This approach rests on three related propositions. One, that global media are central to the production of cultural identity in the present historical moment; two, that cultural identification is a key driver of logics and content of global media flows; and three, that expressions of cultural identity in media texts can be read as reflecting a global awareness. The chapter also highlights the distinctive contributions of the volume and presents the key thematic, theoretical, and methodological focus of each chapter.

* * *

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected the first global President of the United States. Much of what happens in American public life qualifies as a global event, from episodes in the lives of celebrities to the excesses of Wall Street. But the excitement generated by the Obama campaign far exceeded the usual level of international interest in events American.¹ To make this observation is not to be seduced by the utopian appeal of a remarkable historical moment. It is, rather, to recognize that the global attention on Obama, significantly fostered by the media, unsettles the usual patterns of cultural identification in our times. On television, the internet, and in print, in national and transnational conversations, Barack Obama’s story emerged against the backdrop of an intricate set of relationships between the realms of media, culture, and identity.

Biracial but marked as African American, Obama brought out into the light of day the complicated meanings of race in contemporary American society, even as he promised to transform these meanings into more inclusive definitions of Americanness. Globally, Obama stood for the same promise. In the words of Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, Obama was

both an African American and the biracial son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother; both a product of the streets of Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer, and a son of the streets of Jakarta, where he played as a kid.²

Obama, as Robinson put it, was the very “personification of ‘both-and.’”³ His “both-and” story was played out in a simultaneously national and global media space, with key moments in the narrative consisting of his famous “Race Speech,”⁴ his victory speech, and the inauguration. Obama’s victory brought centerstage the issue of minority rights in other nations too. With Obama’s election, European nations were compelled to reflect on their professed claims that minorities could realistically hope to occupy the highest political office in their societies.⁵

But there were other, less salubrious, reactions within the United States to Obama’s identity. Though Obama repeatedly affirmed his Christian faith during the campaign, he was demonized for the fact of possessing a “Muslim” name.⁶ The implied claim that a Muslim was unfit to be a president was itself made possible by the construction of Islam as a violent faith in American public discourse. This characterization of Islam was significantly shaped by the American media in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks and during the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Media have been central to the processes by which the world and Obama have come to know each other. Obama’s mediated engagement with the world has been marked by elisions and inclusiveness. His media persona, for instance, has been carefully managed to prevent too close an association with certain demographics, such as hijab-clad Muslim women.⁷ Obama reflects the relevance of identity politics, with all its attendant complications, in our present-day world. Indeed, an astonishing number of communities across the globe have claimed Obama as one of their own. The list includes, at the very least, Americans, African Americans, white Americans, individuals with biracial identities, immigrants, Kenyans, Africans, academics, activists, Grammy award winners, lawyers, Harvard alumni, Indonesians, Chicagoans, and residents of Hyde Park. Obama’s identity has also provoked racist reactions, anti-Muslim hysteria, and a host of anxieties about criteria of belonging in national and transnational communities. The Obama phenomenon, in numerous ways, embodies the media-culture-identity problematic in the time of the global and highlights the need for critically investigating it. Accordingly, each of these categories—culture, media, identity, and the global—deserves closer examination.

Culture, Identity, Media, and the Global

The entry for the term “culture” in New Keywords, an updated version of Raymond Williams’ classic work, Keywords, begins with a revealing anecdote:

There is now a great deal of hesitancy over the word culture. “I don’t know how many times,” Raymond Williams once said, “I’ve wished that I had never heard the damned word” (R. Williams 1979: 154), registering his frustration that its complexity defied the tasks of ordinary analysis.⁸

Williams’ frustration may be recognized as reflective of the dizzyingly broad and often contradictory uses of the term, including the anthropological definition of culture as a general way of life, the highest form of aesthetic expression of a people, the primary marker of human difference, the basis for a shared humanity, a realm of human activity predicated on economic life, and a basic human drive fundamental to social existence. Similar stories might be charted for the terms “identity,” “media,” and “global.”

In the past few decades, the academic world has witnessed an explosion of interest in identity. Cooper and Brubakers argue that the phenomenon is emblematic of broader developments within the United States, notably the articulation of social and political claims by groups in the vocabulary of identity.⁹ They assert that the excessive theoretical burden placed on the term render it meaningless for academic analysis.

The term media also encompasses a wide range of meanings that might expose it to similar charges of inexactitude. Williams is instructive here, clarifying the valences of the word as vehicle, medium, material, technology, and process.¹⁰ Williams also reminds us of the necessity of thinking about media in a manner that defies technological determinism.¹¹

Once arguably a largely descriptive adjective, the term global now brings with it an undertow of associated questions that mark it as an evaluative term. The term has been given a new lease of life by the debate on globalization.¹² When does the global start? Does it indicate any kind of cultural contact between societies or should it be used only to signal the unprecedented changes in telecommunications, finance, and media that have locked nations into complex patterns of interdependence in the past few decades? If the global implies a certain vision of the universal, how do we approach invocations of the global in light of the powerful critique of universalism launched within the academy?¹³

Each term, then, has taken on a slipperiness of meaning through its extensive use. The pervasiveness of the terms reflects their abidingness in everyday language, media conversations, and public discourse. Although this confirms the value of the terms as objects of inquiry, it also points to challenges in articulating them as analytic categories.

Theoretical Approach

Any investigation of the culture-media-identity problematic must be responsive to the range of meanings that these terms take on in the era of the global, while being attuned to contingency of outcomes and identifiable patterns in which the problematic manifests itself. Such an analysis must also categorically articulate some general relationships between media, culture, identity, and the global that can serve as a frame for scholarly analysis. I outline elements of such a theoretical frame, following a discussion of relevant perspectives in media studies, postcolonial studies, and poststructuralist theory that are already in conversation with Marxist perspectives. The framework outlined below is not meant as a prescriptive model but as a general schematic model suggesting directions for further examination.

Global Media Studies After Marxist, Postcolonial, and Poststructuralist Theory

The “cultural imperialism” theory is a natural starting point for any discussion of global media. Global media scholarship has extensively focused on the thesis, which analyzes media as an instrument of cultural domination, reflecting unequal power relationships between nations that dominate the production of global media and those that import such media.¹⁴ The main limitations of the thesis are a simplification of complex flows of communication to a two-way relationship, its neglect of adaptations of global products to local conditions, the simplistic conception of a native culture under threat from the West, and assumptions of passivity on the part of the audience.¹⁵ Taking these criticisms into account, Morley argues that the theory still retains value for the study of media. For, even in a multipolar world, some locations are more powerful than others. Furthermore, an emphasis on the agency of audiences should not be misread as the ability of viewers to immunize themselves from any media influence.

Sreberny-Mohammadi has critiqued the use of the concept by scholars for its equation of imperialism and Americanization, its conflation of cultural imperialism and media imperialism, and its reductive focus on imperialism as a post-World War II phenomenon.¹⁶ She argues that scholars such as Said, Tomlinson, and Hall have privileged “the realm of the discursive” in their assessments of cultural imperialism, which has had the effect of obfuscating the multifaceted nature of cultural contact.¹⁷ She calls, instead, for analyses of cultural imperialism based on an anthropological view of culture as the practice of everyday life.

As these perspectives indicate, treatments of imperialism within media studies have not always converged with the powerful critiques of imperialism proposed by postcolonial studies. One reason may be that the basic modes of analysis of imperialism within media studies have been “heavily indebted to the works of Marx, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg” or reliant on Marxist-inspired frameworks such as dependency theory.¹⁸ Postcolonial studies, on the other hand, stands in an ambivalent relationship to Marxism.¹⁹ But there are obvious overlaps between the postcolonial studies and media studies. The influence of postcolonial studies on media studies, for instance, may be recognized in scholarship that centers on media representations of Others—national, racial, ethnic, sexual—and on processes of Othering. Shohat and Stam’s work, Unthinking Eurocentrism, exemplifies the point. It represents a radically new perspective on mediated exchanges between Europe and its Others.²⁰ Presenting “a theorized and historicized discussion of Eurocentrism as shaped and challenged by the media,” Shohat and Stam seek to replace that Eurocentric lens with a “polycentric multiculturalism.”²¹ They clearly do not view polycentric multiculturalism as a postcolonial perspective.²² Nonetheless, their critique of Eurocentric epistemologies and their description of racial difference as fundamentally constitutive of colonialism reveal close affinities with the project of postcolonial studies. Shome and Hegde argue that the distinct value of postcolonial studies for the field of communication lies in its contextualization of cultural power in historical and international perspective; its location of the national in broader “histories and geographies of global power and culture”; and its embedding of the problematics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in concrete historical manifestations of modernity.²³ The arguments in several contributions in Parks and Kumar’s important volume on global television may be interpreted as broadly reflecting such imperatives. Luckett’s essay on the television series Goodness Gracious Me and the South Asian diaspora in Britain whose experience it voiced demonstrates how the show confounds a model of media production and consumption for a conventionally understood national audience.²⁴ Schwoch’s essay conceptualizes Russian audiences as a new horizon against which Chechen national identities were “imagined” through the televisual coverage of Russian—Chechnya political conflict.²⁵ Although the Chechens had hoped to gain the attention of the West through the “CNN Defense”—holding out against an adversary till the attention of the Western world could be mobilized—it was Russian and Chechen audiences, instead, who became the audiences of any “national” narratives contained within the telecast.²⁶

Poststructuralist diagnoses have assessed media technologies and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Media, Culture, and Identity in the Time of the Global
• Part I: Geographies and Currents of Global Media and Identity
• Part II: Entanglements of the Global, Regional, National, and Local
• Part III: Digital Mediations in the Global Era
• Bibliography
• Index