Globalization and Latin American Cinema

Toward a New Critical Paradigm

Sophia A. McClennen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319570594
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319570600
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Studying the case of Latin American cinema, this book analyzes one of the most public - and most exportable- forms of postcolonial national culture to argue that millennial era globalization demands entirely new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between politics, culture, and economic policies. Concerns that globalization would bring the downfall of national culture were common in the 1990s as economies across the globe began implementing neoliberal, free market policies and abolishing state protections for culture industries. Simultaneously, new technologies and the increased mobility of people and information caused others to see globalization as an era of heightened connectivity and progressive contact. Twenty-five years later, we are now able to examine the actual impact of globalization on local and regional cultures, especially those of postcolonial societies. Tracing the full life-cycle of films and studying blockbusters like City of God, Motorcycle Diaries, and Children of Men this book argues that neoliberal globalization has created a highly ambivalent space for cultural expression, one willing to market against itself as long as the stories sell. The result is an innovative and ground-breaking text suited to scholars interested in globalization studies, Latin-American studies and film studies.

© The Author(s) 2018

Sophia A. McClennenGlobalization and Latin American CinemaPalgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Toward a New Critical Paradigm for the Study of Culture and Globalization

Sophia A. McClennen¹

(1)

Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

Sophia A. McClennen

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

On August 30, 2013, the historical connection between Latin American cinema and the United States underwent an unprecedented shift. For the first time in the history of US–Mexican film exchange, a Mexican film was released in the US market before ever being released inside Mexico. Not only were viewers from the north able to see the film before viewers in the national market from which the film ostensibly hailed, but US viewers flocked to see the film. In only eight weeks, No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions Not Included, 2013) was ranked as the fourth most successful foreign language film in the US box office and it is currently the all-time top-ranked Spanish language film in the US market.

Beyond the obvious appeal to Spanish speakers living in the United States, the film received significant support from the non-Spanish speaking market as well. This is an especially noteworthy fact since the film is a comedy—a genre traditionally considered not to cross borders well. In addition, it epitomizes the new global order of filmmaking: with Mexicans writing, directing, and performing; the US–Mexican film production company Pantelion Films producing ¹ ; US-based, Canadian-founded Lionsgate distributing; and Chinese-owned AMC theaters (among others) screening it.

While obviously trendsetting, this film symbolizes a process that has been a long time in the making. It shows that we are now in a phase of globalization that demands entirely new critical frameworks through which to think about the key dilemmas that have preoccupied scholars of cultural globalization for decades. ² Focusing on the period from 1990 to 2016, this book studies Latin American cinema in the global era in order to offer a new critical paradigm for understanding the effects of global economies on national cultures.

One of my core arguments is that the 1990s ushered in a new era of globalization that could not be interpreted according to previous critical paradigms. This new phase of globalization is best thought of as specifically tied to neoliberal capitalism and to the market-oriented policies it demands. Despite increasing calls to populist nationalism, previously in Latin America and now in the United States and Europe, the reality is that even the most populist governments are still deeply committed to a global exchange economy and a state structure with minimal commitments to social welfare. Neoliberal policies that demand deregulation and privatization are operating in most states across the globe. Thus, what I am calling millennial globalization begins in the twenty-first century and represents the era when neoliberal policies put in place in the 1970s operate on a truly global level. One of the key shifts brought on by millennial globalization is the spatial framework within which we understand it. If at one time it made sense, for instance, to think of Latin America as a “loser” in the global economy, the neoliberal era upends that status as certain economies and specific corporations in the region rise to global prominence. As David Harvey puts it in The Enigma of Capital, “the creation and re-creation of ever newer space relations for human interactions is one of capitalism’s most signal achievements.” ³ Thus, in the precise moment when practically every economy across the globe participates in the capitalist marketplace, the geographical frameworks through which capital circulates begin to destabilize the traditional axes of power. This book argues that these changes demand new ways of understanding the connections between culture, politics, and place. Most importantly, this shift makes it possible to disentangle the longstanding association of the west with capitalism. For instance, economies like that of Brazil or Mexico surge to global prominence, while those of Spain and Greece nosedive. These economic realities demand that we recognize the decline in power of the west alongside the increased strengthening of capitalism as a way of life.

These changes also explain why the critical oppositions that have tended to frame analysis of globalization’s effects on culture need revision in the current context. As we cluster the sorts of questions that have structured most research on culture and globalization—especially from the perspective of postcolonial scholars—we can note that they offer political oppositions and antagonisms that are significantly destabilized by the neoliberal market economy. Consider the following list of traditional categories used to study film culture and globalization:

• Cultural Homogenization vs. Cultural Heterogeneity
• Cultural Imperialism vs. Local/Autochthonous Culture
• US Market Dominance vs. “Emerging” Markets
• Hollywood Aesthetic Dominance vs. “Local” Aesthetics
• Consumption of Other Cultures Influences One’s Identity and Ideas about Other Cultures
• Global (American) Culture vs. National Culture

While it must be said that postcolonial approaches to these issues often stressed deconstruction and hybridity rather than stark oppositions, it is still true that many of the debates about culture and globalization tended to trope on the above list of antagonisms. In a section below I will analyze the various ways that these oppositional categories no longer hold in the era of millennial globalization.

But even more important, I will show how the study of these antagonisms often rested on implicit value judgments, which were often more connected to identity categories than to political power. Think, for example, of the tension over homogeneity and heterogeneity, which was a common category of concern for cultural globalization scholarship in the 1990s. That earlier research often rested on the implicit assumption that heterogeneity was “better” in the face of a global homogenizing trend where all cultures copied the west and embraced capitalism. Recall, for example, one of the most famous lines of 1990s research on globalization and culture, that of Arjun Appadurai, who wrote that: “The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.” ⁴ In a similar vein, Roland Robertson, the critic responsible for transferring the term “glocal” from Japanese business theory to cultural theory, emphasized the interlinking qualities of the local and the global:

It is not a question of either homogenization or heterogenization, but rather of the ways in which both of these tendencies have become features of life across much of the late-twentieth-century world. In this perspective the problem becomes that of spelling out the ways in which homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies are mutually implicative. ⁵

For Robertson, writing in the 1990s, sorting out the connections and interactions between cultural heterogeneity and cultural homogeneity was the key problem scholars needed to solve.

These approaches were based on the expectation that the cultural effects of neoliberal globalization would mimic cultural imperialism. Thus, scholars like Robertson and Appadurai mapped their research according to imperial era power structures that had bundled economic, political, and cultural power into predictable constellations. The critical response to the imperial model of globalization also assumed that cultural resistance should take the form of protection of diverse identities and the defense of difference. But those 1990s interventions into the cultural impact of globalization could not fully predict what would really happen under millennial globalization. They were unable to foresee the effects of the incorporation of previously postcolonial societies into market capitalism, which led to postcolonial states working with multinational corporations to market “national” culture on a global scale. Nor did they anticipate the fact that neoliberal practices would actually encourage market diversification and would profit from the desire for difference. In fact, as John Tomlinson points out, the homogeneity of globalization may well be best understood as the rendering of all culture into commodity, not the creation of a uniform monoculture. ⁶

As the following analysis will show, too often our inherent critique of the cultural effects of global capitalism was shrouded by what appeared as overt arguments for diversity and the local. For a variety of reasons the ethical critique of the effects of a global capitalist market economy was embedded within arguments that such practices would create a homogenous culture and would eradicate local specificity. This angle worked, in part, because there was a homology between the source of the dominant culture, imperialist practices, and capitalist power. It worked because the “winners” and “losers” of globalization could mostly be mapped according to an imperialist geography. This book will explain how in the era of millennial globalization those structures have shifted, rendering many of the critical approaches that used to work to analyze the consequences of globalization ineffective.

There is another way that this book contributes to debates on the impact of globalization on culture. Rather than speculate about what would happen to national film industries after the imposition of neoliberal policy, this book draws on actual data. As the various empirical sources offered throughout this book prove, many of the outcomes scholars imagined did not pan out. For instance, national industries did not die out and states did not stop investing in film. And neoliberalism did not consolidate culture; it diversified it. This means that, as scholars fought to protect cultural practices, neoliberal policies sought a variety of markets to enter and commodities to sell. Today, for instance, there is far more Latin American film across a range of styles and aesthetics available to viewers than ever before.

While some of the 1990s worries did not come to pass, that does ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Toward a New Critical Paradigm for the Study of Culture and Globalization
• Part I. Process
• Part II. Place
• Back Matter