Globalized Arts

The Entertainment Economy and Cultural Identity

J. P. Singh

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780231519199
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Our interactive world can take a creative product, such as a Hollywood film, Bollywood song, or Latin American telenovela, and transform it into a source of cultural anxiety. What does this artwork say about the artist or the world she works in? How will these artworks evolve in the global market? Film, music, television, and the performing arts enter the same networks of exchange as other industries, and the anxiety they produce informs a fascinating area of study for art, culture, and global politics.

Focusing on the confrontation between global politics and symbolic creative expression, J. P. Singh shows how, by integrating themselves into international markets, entertainment industries give rise to far-reaching cultural anxieties and politics. With examples from Hollywood, Bollywood, French grand opera, Latin American television, West African music, postcolonial literature, and even the Thai sex trade, Singh cites not only the attempt to address cultural discomfort but also the effort to deny entertainment acts as cultural. He connects creative expression to clashes between national identities, and he details the effect of cultural policies, such as institutional patronage and economic incentives, on the making and incorporation of art into the global market. Ultimately, Singh shows how these issues affect the debates on cultural trade being waged by the World Trade Organization, UNESCO, and the developing world.

1

Cultural Politics and Global Anxieties

Despite the guilty, fearful silence at the front of the auditorium, few could hear what Funda Eser was saying: that when the angry girl tore the scarf off her head, she was not just making a statement about people or about national dress, she was talking about our souls, because the scarf, the fez, the turban, and the headdress were symbols of the reactionary darkness in our souls, from which we should liberate ourselves and run to join the modern nations of the West. This provoked a taunt from the back rows that the entire auditorium heard very clearly.

“So why not take everything off and run to Europe stark naked?”

—Orhan Pamuk, Snow

The road from the production of creative expressions to their realization as policies enacted to protect cultural identity is paved with politics. The ultimate aim of this book is to warn against the kinds of politics that revolve around some singular elite notion of culture. Art and politics are not innocent allies: the politics of identity they yield need to be questioned. Winslow Homer’s American landscapes speak to a ruggedly innocent national identity venerated in many American discourses; however, we need to investigate the notion of a national cultural identity, especially when creative expressions no longer obey national mantras. This does not mean giving up on culture: it only means that the quest for identity and a cultural voice need not be moored to the ship of the nation-state.¹ The institutions and processes through which cultural politics and deliberations take place are described in the next section. The rest of the chapter examines the salience of identity politics and cultural anxieties in globalization.

Creative Expressions and Globalization

Creative expressions are the most visible symbols in understanding human identities. They mark and embody the passage of time and the way of life for individuals. A statue, a stanza, or a city’s architecture may well reveal to us many things about its creators or the groups that have successively inhabited or experienced such forms. Representations—linguistic, visual, musical, or otherwise—are, therefore, practices created and interpreted by individuals. Being representations, they can be shared, inherited, and left behind as legacies. On Christmas Day, 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Ode to Joy) in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the regretfully eponymous wall. Earlier, in 1972, the Council of Europe and, in 1985, the European Union, had adopted the symphony as the European anthem.² In this regard, Beethoven’s Ninth provides a punctuated equilibrium to Europe’s restless quest for a common identity. In Potsdamer Platz, the fall of the Berlin Wall was also greeted with other music, including Pink Floyd’s The Wall.³

Creative expressions reflect but also constitute our reality; the mirror tells us who we are. Who are we, then, when surrounded by several mirrors, each showing a different and changing portrait? Institutions of power often take individual or group identities to be fixed; their task is to affix it further through evocations of historical memory, as in Beethoven’s Ninth. But identities are always in a state of flux, and the fall of Berlin Wall serves as a physical reminder. The ability to demarcate the contours of identity is a form of metapower: itself borne out of interactions with people and their creative representations. Such is the power of representation or art; expressions beget power by providing an identity to the issues they enact. Once the contours have been set, what we do with our identities is business as usual. No wonder, then, that art calls forth such passions and reasons everywhere.

Globalization has given metapower to actors hitherto not present in our living rooms. Who decides which representations are creative? How do these creative representations become cultural-or group-identity artifacts? Whose culture? What can we make of global cultures and global societies in these debates? These are questions to which I attend in the following pages. Like a postmodern narrator, let me provide the denouement right here. As always, the right to call something cultural is being contested, as it should be, in globalization debates. Globalization has stirred up the demarcations of identities anchored to the ship of the Westphalian nation-state that emerged in the modern world as the preeminent actor. The flux of identities was largely settled in 1648 by the peace of Westphalia. Commerce, technology, and social imaginaries converged to produce in the nation-state the legitimate political organization for governance (Anderson 1983).⁴ In Europe, the initial boundaries of the nation-state were primarily linguistic, demarcating people as English, French, German, or Italian. For this very reason, when this Europe adopted Ode to Joy as its anthem, it asked the conductor Herbert Von Karajan to come up with an instrumental version devoid of Schiller’s poem by this name, sung in German in Beethoven’s symphony.

While the nation-state fights for dominance and legitimacy in a plurality of actors in the twenty-first century, the representational metaphors are in flux again. A dozen yellow stars now encircle the middle of the European Union’s blue flag. Likewise, identities are afloat: sometimes affixed to the nation-state, otherwise paddling toward other identity markers—civilizational, linguistic, religious, diasporic, indigenous, ethnic, sexual, global. Representational practices with local flavors find, or are created for, global audiences. The plight of poverty and its effect on children are shown in films such as City of God from a favela in Brazil, Tsotsi from a South African township, or Salaam Bombay and Slum Dog Millionaire from a chawl in Mumbai. They now compete in representational politics with the La Boheme of La Scala or a Pearl Fisher from the Palais Garnier. The capital C of high culture and the small c of popular culture can be seen in contest or collaboration or both.

In their struggles to dominate or, at times, to profit their constituencies, the various international actors—nation-states, international organizations, commercial enterprises, societal groups and movements—deploy or destroy, as the case may be, a variety of representational practices. The salience of public diplomacy in the United States after September 11, 2001, promotes the “soft power” or persuasive and positive appeal of being “American” through the seductive charms of its films, music, and other creative expressions. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, these “charming” exports, as they appear to the nation-state that promotes them, may be typecast as cultural imperialism by other nation-states or actors. Such debates can lead to protests against Hollywood’s presence in various parts of the world. In other parts, even local representations may become part of destructive rituals, as in the Taliban regime’s destruction of the historic Bemiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan or protests against Hollywood films in South Korea. At a less destructive level, these quarrels feature lively moments in the so-called “cultural flows” at local, societal, national, and international levels. At stake are not just the commercial and technological practices that sustain these flows but also the meaning of cultural identity itself when the local and the global—that is, the Janus-faced twins of representational practices—turn around and stand face to face.

The Politics of Cultural Policy

The path creative expressions tread toward becoming symbolic bearers of cultural identities wends through political institutions and deliberations. The end point is policies that favor one form of cultural identity over another. In the age of globalization, these deliberations are informed by anxieties about creative expressions flowing across borders, both territorial and extraterritorial—anxieties that come from fears of the unknown. These fears or cultural anxieties reflect the challenges to collective identities from accelerated flows of various creative expressions and representations. The territorial origins and destinations provide a physical dimension to the flows of creative expressions. However, creative expressions also possess an extraterritorial dimension and challenge, as they always have, the boundaries of what it means to have a self, a family, a community, a society, or a network. It would be a truism to note that identity politics are in a flux today as people challenge the cultural boundaries of their identities.

Who invokes culture? In which political or social space is it being invoked? How is the invocation contested or deliberated? By whom? For what purposes? The anthropologist Virginia Dominguez (2000, 22) writes that an analysis of cultural politics needs to move beyond a repertoire of objects and their distribution in society “toward asking what is being accomplished socially, politically, discursively when the concept of culture is invoked to describe, analyze, argue, justify, and theorize.” In an essay that immediately follows Dominguez’s, in the same volume, the sociologist Paul DiMaggio (2000, 38) notes that “people’s choices of expressive goods are profoundly cultural and social.” In other words, individual acts of consumption are not independent of social and cultural preferences. The Dominguez-DiMaggio challenge is to think of creative artifacts and cultural policy as socially constructed and instituted processes related to social and cultural preferences rooted in the kind of identity politics that I outlined earlier. These ideas link cultural-identity policies with specific cultural-policy measures that are enacted to promote these identities. Nevertheless, this is not an assault on individual rationality or freedom. By focusing on deliberative and discursive acts, one merely moves toward a model of cultural policy while not necessarily negating individual choices. I take it as given that creative expressions and their consumption can be individualistic but nevertheless socially informed.

The chapters that follow evaluate cultural-policy contests or deliberations from an ideal type, namely that of problem-posing deliberations, which may include individuals, groups, or institutions. Ideal types are necessary not only to provide a method of evaluation but also to underscore my normative argument around nonoppressed creative voices. This argument leans upon inclusive and impartial policymaking where groups solve problems rather than prioritizing precrafted solutions that are always partial to one group or another. Cultural policy explicitly favors particular (cultural-identity-based) creative expressions. When the meaning of cultural identity is rapidly changing, it becomes unclear whom cultural policy should favor. An ideal type that allows all groups to participate and engage in problem solving offers a process for crafting an appropriate cultural policy.

Cultural deliberations will invariably run into a contest between segmentations of a historical identity and permutations available in the future. While cultural practices may run deep in history and be objectified or even reified through institutional objectifications, they are, being group phenomena, the result of social construction. What one believes to be high culture, such as opera, for example, has received centuries of political support from elite cultural institutions. Seyla Benhabib (2002, 5) notes that participants in any culture “experience their traditions, stories, rituals and symbols, tools, and material living conditions through shared, albeit contested and contestable, narrative accounts.” We now find ourselves in a contest where the meanings and influences of elite and popular cultures are being redefined. Any narrative of cultural policymaking must then account for the power of those in contest.

Cultural Deliberations

Ideally, deliberations involve assaying alternatives in political spaces that allow for trust, transparency, and inclusion among the stakeholders or participants. Nevertheless, power often shapes outcomes. If power is diffuse, contests among individuals and groups can yield indeterminate results or a slow search for solutions; if power is concentrated and outcomes are dictated by the powerful alone, results can be overdetermined and rigidly derived.⁵ However, power also has a transformative dimension, especially in an interactive deliberative context in which the deliberations themselves effect changes in the identity of the participants and the meaning of the issue they are discussing. This notion of metapower attends problem-posing deliberations in which successive interactions among participants changes the issue dimension and the identities of the participants. As the term implies, in “problem-posing deliberations” outcomes reflect discursive deliberations accomplished through persuasion.⁶ They are not predetermined solutions revealing the prerogative of those with instrumental or structural power to effect their favored outcomes.⁷ Furthermore, in problem-posing deliberations, the absence of instrumental coercions does not always result in a win-lose format. Instrumental persuasion may be present in problem-posing deliberations as well, but it is transformative in making participants cognizant of alternatives.

The notion of problem-posing deliberations presented here rests upon Freire’s notions of dialogic action and Habermas’s notions of communicative action.⁸ Freire notes that problem posing can only take place in an atmosphere of trust and empathy, in which the participants “name their world” and find a cultural voice through successive communications. For Habermas, communicative action is deliberative, transparent, and inclusive. Instrumentality, on the other hand, is purposive and therefore cannot effect problem-posing deliberations. Clearly, Habermas is positing communicative action as an ideal type. In practice, deliberations can start with instrumental rationalities and lead to problem posing and persuasion once sufficient trust has been established among participants.

Three criteria define the ideal type for deliberation: trust, transparency, and inclusion. Trust is the belief in the legitimacy of the process and the space in which deliberations are taking place. Legitimacy, in terms of a socially constructed due obedience, may or may not encompass normative conduct, but due obedience does specify at least a minimal habitual acceptance of results (Hurd 1999).⁹ Transparency similarly varies in deliberations and poses a particular problem. Collective action is easier among small groups that can meet without the spotlight of the media. There may still be space for a small group meeting to effect consensus, but transparency creates due process. Finally, inclusion is especially important for any deliberation and must speak to all the parties affected. In practice, inclusive participation often means chains of delegation—people participate indirectly through delegations or representatives. In a communicative context, Iris Marion Young (1996) avers that inclusion can result from acknowledging existing forms of greetings, rhetoric, narratives, and storytelling from the marginalized “other” voices. Appiah (1994, 161) calls these forms “positive life-scripts,” organizing narratives about people’s lives that offer dignity and inclusiveness. Trust, transparency, and inclusion together create conditions for problem-posing deliberations or the weighing of alternatives through persuasion. As will be seen later, the three conditions are notably present at the international level, where diffused power is the norm, or in domestic contexts, where democratic institutions are present. The absence of trust, transparency, and inclusion, especially in situations of concentrated power among a few actors, invariably leads to coercion or manipulation. Nevertheless, even in democratic contexts, deliberations around cultural identities are particularly tricky (Benhabib 2002, Benhabib, Shapiro, and Petranovic 2007). Two or more cultures in negotiation may not know each other and may meet within a climate of mistrust and fear. As I alluded to before, the anxieties of globalization make this particularly difficult.

Two narratives drawn from the U.S. context may help to illustrate the claims I have just made. In Slim’s Table (1992), Mitchell Duneier presents an ethnography of a group of black mechanics that regularly meet at the cafeteria Valois in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. In the opening chapter, Slim, one of the mechanics, reaches out to Bart, who grew up in the segregated South. But Duneier notes that Slim’s “attitude of caring exists within a framework of barriers to closeness set up by Bart” (15). Bart’s upbringing cautions him against interacting with Slim and his friends, therefore causing him anxiety. Despite Bart’s barriers, “Slim’s caring behavior had pushed Bart to the limits of his potential for tolerance, friendship and respect” (21). Slim’s Table is a powerful testimony to the successive degrees of trust, transparency, and inclusion within interactive environments. It shows how individuals may move toward Taylor’s multicultural politics of mutual recognition of one another’s dignity and esteem (1994). Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004) presents the opposite: the manipulation of anxiety by the political elite to breed mistrust and exclusivity. Frank documents how voters in Midwestern states such as rural Kansas have overlooked their own history o...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Creative Voice and Cultural Identity
• 1: Cultural Politics and Global Anxieties
• 2: Value, Markets, Patronage
• 3: Culture Wars
• 4: UNESCO and the Europeans
• 5: Cultural Patrons in the Developing World
• 6: Culture by Any Other Name
• 7: The Creative Voice and Cultural Policy
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index