Sumita Chakravarty

My aim in this section is to provide a brief overview of the literature on globalization as it pertains to media and culture. A search on amazon.com for books on "globalization and media" yielded 481,000 entries on last count! Obviously, not all of these studies are useful for our purposes, nor can one keep up with the deluge of offerings that is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. What I present instead are dominant frameworks of analysis, with the full realization that no matter how limited one's focus, there is likely to be little consensus on what these frameworks are or how to interpret them.

One way to make sense of perspectives on globalization, and in keeping with the empirical and open-ended orientation of the submissions in this journal issue, is to start by posing the query of what is at stake in the process itself. In other words, what is globalization doing and to whom? Who benefits and who loses in globalization's spread and reach? It is these concrete concerns, rather than attempts to theorize the phenomenon, that seem to mark the current stage of scholarship. Part of the 'problem' may be, as Fredric Jameson noted, that the topic is "unclassifiable," "falling outside the established academic disciplines," "the modern or postmodern version of the proverbial elephant, described by its blind observers in so many diverse ways" (Jameson 1998: xi). His definition of globalization as an "untotalizable totality" tries to capture the tensions and contradictions that even a cursory look reveals regarding the ways in which the world has become inter-related. For if the unit of analysis earlier was the nation-state, it is a founding premise of globalization studies that that is no longer sufficient or practicable. A new lens is required, that which looks at the world itself in a manner which recognizes that the parts are subservient to the whole, that global processes are uneven in their dynamics and effects, and that globalization is not the harbinger of utopian human collectivity.

Thus it is necessary to call attention, at the outset, to the two sides to considerations of globalization as a process: the scale and speed at which nations, regions and groups come into contact, yet the persistence of old hegemonies, on the one hand, and old and new nationalisms, on the other. Scholars, therefore, have posed the following questions: Is globalization another name for Americanization? Are Western universalist values of modernization, industrialization and liberalism being thrust on the rest of the world? How does one preserve the integrity of particular cultures against a rising tide of homogeneity induced by the "ooze" of mass culture? Is the nation-state in decline or eclipsed by state-less professionals and transnational corporations? What are the "new" conditions for the formation of cultural identity? How does the local relate to the global? Is there a "clash of civilizations" between (Islamic) fundamentalism and (American) modernity? I will return to these questions below, but note them here as indicative of the stakes that inform discussions of globalization.

Another important general point needs to be made regarding the topic. I would like to advance that globalization has ushered in a new moment in the study of culture, something that one can locate in the broader history of cultural studies as its third phase. For if humanities disciplines took a "cultural turn" in the post-world war two period as a result of scholarly and political work in Britain, notably the work of Raymond Williams, and the 1980s marked a "visual turn" in cultural studies, the 1990s may be said to mark a "global turn." "Culture" is now the foremost site of struggle and accommodation across space and time, and all aspects of social and political life are grasped through the dimension of the cultural: the realm of signification through which subjectivity  is formed and expressed. (We can add to this the idea, advanced by Manuel Castells, about the world's transition to an information economy, on which more below.) How else to explain the predominance of books on globalization with "Culture" in the title: Global Culture (1990), Culture, Ideology and World Order (1984), The Cultures of Globalization (1998), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (1996), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy and Globalization (2002), Culture and Global Change (1999), Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (2002), Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004), and many others. While these texts reflect a wide variety of political positions and disciplinary orientations, they share a general realization that the rapid circulation of goods, ideologies and people across national boundaries makes for new circuits of meaning and new configurations of power. There are, then, five ways in which the globalization-and-culture nexus is presented:

1. through discrete ethnographic descriptions of traditional, usually third world societies adapting to modernity and the capitalist world market: I call this the tourist's view of globalization;

2. through celebratory accounts of how dominant Western societies, primarily the United States, absorb influences from other cultures: the melting pot or multiculturalist view of mainstream social science;

3. through models of hybridity, drawing on postcolonial and/or postmodernist discourses, which describe emerging patterns of global cultural traffic of peoples, ideas and commodities;

4. through models of dependency, which chart neo-colonial formations and the attempts of local actors to resist such forces;

5. through reflexive and critical new histories of cultural movements within dominant societies in relation to their own minorities.

It may be useful to see these accounts in relation to the concerns of those scholars who may not have been writing on globalization per se but whose models of explanation have been influential and are highly relevant in understanding the phenomenon and attendant discourses in their current phase. For purposes of convenience, one can designate these theoretical frameworks as political-economic, historical, cultural, and sociological:

a) world systems theory or the critique of capitalism as developed by Immanuel Wallerstein;

b) world historical theory or the critique of imperialism as developed by Eric Hobsbawm;

c) the civilizational thesis as developed by Samuel Huntington; and

d) cosmopolitanism as a way of life as developed by Ulf Hannerz and others.

Wallerstein argues that the modern world-system, which he defines as a unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural systems, is the proper entity of analysis. He sees the world as divided into the inter-related regions of core/periphery/semi-periphery, resulting in the conditions of development and underdevelopment, and on the dependence of the peripheral countries on the core economies. The capitalist world-economy is thus responsible for a global division of labor. Wallerstein, like the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm, sees the growth of the capitalist market as starting in the 16th century, with ceaseless expansion since then.

Hobsbawm, in The Age of Empire, provides a compelling account of imperialism in the period 1875 to 1914, seeing it as the conjunction of the expansion of European capitalist drive as well as political competition among European powers. Avoiding mono-causal explanations, he shows how politics coupled with economics led to the conquest of non-western societies. There was rivalry between different European powers, and soon the acquisition of colonies became a status symbol, irrespective of their value (p. 67). Nations started appealing to the patriotism of their peoples through imperial conquests. Hobsbawn writes: "This partition of the world among a handful of states… (was) strikingly new. Between 1876 and 1915 about one-quarter of the globe's land surface was distributed or re-distributed as colonies among a half-dozen states" (p. 59). The word "imperialism" became current in the 1890s. An interesting update is provided by Stuart Hall in his essay, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity" (1991). Like Hobsbawm, he argues that the globalizing process has a long history but addresses how the question of Englishness or English national identity is formed against a racial and gendered Other. One of the consequences of Britain's imperial conquest is that it took a long time for the English to think of themselves as an ethnicity, since they were the norm against which every other kind of people was seen. It absorbed all the differences of class, region, gender, in order to present itself as a homogeneous entity. This has started breaking down with the current phase of economic globalization and Britain's economic decline. Hall goes on to describe the paradox that just when Britain started getting rid of its colonies, "we all came back home." Labor migrations also broke up the old unitary formations. Hall perceives the return to the local on the part of Britain's minorities as a response to the older homogenizing tendencies. Marginality has become a powerful space, as such people have recovered their own hidden histories, reaching for groundings in what he calls ethnicity.

Huntington's controversial essay, "The Clash of Civilizations?" is written from an American foreign policy perspective that warns of a period of world polarization around civilizations that are radically opposed in their values and belief-systems. He argues that conflicts today, that is, since the U.S. has emerged as the only superpower, are cultural/civilizational rather than ideological (such as, capitalism vs. communism). Lumping a great number of 'civilizations' together (Confucian, Hindu, Muslim) in order to provide the West with an Other, he pits the West against the non-West and shows them locked in a deathly struggle. In a rejoinder, "The Clash of Definitions," Edward Said (2002) critiques Huntington's cold war revivalism, his aggressive and chauvinistic views regarding conflict, his cultural myopia. "A great deal of his argument depends on second- and third-hand opinion that scants the enormous advances in our concrete and theoretical understanding of how cultures work, how they change, and how they can best be grasped or apprehended" (p. 571). Said points to the internal contradictions within societies, their official and counter cultures, saying that "No culture is understandable without some sense of this ever-present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the official; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity, is to miss what is vital and fecund" (p 578). These opposed views point to fundamental discrepancies between cultural frameworks of understanding still operating today.

If Huntington presents a conflict model, Hannerz presents a convergence model of cultural exchange. Hannerz wants to articulate a 'state of mind', a perspective which reflects cosmopolitanism. He traces the history of this idea to Robert Merton in the 1940s, but at the time the context was that of the nation, while cultures today are carried by networks as collective structures of meaning extended in space. Cultures mingle and overlap, giving rise to "new formations of subjectivity." For Hannerz, the cosmopolitan has an aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences. Cosmopolitans can be connoisseurs and dilettantes, or both. They are narcissists. The self is constructed in the space where cultures mirror each other. Intellectuals/ occupational cultures, bureaucrats and politicians, business people, diplomats and journalists are some examples of cosmopolitans.

The approaches outlined above, though influential and provocative, do not engage with the media in any direct way as a dominant force in processes of globalization. This remains an inexplicable lacuna in the readings on this topic. Discussions of media remain specialized in academic journals even while the practices of media permeate the spheres of politics and international relations, government and business, art and entertainment, medicine and warfare. Like globalization itself, it is possible to argue that the topic of media has become unclassifiable, that "the media" have repercussions far beyond their ostensible forms or modes of operation, that "media studies" traverses academic boundaries, much as media messages and signals traverse national ones. It is no surprise, then, that studies of media in a global context are marked by political-economic and technological, historical and cultural concerns. For media are at once consumer products, technological means of communication, economic institutions and forces, and cultural or symbolic artifacts. And in a mirror image of the optimists and pessimists regarding economic globalization, there are those who perceive new media technologies as ushering in an era of global democracy and empowerment while others see the internet as another way for American consumerism to spread across the world.

In the section that follows, then, I would like to review the issues that scholars of media have taken up and the practical and methodological problems they confront in their work. Very broadly, the approaches designated are as follows:

a) the political, dealing with control of media by governments, corporations and citizens' groups;

b) the economic, dealing with media companies as global capitalist organizations;

c) the cultural, dealing with the use and impact of media in everyday life;

d) the technological, with a focus on the information economy and its economic, social and cultural effects.

Media Analysis in the Context of Globalization

Perhaps one can start with the issue of global media governance: confronting media and communications governance or regulation at the global level. Sean Siochru and Bruce Girard (2002) indicate this as a struggle for control over communications between people and their representatives on one side and commercially driven forces on the other. As the authors state, media regulation is crucial because "the very mode in which society as a whole realizes its aspirations and fulfills its claims to offer freedom and democracy to its members. . . all of these ideas and realities are represented to us and brought to us primarily by the media. They provide us with the raw material, often even the tools, to comprehend what our society is beyond our immediate experience, and ultimately to participate in that society and perhaps even to change it" (p. 3). Covering a slew of regulatory issues, from telecommunications development in poorer countries to questions of intellectual property to allocation of radio frequencies and orbital slots, the authors present a sobering picture of the increasing commercialization of the media, the actions of intergovernmental agencies and the struggle to create a democratic public sphere. This book is important because it takes a truly global approach to the issues raised, although it acknowledges the tension between national regulations and desired trans- or supra-national policies for a just media world order.

If issues of global governance raise political questions about the continued viability of the nation-state and its power to withstand the hegemonic thrust of multinational media corporations, Toby Miller et al's book, Global Hollywood (2001), takes up precisely this issue, approaching media from the perspective of political economy. This study exemplifies several themes mentioned earlier that are recurrent in the globalization literature: the idea of globalization as another name for Americanization; the spread of mass consumer culture through which the United States dominates the rest of the world; the power of capital; the threat to national cultures. The authors build on earlier critiques of U.S. media imperialism, and chart the continuing business practices of Hollywood as an industry. They critique screen studies for its reliance on textual analysis, seeking to "blend disciplinary perspectives," particularly those of critical political economy and cultural studies. Arguing for a radical historicization of context, they write that "we must consider all the shifts and shocks that characterize their (films') existence as cultural commodities, their ongoing renewal as the temporary 'property' of varied, productive workers and publics and the abiding 'property' of businesspeople" (pp. 13-14). Using the concept of a New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL), the book ranges over enormous territory as it examines issues such as copyright, surveillance of audiences, marketing, distribution and exhibition of Hollywood products, co-productions, trade and media policy.

Global Hollywood is emblematic of the political economy approach in its focus on the business practices of the world's dominant media industry and on wealthy countries since they provide the most capital to the U.S. Appadurai's influential book, Modernity at Large (1996) helps us shift the focus to the experience of globalization from the perspective of the formerly colonized world. He rejects the idea of cultural homogenization and takes the reader instead on a quasi-personal, quasi-ethnographic journey across different temporal and social landscapes. Taking a postcolonial stance rooted in anthropology and area studies, Appadurai places media and migration at the center of current globalization, seeing them as twin processes that mark "the imagination as collective social fact." He talks of flows across large and irregular transnational terrains, commenting on unexpected convergences of peoples and cultures. Appadurai looks beyond the nation-state to an era of a global public sphere rendered possible by the new digital technologies.

The latter comprise the heart of Manuel Castells' magisterial work on the information age and its economy, society and culture. In his The Rise of the Network Society (2000), Castells' aim is to chart the information technology revolution and to elaborate on its paradigm. He ascribes the following features to this paradigm: information is its raw material; effects of the new technologies are pervasive; the networking logic is applied to all kinds of processes and organizations; it is marked by flexibility or the ability to reconfigure on the part of institutions and organizations; there is convergence of specific technologies into a highly integrated system. Going beyond the binaries of development/underdevelopment, the West and the Rest, local/global and the like, Castells documents an interdependent system, "the parallel unleashing of formidable productive forces of the informational revolution, and the consolidation of black holes of human misery in the global economy, be it in Burkina Faso, South Bronx, Kamagasaki, Chiapas, or La Courneuve (p. 2). Against this transformational backdrop, Castells assesses the different claims made for and against the social consequences of new media. The Internet, he contends, creates communities that work in a different plane of reality (p. 389). He describes the "culture of real virtuality" as "a system in which reality itself (that is, people's material/symbolic existence) is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience" (p. 404, italics in original). In the new historical environment, the critical cultural battles will be between those who seek inclusiveness and those who want to set barriers to this communication system.

I have focused in this overview on what appear to me as the most seminal contributions to the topic of globalization, particularly with reference to media and cultural patterns more broadly. It is clear that no narrow view of "the media" will do; rather, a historical-materialist, cultural-ideological, policy-organizational, audience-experiential interactive model alone can help us in understanding the fundamental role of media in our globalized world.

Works Cited

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Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, University of California Press, 1997.

Crane, Diana, ed. Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization. Routledge, 2002

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Hall, Stuart. "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity" in Anthony King,
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Huntington, Samuel. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs (summer 1993): 22
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Miller, Toby et al. Global Hollywood. London: BFI Publishing, 2001.

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Wilson, Rob and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Global/Local: Cultural Production and
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Sumita S. Chakravarty (Ph.D., [Comms] University of Illinois, Urbana; Ph.D., [English] University of Lucknow, India) Core faculty in the Media Studies program and Chair of the Cultural Studies and Media concentration at Eugene Lang College, New School University. She is the author of National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema (University of Texas Press, 1993) and editor of The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Sen (2000). Her essays have appeared in various anthologies, most recently in Rethinking Third Cinema (Routledge, 2003). Her research and teaching areas include media and cultural theory, third world cinemas, globalization, and popular culture. Her current projects include: the impact of visual technologies on non-western cultures, and globalization and media.