The Cultural Turn in International Communication

Abstract

This summative/programmatic essay outlines how the field of International Communication today is underpinned by a central concern with issues of “culture.” An epistemic model for how to understand this new use of culture is sketched, arguing that the term “culture” operationalizes issues of nationalism, modernism, capitalism, postmodernism and post colonialism. The relationship of this model for media forms such as television is then undertaken. Detailed End Notes engage with relevant literature from the field of International Communication.

Notes

An early version of this paper appears in Kavoori (2007), and a more developed version (book-length) in Kavoori (2009). The authors would like to thank the editors at those outlets for permission to reuse previously published material.

¹For a useful overview of the paradigms of International Communication see Thussu (2000), Shome (2006) and review essays in various editions of Curran and Gurevitch's, Mass Media and Society (2005). The tone and intent of this essay is along the model building/critiquing exercises (for International Communication) at different historical moments, such as Chitty (1994); Kavoori (2006); Mowlana (1994); Shome and Hedge, (2002a); Tehranian (1994); and Waterman (1990). Key influences in developing the epistemic articulated here include Appadurai (1996); Pieterse (2004); Rantanen (2005); and Tomlinson (1999).

²The most influential theorists of Globalization include Appadurai, Castells, Giddens, Hannerz, Pieterse, Robertson, Tomlinson and Wallerstein, (and the numerous scholars who have interrogated different parts of their work—for example Giddens by Tomlinson (1994) and Rosenberg (2000)). The essays in King (1991) by many of these scholars, remain one of the best collections on the subject. More recently, Holton (2005) has a cogent accounting of the first, second and third wave scholarship on Globalization as does the more critical analysis in Kiely (2005) and the contextual one in Hopper (2006). For useful summaries of the history of the term/theories of Globalization see, Holton 2005 (pp. 4–15); Hopper (2006, pp. 2–10); Pieterse (2004, pp. 7–21); Steger (2004, pp. 1–12). For a recent summary directly related to media/culture/communication, see Artz (2003, pp. 3–10); Casey, Casey, Calvert, French and Lewis (2002, pp. 111–115); Rantanen (2005, pp. 4–8); Tomlinson (1991, pp. 1–31). For a sense of where the debate stood in the early nineties, see Featherstone (1990); Friedman (1994); and Robertson (1992).

³Initiated by Hall's Encoding/Decoding model some of the key negotiations for audience research has been the career long work of Morley and Ang. For a recent summary of these debates see the introductory essay in Murphy and Kraidy (2003) and for a methodological reformulation of some key issues see Couldry (2000).

⁴For an influential analysis of this see the collected essays of Appadurai (1996) and Hannerz (1992). For a more recent reframing of the conceptual and pedagogical issues at hand see Pieterse (2004) and Tomlinson (1999). For a sustained debate on the issue of identities in a global context see Martin-Barbero (2002) and Schlesinger (2002).

⁵The essays collected in Durham and Kellner (2001) are perhaps the best one-stop shop for understanding this debate with essays on the political economy of media (by Chomsky, Garnham, and Schiller) and media/cultural studies (with essays by Baudillard, Gross, Hebdige, Poster, and Williams). Thurston-Jackson (2003) reviews “cultural economy” approaches (books by Du Gay, Louw, Maxwwell, and Pryke) that draw elements from both approaches.

⁶Thussu (2000, pp. 53–81) provides a useful summary of these connections especially the connections between dependency and structural imperialism theories and their devolution into cultural imperialism theory. Thussu's book is a good example of such retrofitting with an overall grounding in the political-economy tradition which structures the narrative of his chapters on global communication infrastructure, marketplace, and contra flows amongst others issues.

⁷This essay is also a reaction (and a counterpoint) to three other issues: (a) as an antidote to the kind of theoretical/pedagogical divides that have become embedded in the study of International Communication between practitioners and theoreticians; scholars and policy makers; creators and critics; (b) the kind of fixity that has “carved up” the field and practice of International Communication into genre studies, policy studies, political economy studies, literary studies, etc.—the conversation between these is limited, often farcical, with little attention being paid to internationalizing media studies—rather the trend has been to refit existing sub-fields in communication with an international aspect—hence reception analysis becomes comparative reception analysis and so forth; and (c) as a replacement to understanding international communication processes as linear and evolutionary (from third to first, from developing to developed) which has little analytical value in examining the mutative nature of contemporary International Communication, seen in the open and dialogic nature of media culture (Korean rap, Japanese anime, London Bhangra) and their placement within the strategies of global capital and local media elites.

⁸ Gidden's (1990) theory of globalization with modernity at the heart of it remains arguably the single most important theorization. Setting the context and scope of debate for years to come, it offered a rendering of the “institutional dimensions of modernity” (surveillance, capital accumulation, industrialism, military power) and argued that these dimensions was globalizing creating what he called the “dimensions of globalization”—the world capitalist economy (from capital accumulation), the nation-state system (from surveillance), the world military order (from military power) and the international division of labor (from industrialism). While space does not allow for an extended discussion of how Gidden's work has been extended/critiqued, two books are important. Rosenberg's Follies of Globalization theory (2000)critiques the institutional model, the historical reading and theoretical consistency (on Marxist/critical lines) and Tomlinson's Globalization and Culture (1999) engages with modernity in terms of historical development, global reach, deterritorialization and cosmopolitanism.

⁹Postmodernism as an epistemic has a sprawling literature. To summarize briefly, four areas dominate: (a) The reworking of Foucault's post-structuralist vision in a global context (as seen in the work of Said and his followers); (b) The emergence of post-modern values that work as an ideological anesthetic masking conditions of structuration and identity (as seen in the work of critical theory and transnational Marxist studies); (c) The emergence of a global aesthetic and visual vocabulary that creates effects of simulation, dissonance, actualization, eroticization and ideological affiliation (as seen in the work of the followers of Barthes, Baudillard amongst other semiotic/post-structuralist theorists); and (d) The reworking of identity politics (specifically issues of race, class, gender and sexuality) in a global setting where they articulate issues of ethnicity, power, nationalism (in addition to those of race, class, etc.) and construct alternate/altered models of post-modernism/globalization(s).

¹⁰Anderson's notion of “imagined communities” has functioned as the key organizing principle for a considerable body of research on nationalism and national identity in relation to media (along with relevant ideas from the work by Gellner and Hobsbawm). In the context of media, three broad areas may be identified (a) the links between nationalism and ethnicity (or “ethno nationalism”) in a global context articulating issues of cultural identity, nationalist hegemonies; the relation of nationalism to “modern” concerns of identity politics; the role of nationalism with concerns of immigration and multiculturalism (Connor, 1994; Conversi, 2004), (b) the connections between nationalism and nation-states in a global context examining issues of post-independence state formation on the basis of linguistic/cultural hegemonies; the role of state policy and regulated violence in constructs of nationalism; the links between nationalism and fascism (Appadurai, 1996, Billig, 1995; Hosking & Schopflin, 1997; Hutchinson & Smith, 1994; Smith, 1998), (c) The connections between national cultures and cultural imperialism examining issues of historical and contemporary dominance in the cultural and economic arena by dominant nation-states (Mann, 2004); the role of language and media in that process (Barbour, 2000; Tomlinson, 1991) and the critical/subaltern reception of those processes in the non-western world (Appadurai, 1996).

¹¹The well-known (and worn) path from classical Marxist analysis to critical theory and political economy/dependency studies of mass communication provides the contextual frame for understanding capitalism as an epistemic. Two questions are especially important: (a) The usability of the classic questions of hegemony and ideology in a global context, where the issue is less one of internal cultural/institutional mechanisms for the ideological work of media, and more of issues of the intent and functioning of global capitalism. The question that has emerged with increasing frequency is the intimacy of global capitalism with local hegemonies (across a range of trajectories—national, religious, or the cult of the leader); the post-war transference of national movements to national (usually based on a single political party) ideologies using a range of economic rationales (from capitalist to socialist to mixed economies); the collapse between globalization and capitalism as the two categories become synonymous with economic integration, cultural affiliation and homogenization (reflected in debates within the ideology and cultural imperialism subschools of analysis), and (b) The usability of questions of global capitalist structuration using a dependency and political economy approach. The debate has centered around questions of political agency (of both corporations and nation-states at the center) and economic effect (in the creation of markets/products along lines of center/periphery); questions of the role of communication in the economics of political life and inversely in the politics of economic life—the key issue has been the steady erosion of the public sphere by the forces of corporatization (in the media and in the academy), the emergence of vocabularies of neo-liberalism (such as the field of media economics whose theories reify the marketplace) with one single overwhelming consequence: The role of the social formation (especially the question of class) is ignored and replaced by the omnipresence/naturalization of the marketplace.

¹²“Post-colonialism as an epistemic is grounded in two key areas: (a) the reframing of questions of identity politics taken to a global level. This has been manifest in work that examines issues of not just gender politics but in the gendered nature of global categories; the intimate ties between personal expression and global placement; the working of global capital in local identity formations and, perhaps most crucially, in taking the audience question and framing it in terms of subalternity and agency rather than a unreflexive domination (as in “cultural imperialism”), and (b) The “stretching out” of the personal and the institutional by emphasizing the deterritorialisation of ideas, peoples, goods, markets and values while reworking/retaining foucualdian and habermasian questions of discourse and accountability in the public sphere. To its credit, this has been more than just a reworking of questions of dependency and political economy, rather, there has been a re-theorization of the political and the cultural in multiple trajectories—seeing connections between the post-colonial contexts of the first and the third world as seen in concerns of immigration, trade (of people, goods and services) and the imagination. For a overview see the debate between Kavoori and Shome in Critical Studies in Mass Communication (1998, pp. 203–212). For more recent accounts, see Kavoori (2006, 2007, 2009); Parmeswaran (2008a, 2008b); and Shome and Hedge, 2002a, 2002b).