Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us

Abstract

In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship.

Notes

[1] Postmodernist theorists (e.g., Fredric Jameson) and poststructuralist hyrbidity scholars (e.g., Marwan Kraidy) have quickly challenged the validity of the “cultural imperialism” thesis. They claim that globalization is not one-way domination, with a frequently mentioned example of the transnationalization of Japanese video games and television dramas (Iwabuchi, 2002), and that non-Western cultures have the ability to resist Western influence, manifested in the shape of hybridity (Kraidy, 1999). Kraidy's work on hybridity was a new development of the reception research in media studies, an approach that applies Stuart Hall's notion of “preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings” in audience research. David Morley (1997), a pioneer and leading figure in reception research, warns that the new audience research has gone too far toward celebrating the audience's ability to negotiate meanings and subvert the power of media. Kellner (2003) points out that there is a tendency in cultural studies, postmodernist, and poststructuralist research to romanticize resistance in non-Western cultures and downplay the power of Western culture. Interestingly enough, Iwabuchi's (2002) point that Japanese cultural products have to be deliberately made “cultural odorless” (i.e., de-Japanized, or Westernized) in order to be accepted by audiences and consumers outside Japan has been completely ignored by those postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists. The widely celebrated notions of “third space” and “hybridity” proposed by Homi Bhabha are not free from contradictions. Kalscheuer (2009) points out that while Bhabha focused on the issues of power in the construction of identity and attempted to offer a space for the marginalized to have their own voices and to resist domination, he failed to consider the issue of power in the third (in-between) space. Kalscheuer (2009) posed the pungent question “Did Bhabha forget the question that Spivak raised in 1998, namely, Can the subaltern speak?” In other words, once entering the third space, how can we be sure that the marginalized will automatically be able to have a voice, consciousness, or subjectivity that is free, or at least partially free, from previous social/cultural/political constructions? What kind of alternative (cultural, symbolic) resources can be used by persons in the third place to build a new culture? Bhbaha's theory is still operating within the Eurocentric paradigm, which upholds the supremacy of sovereignty of the individual. The assumption that people are able to freely reinvent their identities unlimitedly, although extremely alluring, is indeed an attempt to extend the privilege of the white man to a small number of elites of the marginalized groups so that they could also transcend their cultural realities to reinvent preferred identities. This form of reinvention has little relevance or meaning to the majority of people in marginalized groups. It indeed offers only an individualist solution to the structural problem. Whereas the antiessentialism tenet and the deconstruction orientation in postmodernist, poststructuralist, and postcolonialist traditions have been instrumental in unmasking and dismantling the naturalization or normalization process of power relations in the realm of discourse and culture, they also make it impossible for marginalized people to use their own cultural traditions as cultural groundings for self-understanding and self-assertion because it does not allow any culture and collective identity to be conceived other than in a very temporary and fluid fashion of “strategic essentialism.” Ironically, the idea of hybrid culture and identity, with its endless possibility for new intersections, would eventually render all exchanges among all individuals to be interpersonal communication, thus making the concept of culture or even intercultural communication lose their validity or usefulness. Agreeing with Maulana Karenga and Tu Weiming, I believe that everyone is a cultural being who develops a sense of agency in concrete social/cultural reality. If we cast away all forms of social relations, as a result of deconstructing every collective identity, we will find ourselves merely as atomistic individuals—biological objects, prior to entering any social relations, without any sense of political or historical agency.

[2] The use of the collective personal pronoun here is deliberate and is meant to designate all modern subjects, this author included. To the extent that the majority of us now no longer live indigenously but live by the industrial machine, we share complicity (albeit to varying degrees) with the decimation going on among the globe's last remaining indigenous peoples.

[3] See, for example, the film documentary by Christopher Walker, Trinkets and Beads, chronicling the cultural and environmental havoc wrought by oil drilling in the Huaorani and other neighboring tribes’ territories in the Amazon heartland—all for the sake of a volume of oil extracted from the region sufficient to power cars in the U.S. for 13 days of driving.