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Perspectives on Global Cultures Issues in Cultural and
Media Studies 1st Edition Ramaswami Harindranath
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Ramaswami Harindranath
ISBN(s): 9780335225682, 0335225683
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.11 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
Perpectives…global culture pb 21/4/06 8:38 am Page 1

Harindranath
I S S U E S
IN CULTURAL AND MEDIA STUDIES
S E R I E S E D I T O R : S T U A R T A L L A N

Perspectives on Global Cultures

Ramaswami Harindranath
This book explores significant aspects of the cultural
and social impact of globalization on the developing
world by examining intellectual contributions and
cultural expression in Latin America, Africa, and
South and South East Asia. How do we understand
and conceptualize the ‘underside’ of globalization?
How can voices from the margins challenge
dominant discourses? In what ways do ‘culture
wars’ contribute to the politics of nationalism,
indigeneity and ‘race’?
The book surveys key debates on the politics of
representation and cultural difference, paying
particular attention to issues such as subalternity,
cultural nationalism, third cinema, multiculturalism,
and indigenous communities. It offers an original
synthesis of ideas on these topics, and traces the
lines of connection between national cultural and
political projects during anti-colonial struggles and
more contemporary forms of national and transnational

Perspectives on Global Cultures

cinema and television.

Perpectives
Harindranath invites us to consider non-metropolitan cultural
forms in the context of contemporary issues relating to the
politics of difference. Perspectives on Global Culture is important
reading for students and researchers in media and cultural
studies and sociology, as well as for those interested in debates

on Global
on 'race' and ethnicity.

Ramaswami Harindranath is Senior Lecturer in Media and

Communications at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He
has taught in universities in India, Malaysia, and the UK. His

Cultures
other publications include Approaches to Audiences (1998), and
The ‘Crash’ Controversy (2001).

Cover design: del norte (Leeds) Ltd

ISBN 0-335-20569-0

I S S U E S
9 780335 205691 IN CULTURAL AND MEDIA STUDIES
PERSPECTIVES ON
GLOBAL CULTURES
 I S S U E S in CULTURAL and MEDIA STUDIES

Series editor: Stuart Allan

Published titles:
News Culture, 2nd edition Media and Audiences
Stuart Allan Karen Ross and Virginia Nightingale
Modernity and Postmodern Culture Critical Readings: Sport, Culture and the Media
Jim McGuigan Edited by David Rowe
Television, Globalization and Cultural Rethinking Cultural Policy
Identities Jim McGuigan
Chris Barker
Media, Politics and the Network Society
Ethnic Minorities and the Media Robert Hassan
Edited by Simon Cottle
Television and Sexuality
Sport, Culture and the Media, 2nd edition
Jane Arthurs
David Rowe
Identity and Culture
Cinema and Cultural Modernity
Gill Branston Chris Weedon

Compassion, Morality and the Media Media Discourses

Keith Tester Donald Matheson
Masculinities and Culture Citizens or Consumers?
John Beynon Justin Lewis, Sanna Inthorn and Karin
Wahl-Jorgensen
Cultures of Popular Music
Andy Bennett Science, Technology and Culture
David Bell
Media, Risk and Science
Stuart Allan Museums, Media and Cultural Theory
Michelle Henning
Violence and the Media
Cynthia Carter and C. Kay Weaver Media Talk
Moral Panics and the Media Ian Hutchby
Chas Critcher Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the
Cities and Urban Cultures Media
Deborah Stevenson Edited by Chas Critcher
Cultural Citizenship Critical Readings: Violence and the Media
Nick Stevenson Edited by C. Kay Weaver and Cynthia
Carter
Culture on Display
Bella Dicks Mediatized Conflict
Simon Cottle
Critical Readings: Media and Gender
Edited by Cynthia Carter and Linda Steiner Game Cultures
Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy
Critical Readings: Media and Audiences
Edited by Virginia Nightingale and Understanding Popular Science
Karen Ross Peter Broks
PERSPECTIVES ON
GLOBAL CULTURES

R a m a s wa m i
H a r i n d ra n a t h

Open University Press

Open University Press
McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill House
Shoppenhangers Road
Maidenhead
Berkshire
England
SL6 2QL

email: enquiries@openup.co.uk
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and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121–2289, USA

First published 2006

Copyright © Ramaswami Harindranath, 2006

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism
and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright
Licensing Agency Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be
obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of 90 Tottenham Court Road, London,
W1T 4LP.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-10: 0 335 20569 0 (pb) 0 335 20570 4 (hb)

ISBN-13: 978 0 335 20569 1 (pb) 978 0 335 20570 7 (hb)

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Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
 CONTENTS

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD vii

INTRODUCTION 1

PART 1
1 | ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY? 7
Revealing absences 8
The global-local dialectic – a process of homogenization? 17
The politics of cultural production 22
Further reading 26

2 | THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE 27

Culture wars 31
Cultural identity and the voice of the Other 36
Further reading 46

3 | THE SUBALTERN AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION 47

The ideology or hegemony debate – a small detour 51
The subaltern and agency 55
Conceiving subaltern resistance 62
Further reading 65
vi | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

PART 2
4 | MULTI-CULTURES, NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL 69
Contestations and debates 71
Different contexts, diverse conceptions 75
Negotiating sameness and difference 79
Recognition and identity 83
Subaltern aesthetics 88
Transnational identities and the media 92
Further reading 97

5 | THIRD CINEMA 98
Renewing Third Cinema theory 104
National and gender politics 112
Cinematic representations of national identity 114
Further reading 120

6 | INDIGENOUS POLITICS AND REPRESENTATION 121

The ‘indigenous’ in nationalist discourse 124
Indigeneity, land and representation 129
Mediations of Aboriginal experience and politics 134
Further reading 139

7 | GLOBALIZATION, IMPERIALISM AND NATIONAL CULTURE 140

Globalization or imperialism? 142
The market, the state and the nation 146
Nationalism, then 148
Nationalism, now 154
Further reading 160

GLOSSARY 161

BIBLIOGRAPHY 163

INDEX 177
 SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

‘This is not Iraq, this is not Somalia,’ correspondent Martin Savidge of NBC News
told viewers. ‘This is home.’ Savidge was surveying the catastrophic landscape left
behind in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters in US
history that left more than 1,300 people dead and tens of thousands homeless. In its
immediate aftermath, it quickly became evident that the majority of those left in
harm’s way had lacked the physical or financial means to evacuate, many of them
African Americans living in impoverished conditions in low-lying areas especially vul-
nerable to flooding. Television news images relayed from helicopters circulating above
the tragedy were, in a word, shocking. Some journalists made the connection with the
consequences of the South Asian tsunami. ‘It’s amazingly similar, horrifyingly similar.
The scene of whole villages gone is very much the same,’ CNN anchor Anderson
Cooper commented. ‘Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, Waveland – it could have been Galle, Sri
Lanka. But what makes it different is that this is the US seeing bloated corpses out on
the streets for days.’ Images of the dead rapidly became iconic symbols of deeply
entrenched poverty, neglect and racism. In one news report after another, references to
New Orleans as a ‘scene from the Third World’ (often accompanied by phrases such as
‘bodies floating on water reminiscent of Africa’) were heard. Angrily defiant state-
ments such as ‘I cannot believe this is America’ or ‘This is not supposed to happen in
America’ were recurrently quoted, despite the realities of the horrors around them.
The global was suddenly being reconfigured as local, a politics of convergence meas-
ured in human misery and suffering.
The era of ‘globalization’, as examples such as this one make all too apparent, is
much more than an academic buzzword. In seeking to overcome the limitations of
traditional conceptions of it, Ramaswami Harindranath begins Perspectives on Global
Cultures with an exploration of the contradictions at the heart of the global-local
relationship. He explains from the outset that one of the central concerns of the book
viii | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

is to recast the familiar sorts of assumptions underpinning the ‘canon’ of the estab-
lished academic literature, not least by recognising the value of contributions from
those otherwise displaced by its orthodoxies. For Harindranath, the crucial issue – and
one that is often lost sight of in scholarly discussions – is the need to engage with the
political and economic imperatives shaping cultural production. Unravelling the glob-
alizing dynamics of representation and subalternity, it follows, becomes a strategic
priority. Questions of power assume a vital significance here, he argues, especially with
respect to how they are taken up and challenged by voices from the peripheries strug-
gling to articulate the concerns of marginalised communities. In the course of elaborat-
ing his theoretical perspective, Harindranath proceeds to present a range of case stud-
ies, revolving around topics such as: multiculturalism and ‘race’, indigenous campaigns
over sovereignty and land rights, the aesthetic and political aspects of ‘third cinema’,
and the conduct of nationalist politics in a globalised world. In each instance, he shows
us not only why debates about global cultures matter in academic terms, but also how
critical theorisations of power can help to open up new possibilities for resistance.
The Issues in Cultural and Media Studies series aims to facilitate a diverse range of
critical investigations into pressing questions considered to be central to current think-
ing and research. In light of the remarkable speed at which the conceptual agendas of
cultural and media studies are changing, the series is committed to contributing to
what is an ongoing process of re-evaluation and critique. Each of the books is intended
to provide a lively, innovative and comprehensive introduction to a specific topical issue
from a fresh perspective. The reader is offered a thorough grounding in the most salient
debates indicative of the book’s subject, as well as important insights into how new
modes of enquiry may be established for future explorations. Taken as a whole, then,
the series is designed to cover the core components of cultural and media studies
courses in an imaginatively distinctive and engaging manner.

Stuart Allan
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without Stuart Allan’s patience and support this book may have taken a little longer to
complete. With his unique brand of unfailing gentleness and humour Stuart per-
suaded, cajoled, and encouraged me during difficult times, although I am certain I
occasionally tested even his seemingly limitless forbearance. I think Stuart, and I hope
he finds this book worth the effort.
Through the long gestation period that preceded the more frantic times of the actual
writing of the book my interest in it and my general well being were sustained by
those I have been fortunate enough to have as friends. I excpress my gratitude to
colleagues and companions, too numerous to name here, in Bristol, Milton Keynes,
London, and Melbourne.
Students at the University of the West of England and the University of Melbourne
kindly offered me the opportunity to discuss my ideas, and enabled me, through
spirited debate, to refine the less polished arguments. To them too, I express my
appreciation.

R. Harindranath
Melbourne, 2006
To TSR, my mentor, in gratitude and appreciation
 INTRODUCTION

As I write this on an early November morning in 2005, the international new sections
of newspapers carry reports of race riots in Paris, of anti-American rallies in Buenos
Aires at the start of the Summit of Americas, and of the Pakistani President’s com-
plaints of what he regards as a lack of generosity by Western donors for victims of
the massive earthquake in northern Pakistan. Hardly a day goes by without similar
reports on occurrences ranging from inter-ethnic conflicts to declarations of national
sovereignty. Such events reveal, in diverse ways, the complexities of the various pro-
cesses intrinsic to what has come to be referred to as globalization. This book seeks to
make a small contribution to the fashioning of academic vocabulary with which to
discuss social and cultural marginalization, in what is commonly understood as our
increasingly globalized world. Are our conceptual frames adequate for the understand-
ing of the various processes that constitute globalization, in particular the enduring
patterns of cultural, political and economic inequality evident across the world? What
strategies can and do communities, excluded variously from the purported benefits
accruing from globalization, adopt in order to voice their concerns? Such questions
animate the discussions in this book.
The provenance of this book can be traced back a few years to the time I taught a
course on Global Cultures at the University of the West of England. Instead of merely
summarizing the existing debates on various aspects of globalization, the course
encouraged the students to engage critically with enduring socio-political and cultural
marginality. That was the time of anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle and
Prague, and the students took to the course with alacrity and enthusiasm. Many of the
ideas I have attempted to develop in this book had their origins in the discussions I had
with students on that course. However, teaching that course at UWE, and similar
courses more recently at Melbourne University, has alerted me to the relative paucity in
academic literature of accounts and deliberations that are willing to transgress the
2 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

boundaries of received orthodoxy on the process of globalization. While prevailing

debates encompass several relevant developments and attempt to trace their contours,
I have noticed that pertinent contributions from outside the Euro-American academia
have not been sufficiently explored. Neither have the cultural and political struggles at
the margins, both at the global level as well as within local contexts, been adequately
acknowledged. Focusing mainly on novel configurations and developments that are
seen to constitute contemporary globalization, the majority of available literature has
continued to de-emphasize both the persisting patterns of inequality and marginaliza-
tion, as well as the more recent manifestations that have emerged as a consequence of
globalizing processes. Accounts of the increasing fluidity between national borders
and of the increase in cross-border mobility for instance, rarely take into account the
increase in the number of restrictions being placed on certain communities. The events
of 9/11, and subsequent developments, have engendered more nuanced investigations
of the ‘underside’ of globalization, but these continue to remain on the margins of
academic discussions.
This book has emerged from these concerns. As I embarked on the process of
putting together my ideas and organizing them into a coherent structure, however,
I rapidly realized the sheer enormity of the task. It is hardly surprising that theorists
and researchers have spent entire careers studying various aspects of the contemporary
world. Outlining the various struggles for recognition and redress alone seems a
monumental enterprise; engaging with and addressing the complexity – theoretical and
political – of such struggles adds yet another dimension to the undertaking. This
realization has encouraged me to delimit this project by addressing only a few aspects
of the elaborate range of issues.
By way of signalling this complexity, I offer, in Section 1, a conceptual framework
with which to grasp the cultural politics of globalization ‘from below’. In the first
chapter I sketch arguments concerning the need to go beyond the largely programmatic
orthodox thinking on globalization in order to examine the intricacies of the global-
local dialectic and the politics of cultural production. Chapter 2 negotiates the terrain
of cultural difference: expressions of it and their increasing commodification; the
damaging consequences of contemporary culture wars; and the ethico-political issue
of universalism versus particularism. The politics inherent in representation – both
mainstream as well as those from the margins, hegemonic as well as resistant – is the
focus of Chapter 3. Rehearsing key moments in the debate on the notion of hegemony,
I explore the explanatory potential of the concept of the subaltern and subaltern
agency. Following Stuart Hall’s assertion regarding marginality as productive, the
chapter explores the importance of the loci of enunciation – the positions that inform
representations by peripheral communities.
Section 2 presents different case studies, illustrating and exploring the validity of the
conceptual themes raised in the preceding section, as well as locating, however briefly,
cultural representations and academic contributions from outside the canon. Recent
events across the globe have increased attention on national security, and one of the
 INTRODUC TION | 3

consequences of this development is the renewed focus on multiculturalism, citizenship,

and national identity. Chapter 4 traces the complex debates on multiculturalism and
the constitution of multicultural citizenship, many aspects of which suffuse representa-
tions of sameness and difference, recognition and identity, in the media and other
forms of cultural production. One of the best known, and overtly declared, confluences
of cultural production and emancipatory political practice is ‘Third Cinema’, which
originated in Latin America and has inspired political film-making, particularly in the
developing world. The continuing efforts to refine the political and aesthetic theory of
Third Cinema are examined in Chapter 5, along with the intricacies of national cinema
or the cinema of nationalism.
Indigeneity is arguably one of the most important markers of economic and political
subalternity that rarely gets a mention in academic literature on globalization. Chapter
6 outlines the political role of indigeneity in the national imaginary, and the import-
ance of land and space to indigenous life and aesthetic practice, including figurative art
and media representation. The final chapter considers the complex and fraught issue of
nationalist politics and culture in the context of the alleged shrinking of the state in
the face of the consolidation of the global market. Overall, this book endeavours to
present a theoretically informed examination of the politics of marginality and
cultural production.
PART 1
1 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY?

It is often the case that works of fiction speak to larger truths. T. C. Boyle’s novel
The Tortilla Curtain, for instance, juxtaposes characters from either side of the
US-Mexican border by alerting the reader to the plight of Mexican villagers illegally
entering the USA to find manual work. When, at the beginning of the novel, Delaney
Mossbacher’s car knocks down Candido, the event not only inaugurates a tense and
suspenseful story but, more significantly, also precipitates a collision of two worlds.
One is that of an environmentally conscious, middle-class liberal American living in a
gated community in Los Angeles, and the other is that of an illegal Mexican immigrant
who had smuggled himself and his young pregnant girlfriend across the border to
search for work as a manual labourer.
These constitute two opposing life-worlds – on the one hand, that of the sensitive
nature writer and his realtor wife, a man with leftist sensibilities initially opposed to
the notion of a gated community, and on the other a young couple without official
papers, members of the largely invisible group of Mexican ‘illegals’ who form part of
the workforce in parts of California. One is the world of plenty, in which the collision
with a pedestrian awakens in Delaney a self-reflexive concern for the unknown victim,
while at the same time anxiety about potential legal consequences keeps him moving
after a cursory glance at the rear-view mirror, retreating into his carefully constructed
and guarded domestic environment. The other is a desperate form of existence in
which Candido’s chances of getting work on the farms are seriously damaged by the
broken bones caused in the collision, and he retreats to his makeshift camp in the
ravine, concerned about his inability to protect and care for his girlfriend.
The difference however, is not merely between plenty and poverty. What constitutes
the expectations of domestic life are different in the two worlds; what Delaney and
Candido construe as risk, both avoidable and necessary, are different; their relative
positions in the hierarchy of power are different, as are their respective locations in the
8 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

international division of labour. Their lives, in other words, depict instances of the gulf
separating communities that often intersect, interact and sometimes collide with one
another, but together contribute to the contemporary form of global culture, economy
and politics. The profound differences between Delaney’s and Candido’s lives are
testimony to different worlds – their respective life-worlds testify to the different
material realities that underpin the different ‘worlds’ that constitute contemporary
global culture. They illustrate current debates on the cultural and economic aspects of
globalization, in particular the interaction between the global and the local, globaliza-
tion as a process of homogenization or heterogenization, the politics of local cultural
production and resistance, and reveal also absences in most academic literature on
globalization that ignore, some say wilfully, the consequences of global developments
on those sections of the global population that inhabit the lower rungs of the hierarchy.
Academic publication on the subject of globalization has become a veritable pub-
lishing industry, with particular names associated with specific debates – Giddens,
Beck, Robertson, Castells, Harvey, Jameson – to name only the best known, whose
contributions have, through subsequent interventions by other academics and through
discussions in classrooms, formed a canon of literature on the subject. The framing of
the debates, the very identification of the points of departure in these debates and
discussions, the reference to champions of this position or that with regard to a par-
ticular issue, as well as the conceptual scaffolding that buttress the frames – all these
together, it can be argued, have come to constitute an orthodoxy. Like most ortho-
doxies it contains tenets possessing the power to offer plausible explanations while
simultaneously circumscribing the kinds of issues that the practitioners are willing and
able to talk about. This book attempts to bring to the table voices, both academic and
cultural, from outside the canon, as well as concerns and anxieties that normally fall
outside the purview of received wisdom on globalization. This is not so much a differ-
ence in focus as a change in perspective. On the surface, some of the significant issues
echo ongoing debates on various issues. Does globalization entail homogenization, for
instance? What constitutes the ‘local’, and what is its role in the process of globaliza-
tion? In what ways can local and vernacular cultural producers contribute to and
interrogate debates on Westernization, global culture, and contemporary forms of
capitalist production?

Revealing absences

That prominent conceptualizations of globalization have tended to ignore or neglect

the material and cultural realities of communities outside the dominant ones in the
West and elsewhere is not a novel suggestion. An instance of such a theorization
appears in Runaway World (1999), a collection of Reith lectures originally presented,
and broadcast by the BBC, at different venues around the world, in which Anthony
Giddens claims that, ‘We are the first generation to live in this [cosmopolitan] society,
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 9

whose contours we can as yet only dimly see. It is shaking up our existing lives, no
matter where we happen to be’ (p. 6). While it serves to highlight the novelty and the
magnitude of the changes brought on by globalization, this quote accurately captures
the limitations of orthodox globalization theory, exemplifying the intellectual solipsism
that inheres such conceptualizations. Burawoy (2000) for instance, takes issue with
this claim:
As we listen to [Giddens] across sound waves, or through cyberspace, or watch
him on video, we cannot but wonder how much of globalization talk signifies the
privileged lifestyle of high-flying academics . . . But who is the ‘we’ he is referring
to? For whom has risk been extended, tradition disinterred, the family made more
egalitarian, and democracy become more widespread? To what slice of Hong
Kong’s, Delhi’s, London’s or Washington’s population do his sociological obser-
vations pertain? Is he talking about everyone or just the new cosmopolitan elite to
which he belongs? What does globalization look like from the underside – for
example, from Castells ‘black holes’ of human marginality?
(p. 336)
The pertinence of Burawoy’s interrogation of Giddens’s apparently inclusive ‘we’ lies
in what it excludes, and by extension, the limitations of such theorizing. For example,
exclusive focus on the allegedly novel configurations of contemporary global economy,
culture and politics tend to overlook the continuing patterns of inequality. In trying to
understand and theorize what is new, be it the knowledge economy, time–space distan-
ciation, virtual communities, or ‘post-Fordist’ production, many theorists of globaliza-
tion fail to address issues which have continued to dominate the lives of those who are
clearly outside the remit of such conceptualizations.
Neil Lazarus raises a similar point in another context, in response to Martin Jacques’s
claim that ‘our world is being remade. Mass production, the mass consumer, the big
city, big-brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation-state are in
decline: flexibility, diversity and internationalisation are in the ascendant’ (quoted in
Lazarus 1999a, p. 35). To Lazarus, such instances of ‘undue stress on the portentous-
ness and “radical novelty” of contemporary social and economic developments’ miss
the point.
It is helpful first of all to examine the content of the term ‘our’ that Jacques
deploys so cavalierly. . . . For it is clear that the subjects of ‘our world’ do not
include those in the core capitalist countries . . . whose livelihoods and security
have been undermined by the new strategies of resurgent post-Keynesian capital-
ism. Nor does ‘our world’ include the subaltern classes from the ‘Third World’.
(p. 36)
Lazarus belongs to a relatively small group of scholars who have consistently objected
to the exclusivity of the celebration of the ‘radically novel’ aspects of recent develop-
ments, and the consequent disregard of those for whom it is the largely unchanging
10 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

circumstances of their lives that attest to their continuing political marginalization and
economic exploitation. This latter group is mainly comprised of what Sivanandan has
referred to as those ‘massed up workers on whose greater immiseration and exploit-
ation the brave new western world of post-Fordism is being erected’ (Sivanandan
1990a, p. 6). Lazarus’s passionate disavowal of the ‘radical novelty’ emphasized and
celebrated in much writing on globalization is worth quoting at length: for him such
moves are problematic
for in Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, Kenya, the tide of poor people – landless
peasants, or ‘rural proletarians’ – flooding from the countryside to the cities in
search of jobs continues to rise exponentially. In Rwanda, Eritrea, Korea, and El
Salvador, the question of the nation-state has never before seemed so pressing or
so central. In Brazil, Ghana, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, thoughts of ‘diver-
sity’, ‘flexibility’, and ‘communication’ are really of practical significance only to
foreigners and indigenous elite classes: to the overwhelming masses of local
people, they mostly spell out exploitation in new letters.
(p. 36)
For scholars like Lazarus and Sivanandan such a state of affairs demands a conceptual
formulation that accounts for the complex ways in which the changes instituted by
novel social developments globally are implicated in the persisting patterns of inequality
across the globe.
Giddens distinguishes between ‘sceptics’ and ‘radicals’ – for sceptics, according to
him, debates on globalization are part of an ideological move within academia and
society as a whole, a move which hides the machinations of contemporary global
politics and economy, and the neo-liberal ideology that underpins these developments.
For those like himself, whom Giddens calls ‘radicals’, such debates attempt to capture
and understand the planetary transformations of the real process of globalization,
whose consequences are felt in diverse fields, from everyday life, to the global economy,
to environmental concerns. In a more recent encapsulation of his position vis-à-vis
globalization (Hutton and Giddens 2000), Giddens distinguishes between two oppos-
ing positions on whether or not changes in global economy, politics and culture are
continuations of changes from the past. On the one hand, there are those for whom
the continuities and parallels with the past are much greater than the differences.
They argue, for example, that a hundred years ago there was just as much global-
isation as there is now. . . . At the other extreme are the ‘Gee-Whiz’ types, who are
so impressed with all the changes happening today, especially those to do with
technology, that they see a world breaking quite radically with its past.
(p. 3)
He identifies his position to be closer to the ‘Gee-Whizzers’, that is, his entire oeuvre on
globalization is based on the assumption that the world has changed almost irrevocably
from the past.
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 11

For Burawoy, Giddens’s appropriation of the label ‘radical’ for himself is problem-
atic. He criticizes Giddens for his distinction between sceptics and radicals that ‘deftly
forecloses other options [such as] the perspectival globalization of anthropologists’,
and for arrogating the dubious claim of being one of the radicals (Burawoy 2000,
p. 338), which in its turn deftly overturns the generally accepted sense of ‘radical’ as
progressive and leftist, thereby removing from the equation those who emphasize
the fundamental inequalities inherent in the process of globalization. Nevertheless,
Giddens’s self-positioning with the ‘Gee-Whiz’ end of the spectrum presents a plaus-
ible explanation for his stance. Burawoy overlooks the fact that Giddens’s focus on the
consequences of globalization on the cosmopolitan and the global elite is prompted
and informed by his interest in demonstrating the novel aspects of contemporary
global social formations and how these evidence a break from the past. Patterns of
inequality, both economic as well as enunciative (in other words, marginalized) that
either continue from the past or have arisen as a result of recent developments con-
sequently fall outside his lens. Given this focus on a delimited arena, however, the
totalizing nature of his thesis is problematic, and attracts criticism such as that of
Burawoy – that Giddens’s strategy of tracing the origin and development of concepts
such as risk, tradition and democracy is ‘strangely beside the point’ (p. 339).
Tomlinson’s notion of cultural globalization as ‘complex connectivity through
proximity’ (1999, chapter 1) is another case in point:
What connectivity means is that we now experience this distance [between Spain
and Mexico] in different ways. We think of such distant places as routinely access-
ible, either representationally through communications technology or the mass
media, or physically, through the expenditure of a relatively small amount of time
(and, of course, of money) on a transatlantic flight.
(Tomlinson 1999, p. 4)
And again, ‘Jet travel is an intrinsic part of connectivity and, in its increasing com-
monplace integration into everyday life, demands attention as cultural experience’,
although he does qualify it later, ‘despite its increasing ubiquity, it is still restricted to
relatively small numbers of people and, within this group, to an even smaller, more
exclusive, cadre of frequent users’ (p. 8).
Such acknowledgements of the presence of global inequalities of access to resources
pepper his account of globalization and culture and are noteworthy. But his arguments
are nevertheless aimed at a constituency which both reads the literature and recognizes
itself in it – a constituency that includes Delaney but not Candido. How valid is it
then, to refer to air travel as ‘an intrinsic part of connectivity’ that characterizes
globalization?
What is chosen as exemplifying the ‘intrinsic part of connectivity’ is revealing. The
economic and political aspects of globalization which contribute in complex ways to
the alleged ‘illegality’ of the cross-border movements of people such as Candido,
whose contribution to US economy and culture and their simultaneous invisibility is
12 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

explored in Ken Loach’s film Bread and Roses, is as much part of this connectivity as
the jet-setting knowledge workers with specific skills for whom such travel is common-
place. One can think of other such instances – the ways in which, for instance, the civil
war in parts of Africa such as Angola exemplifies another aspect of the global connecti-
vity, in this case through the international diamond trade, or what Naomi Klein (2005)
recently referred to as ‘disaster capitalism’ to describe the corporatization of emer-
gency relief and reconstruction of disaster-hit zones. Moreover, it is not merely a
question of resources and relative affluence. Issues of race and class intersect, for
instance, on who is considered a desirable migrant and who is marked as an ‘economic
migrant’ and, therefore, undesirable. As Stuart Hall (1980) has argued, while ‘race’ as a
socio-historical category possesses a ‘relatively autonomous effectivity’, it is ‘the
modality in which class is “lived”, the medium through which class relations are experi-
enced, the form in which it is appropriated and “fought through” ’ (p. 41). Moreover,
passport and immigration controls have long been used to police and restrict entry, and
have increasingly taken forms of racial and religious discrimination and surveillance
since the ‘war on terror’. Frequent air or interstate travel is restricted to not only the
affluent, but also to those with the right passports and skills.
These perspectives displayed in Giddens and Tomlinson, along with others such as
Urry’s notion of global ‘complexity’, in which migration has become fluid across
porous borders, while they attempt to negotiate and conceptualize contemporary,
complex global changes, appear exclusive in their focus. At times they conform to what
San Juan (2002) refers to as ‘self-incriminatory’, excluding, both in their address and in
their focus, communities for whom diverse manifestations of globalization have had
more damaging consequences. The ‘Gee Whiz’ celebration of globalization’s novel
aspects is severely selective, focusing almost entirely on those aspects of contemporary
global processes that are manifested in the experiences of an elite community. These
formulations leave out the material realities and cultural manifestations of the funda-
mental inequality that patterns contemporary forms of global economy. As Burawoy
(2000) notes correctly, of all the ‘radicals’, who attempt to demonstrate the character-
istic ways in which the contemporary world is markedly different from that of the past,
it is Harvey (1990, 2003) who comes closest to actually engaging with the economic
aspects of the transformation. ‘But even he, after documenting the postmodern condi-
tion, substitutes for history a plausible but nonetheless speculative Marxist periodiza-
tion of capitalism, based on the successive resolutions of the crises it generates’
(Burawoy 2000, p. 339).
There is, thus, a widespread ignorance or neglect of non-metropolitan situations in
metropolitan knowledge production on globalization that, ironically, claims to speak
for and include the entire globe. The conceptual hall of mirrors that makes up the
majority of available academic literature on globalization excludes as much as it
dazzles. Contributions reflect off each other, and what appears – and are often claimed
as – all-encompassing meta-theories that explain the complex processes and con-
sequences of globalization actually address delimited areas. Admittedly, and this is a
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 13

point that needs to be stressed, understanding and conceptualizing the complex,

contradictory, shape-shifting, protean processes that the term ‘globalization’ tries to
capture is a mammoth task, as testified by the existence of publications such as Castells
three-volume The Network Society.
Another point that needs emphasizing is that the existing canon on globalization
referred to earlier grapples with aspects of this complex process with more than a
reasonable degree of success. Ongoing debates among the contributors to this litera-
ture reveal a healthy disagreement, which in turn keeps the debates alive. To reiterate,
what concerns us here are the blind spots that belie in important ways the claims that
the canon addresses the process of globalization in its totality. This is not merely an
academic or an epistemological issue, it is profoundly political too, as it involves a
persistent neglect of the ‘underside’ of globalization.
Such totalizing claims are always problematic, but how is this lacuna to be addressed?
There are those like Ahmad (1992) who insist on the centrality of the material inequal-
ities which to them are fundamental to any attempt at understanding and reformulating
globalization theories. As Bartolovich (2002) argues, summarizing this position,
any attempt to rectify the genuine widespread ignorance of non-metropolitan
situations in the metropole which fails to address itself to the material asym-
metries which both structure and sanction this ignorance, is doomed to failure. It
can lead only to further appropriation: cooptation and cloying tokenism at best.
The dizzying disequilibria (of power, resources, social agency) exhibited in the
contemporary world-system are, as Enrique Dussel among other Marxists, has
persistently argued, literally irreducible without closing the gaps in material
inequalities among peoples.
(Bartolovich 2002, p. 12, emphasis in the original)
Without what she refers to as a ‘rigorous critique of the imbalances of global political
economy’ (ibid.) any attempt at addressing the diversity of cultural contexts and
contests becomes merely gestural, a superficial celebration of cultural difference.
Some scholars in the field of postcolonial studies have been preoccupied with the
intellectual dimensions of these global imbalances, particularly in relation to the dif-
ferences between metropolitan and non-metropolitan forms of knowledge production.
This imbalance is characterized by, as Dipesh Chakrabarty succinctly puts it, an
‘asymmetric ignorance’ sanctioned by institutional practices, ‘mandates that while
non-metropolitan intellectuals must demonstrate a familiarity with Euro-American
scholarships to gain credibility . . . the reverse does not apply’ (Bartolovich 2002,
pp. 12–13).
This sanctioned imbalance in scholarship has resonances in both intellectual pro-
duction and pedagogic practice. For instance, concepts which are often regarded as
innovative and critical seem to lose their edge when considered in the non-metropolitan
context. An obvious example of this is the concept of ‘hybridity’ that has gained
currency in critical academic literature relatively recently, in the context of discussions
14 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

about multiculturalism and identity. Arif Dirlik has observed that the concept is
assumed in mainstream scholarship to describe the mixing of metropolitan with non-
metropolitan cultures, and rarely as being an effect of cultural features shared, over
centuries, by peoples in the non-metropole, as for instance in Latin America (1994,
p. 342), where by ‘metropole’ we mean the Euro-American centres of cultural and
intellectual production.
Moreover, the acceptance and sanctioning of ignorance of non-metropolitan cul-
tural forms and conditions of existence contributes to the promotion of particular
non-metropolitan academic and cultural texts ‘(typically ones which in reference or
form seem familiar to metropolitan readers) [that] gain extravagant weight – often
being subjected to highly decontextualized assessments’ (ibid.). Further, there is a
similar celebration of
metropolitan cultural forms and works . . . in lieu of less familiar ones, even on
matters of most concern to non-metropolitan populations. One notes in general,
indeed, that concepts deriving from intellectual circuits outside the metropolitan
world often fail to gain currency within this world until put forth, with or without
attribution, by metropolitan intellectuals.
(Bartolovich 2002, p. 13)
A major consequence of this is the uncritical acceptance of a melange of concepts,
theories and texts that are far removed from the realities of non-metropolitan life.
‘The vast discrepancies in “being heard” under current conditions [and] the intimacy
of the connection between the “deafness” of metropolitan intellectuals and their
location – economic and ideological, not merely geographical’ (ibid.) needs to be
addressed urgently.
It is obviously unnecessary to conceive of this ignorance as a wilful act, nor is it
necessary to indulge in ad hominem accusations that, by definition, will be both
unsubstantiated and unproductive. Nevertheless, this absence of a clearly defined
attempt to negotiate the material realities and cultural fall-outs of the process of
globalization particularly in, but not necessarily limited to, the developing world, as
well as those sections of the population in the developed world yet to benefit from the
apparent trickle down of the joys that globalization brings, reveals what is at best a
theoretical lacuna in conceptualizations of, and debates on, globalization. Such con-
ceptualizations are, therefore, incomplete as the literature that currently makes up the
canon is largely restricted to the understanding of the consequences of globalization
on cultures made up by the transnational cosmopolitan elite – the main beneficiaries
of the process.
To return to the example at the beginning of this chapter, the available literature on
globalization speaks about and to the Delaneys and seldom to or about the Candidos.
This absence not only reveals a hierarchization of the contemporary world and the
exclusive focus on the top tiers of that hierarchy, but more worryingly, it is normalized
in academic literature and in the classroom, thus underlining Dirlik’s concern. It
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 15

therefore, becomes difficult not to share his anxiety about the normative nature of
the academic paradigm adopted by even those who engage with the complexity of
contemporary global culture, economy and politics.
Using the example of feminist academic interventions on behalf of Third-World
women, Mohanty (1994) argues that even in the case of critical engagements with
giving a voice to ‘Third World’ communities, such moves at times ironically reproduce
a form of intellectual colonialism. Such interventions made by scholars ‘who identify
themselves as culturally or geographically from the “west” ’ are undermined by
‘assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality’ (Mohanty 1994, p. 199), and
serve to ‘discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of
women in the third world’ (p. 197). Similarly, Bahl and Dirlik (2000) argue that there
is no shortage of critics of certain types of modernity,
unfortunately, the most imaginative of such critics, mostly from Third World
locations, go unheard because of an imbalance of power that continues to struc-
ture the world. Third World scholars and scientists suffer from the prejudices of
media controlled by the powerful who deny a significant hearing to alternative
visions of society, indigenous projects, and appropriate technologies as solutions
to contemporary problems.
(Bahl and Dirlik 2000, p. 5)
But, as Mohanty herself observes, such castigation of the hegemony of Western schol-
arship goes beyond merely opposing metropolitan theorizing with academic and
intellectual work from the developing world, or from what is considered the margins.
As we have already noted, and as it will hopefully become increasingly clear during
the course of the following chapters, it is possible to locate among the theorists based
in the West those concerned with the lacunae and inadequacy – with the ‘intellectual
colonialism’ inherent in dominant conceptualizations of globalization. More import-
antly, as Lazarus (2002) demonstrates, for all the merits of her timely and politically
significant intervention, Mohanty’s argument is weakened by her reification of the
West. ‘The word “Western” is used . . . to gloss, qualify, characterize and of course,
taint and disparage feminist scholarship that provides her with her subject and critical
target. We must then ask of Mohanty . . . why “Western” rather than “Eurocentric” or
even “Orientalist”? What does the term “Western” offer that the term “Eurocentric”
would not?’ (p. 57). Lazarus’s concern is that the term ‘Western’ becomes in such
instances, ‘an alibi in the determinate absence of a plausible conceptualisation of
capitalism and imperialist social relations’ (ibid.). For him, the simple argument of
merely opposing a putative West to the ‘Third World’ will no longer do.
While Mohanty’s intervention is vital to the revision of feminist critical discourse,
particularly in relation to marginal or Third-World women, the solution is more com-
plicated than an automatic gainsaying of what is perceived as ‘Western’ frameworks
and epistemologies. Similarly, critical attempts to revise the orthodoxy that has
emerged in globalization literature – attempts informed by the socio-historical aspects
16 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

of cultural production and resistance as well as academic and intellectual discourse

from the margins – are not limited to merely resurrecting and bringing to the table
voices of the non-metropole. As we see in Chapter 2, the politics of representation
and cultural difference enact complexities that undermine any such straightforward
opposition of the ‘West’ with the ‘Rest’.
Added to this is the further complication of the commodification, in economic or
intellectual terms, of alternative voices and forms. As Brennan (1997) points out, ‘What
might appear to be gestures of openness to alternatives, or solidarity with marginalized
cultural forms and peoples, can all too easily become instead marks of the old, familiar
dynamic of appropriation’ (p. 8). Brennan’s complaint is that the transformation of
the ‘Third World’ into objects of consumption dilutes the challenges and potentially
radical consequences of cultural and scholarly production from the non-metropole. It
is difficult, he argues, for students brought up to consider the Third World in terms of
Body Shop or eco-tourism, to appreciate the writings of Ngugi or Kincaid in their
historical contexts, as critical engagements with local conditions of life. The relatively
recent popularity of one of the forms originating in Latin American fiction, ‘magic
realism’, illustrates his argument that such texts are celebrated more for their genre-
busting and as exemplars of mystery and wonder (and marketed as such) rather than as
historically relevant creative interventions. These and other such texts – one can, for
instance, consider the burgeoning of interest among publishers for South Asian writing
in English, or the packaging of alternative cinema – serve only to exoticize cultural
production in the margins, thereby dulling their critical edge.
This is noticeable for instance, in the way that non-mainstream music, particularly
those genre-transcending forms from the developing world and marginal cultures, is
marketed under the nebulous label of ‘world music’, removing the specific historical,
cultural and political resonance of cultural production. To take an example, Salif
Keita’s work, both with the Bamuko Rail Band and his subsequent output, retains only
the vestiges of the complex aspects of the politics of its production in its avatar as yet
another variation from the mainstream, in this case ‘Mali music’. Dislocated from their
historical specificities, through exoticization or scholarly neglect, they cease to have
significance as politically relevant cultural forms.
In a similar fashion, the application of academically trendy analytical frames such as
psychoanalysis or Deleuzian philosophy to engage with texts such as contemporary
Iranian cinema risks taming the film’s political significance in relation to the intricate
nature of modern Iranian political culture, or of missing the point entirely.
The option open to those interested in rescuing the non-metropolitan from invisibility
– those concerned with the plight of the Candidos of this world – is clearly what Cornell
West (1990) suggests in relation to cultural workers seeking to address the experience of
black and other minority communities in the USA as well as in developing societies:

A new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of
difference . . . Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 17

trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and
heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in the light of the con-
crete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by
highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing.
(West 1990, pp. 203–4)
This is not new, admittedly, yet ‘what makes them novel – along with the cultural
politics they produce – is how and what constitutes difference, the weight and gravity it
is given in representation . . . To put it bluntly, the new cultural politics of difference
consists of creative responses to the precise circumstances of our present moment’
(p. 204). We explore in greater detail the cultural politics of difference in Chapter 2.
Wilson and Dissanayake’s (1996) lament is pertinent in this context. In their
introduction to a collection of essays on the Global/Local, they observe that,
this global/local synergy within what we will track as the transnational imaginary
enlivens and molests the textures of everyday life and spaces of subjectivity and
reshapes those contemporary structures of feeling some culture critics all too
commonly banalize as ‘postmodern’ or hypertextually consecrate as ‘postcolo-
nial’ resistance. Too much of cultural studies, in this era of uneven globalization
and the two-tier information highway, can sound like a way of making the world
safe and user-friendly for global capital and the culture of the commodity form.
(Wilson and Dissanayake 1996, p. 2, emphasis added)
In the dialogue on globalization voices from one side drown out others, promoting one
point of view, one perspective, that is at once both the dominant voice and the voice of
the dominant.

The global-local dialectic – a process of homogenization?

Central to the as yet unresolved debate on globalization is the question of the local. For
instance, are local cultures, those that do not form part of the ‘Western’ or ‘Ameri-
canized’ or ‘consumerist’ culture, in a precarious condition because of the onslaught of
global culture? It has been argued that the ‘single space’ often referred to in connection
with theories of globalization
means not only interdependence, but also homogenisation, which is sometimes
seen as a threat to the local and to tradition. Jameson has sought to characterise
the phenomenon in terms of late capitalism and the transnationalisation of the
consumer society and postmodernity [in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism]. Appadurai sees the intersections of the local and the global in
relation to the disjunctures in the world economy, changing social, territorial and
cultural reproduction of group identity [in Modernity at Large].
(Tam et al. 2002, p. x)
18 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

The notion of homogenization, however, suggests a hegemonic agenda, to which not

all theorists subscribe. Tomlinson, for instance, is unconvinced by its thesis of a glob-
ally synchronized and standardized culture, promoting and benefiting from the global
spread of consumerism. ‘[T]o assert cultural homogenisation as a consequence of
globalization is to move from connectivity through proximity to the supposition
of global uniformity and ubiquity . . . [T]his is a precipitate and in many ways an
unjustifiable movement’ (Tomlinson 1999, p. 6).
He is more forthright in a later essay, arguing against the claim that ‘globalised
culture is the installation, world-wide, of one particular culture born out of one par-
ticular, privileged historical experience’. Arguments that this is ‘in short, simply the
global extension of Western culture’ (Tomlinson 2000, p. 23, emphasis in the original)
are for him misplaced. His main objections concern the conceptualization of Western
culture that such critiques are based on. Firstly, such assumptions ride on ‘too broad a
generalisation. Its rhetorical force is bought at the price of glossing over a multitude of
complexities, exceptional cases, and contradictions . . . A second set of objections
concerns the way in which Westernisation suggests a rather crude model of the one-way
flow of cultural influence’ (Tomlinson 2000, p. 24).
The criticisms raised by Tomlinson about the more simplistic aspects of the notion
of Westernization or imperialism seem valid enough, although it must be said that his
argument about the ‘globalization as the decline of the West’ seems far less convincing.
Nevertheless, assertions about the destruction of local cultures have at times seemed
unsophisticated and insufficiently cognisant of the complex processes involved in glob-
alization and with the global–local dialectic, particularly when made in the context of
a straightforward ‘West versus the Rest’ opposition. It is possible to agree with some
theorists of globalization who underline the complexity of contemporary formations
of global economy, politics and culture. One such is Featherstone (1996), in whose
estimation it is inadequate to regard local cultures as succumbing to Western models
of modernity, or to assume that their national formations are promoted on the basis of
anti-Western sentiments.
Rather the globalization process should be regarded as opening up the sense that
now the world is a single place with increased, even unavoidable contact. We
necessarily have greater dialogue between various nation-states, blocs, and civili-
zations. . . . Not that participating nation-states and other agents should be
regarded as equal partners to the dialogue. Rather, they are bound together in
increasing webs of interdependence and power balances. . . . What does seem
clear is that it is not helpful to regard the global and local as dichotomies separ-
ated in space and time; rather, it would seem that the processes of globalization
and localization are inextricably bound together in the current phase.
(Featherstone 1996, p. 47)
Our concern here, however, is with how we should maintain our critique of con-
temporary global cultural and intellectual domination, without succumbing to the
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 19

crude generalizations of Westernization identified by Tomlinson and Lazarus. Hall’s

(2000) intervention in this regard is pertinent. He acknowledges some of the characteri-
stics of ‘our friend globalization’ identified by others, namely the intensification of
old colonial attempts to establish a world market (Held 1999), complex social and
economic reorganizations on a global scale prompted by new deregulated financial
markets, currency flows and time–space compression (Harvey 1990), ‘which struggles,
however incompletely, to cohere particular times, places, histories and markets within
a homogeneous, “global” space–time chronotype’ (Hall 2000, p. 214).
Despite these developments that have significantly altered global relations, however,
Hall convincingly underlines an important contradiction in the process:

The system is global, in the sense that its sphere of operations is planetary. Few
places are beyond the reach of its destabilizing inter-dependencies. It has signifi-
cantly weakened national sovereignty and eroded the ‘reach’ of the older western
nation-states without entirely displacing them. The system however, is not global,
if by that we understand that the process is uniform in character, impacts every-
where in the same way, operates without contradictory effects or produces equal
outcomes across the globe. It remains a system of deep, and deepening global
inequalities and instabilities.
(Hall 2000, pp. 214–15, emphasis in the original)

Hall makes a crucial point here, in effect claiming, firstly, that the process of globaliza-
tion contains a contradictory logic because certain effects such as the growing inter-
dependencies and the weakening of state power are common across all societies and
nations, yet significantly, this process is uneven. Secondly, the unevenness of the impact
of globalization contributes to, even creates, ‘deep, and deepening global inequalities’,
in other words, it both intensifies earlier patterns of inequality while engendering
new ones.
Hall’s observations on the debate on globalization as a process of homogenization
in the economic and cultural spheres is even more germane to our purposes. ‘Like the
post-colonial, contemporary globalization is both novel and contradictory,’ Hall
claims. ‘Its economic, financial and cultural circuits are western-driven and US-
dominated. Ideologically, it is governed by a global neo-liberalism which is fast becom-
ing the common sense of the age. Its dominant cultural tendency is homogenisation.’
The process of homogenization engendered by the spread of neo-liberal ideas, how-
ever, does not in itself adequately explain contemporary global developments. The
complexity intrinsic to these developments is precipitated by the differences evident
within them:

[Globalization] has also had extensive differentiating effects within and between
different societies. From this perspective, globalization is not a natural and inevit-
able process. . . . Rather, it is a hegemonizing process, in the proper Gramscian
sense. It is ‘structured in dominance’, but it cannot control or saturate everything
20 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

within its orbit. Indeed, it produces as one of its unintended effects subaltern
formations and emergent tendencies which it cannot control but must try to
‘hegemonize’ or harness to its wider purposes. It is a system for con-forming
difference, rather than a convenient synonym for the obliteration of difference.
(Hall 2000, p. 215, emphasis in the original)

As Hall points out, ‘this argument is critical if we are to take account of how and
where resistances and counter-strategies are likely successfully to develop. This per-
spective entails a more discursive model of power in the new global environment than
is common among the “hyper-globalizers” ’ (p. 215).
Here we have a crucial intervention which makes a major contribution to the
rethinking of relations between the global and the local without addressing them from
the critically unproductive West–Rest dichotomy. Hall is clear about the emergence of
neo-liberalism as the underlying ideology that contributes to homogenization in terms
of culture, global markets, economic policies, labour relations, and so on. Conceiving
of this in Gramscian terms, however, permits the existence of oppositional voices.
In other words, although the process is ‘structured in dominance’, it allows for ‘dif-
ferentiating effects’, even opposition, such as the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Hall’s
invocation of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony is significant in two important respects: it
explains the reasons for the homogenization to not be complete, it generates pockets of
resistance in the margins which need to be constantly negotiated, and, by emphasizing
the discursive nature of power, emphasizes the role of culture – both global and local – in
this struggle for hegemony.
It is in this context that the recent emergence of social movements have to be seen –
movements in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan communites that challenge
dominance. Dirlik (1996) identifies as exemplars of resistance the Chipko movement in
India that challenged deforestation, women workers of the maquiladora industries of
the US-Mexican border, and various indigenous movements which together ‘have
emerged as the primary (if not the only) expressions of resistance to domination. . . .
[L]ocal movements have emerged as a pervasive phenomenon of the contemporary
world’ (p. 22). The Indian environmental campaign known as the Chipko movement,
which began in the 1970s, organized tribal women against deforestation and high-
lighted the plight of indigenous communities with the political empowerment of
women in such communities. This, along with its more recent form of protest against
the building of a series of dams on the river Narmada, is an example of a ‘local’ com-
munity-based social movement that coalesces two normally distinct areas of theor-
etical and political intervention: feminism and environmental activism. As I have
argued elsewhere (Harindranath 2000), this effectively undermines the apparent univer-
sality of the theoretical boundaries guarded by conceptual formulations which, as a
consequence, need to be revised.
To Dirlik, the ‘local’ is ‘a site both of promise and predicament’, offering the
opportunity and the location for anti-global-capitalist resistance, for challenging the
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 21

local manifestations of neo-liberal ideology. He distinguishes between a ‘critical

localism’ from
localism as an ideological articulation of capitalism in its current phase. . . . In its
promise of liberation, localism may also serve to disguise oppression and paro-
chialism. It is indeed ironic that the local should emerge as a site of promise at a
historical moment when localism of the most conventional kind has re-emerged as
the source of genocidal conflict around the world.
(Dirlik 1996, pp. 22–3)
Thus, even while it contains the promise of offering resistance and liberation, intrinsic
to the local that is complicit with global capitalism is the potential for suppression and
conflict. That is its predicament. Ironically, conflicts based on ethnic or religious
grounds reify the idea of difference – the ‘localism of the conventional kind’.
In ideological terms, modernity and the various projects of modernization such as
development have been instrumental in the suppression of the local. What Dirlik terms
‘modernist teleology’ informed and continue to support development projects, whereby
the local, by definition, is considered backward – a site of rural passivity opposed to the
dynamic logic of industrialism and urban culture, inhabited by communities in thrall to
unscientific beliefs and outmoded customs. The local, in other words, was seen as an
obstacle to be overcome in the name of progress. For Dirlik, important intellectual
challenges from postmodernism and post-structuralism have played a crucial role in
the rejection of modernity’s ideological narratives. He locates in the repudiation of
modernity’s meta-narratives, and the attendant re-examination of the discourses of
development as coercion than as teleology, two significant consequences:
First, it rescues from invisibility those who were earlier viewed as castaways from
history, whose social and cultural forms of existence appear in the narrative of
modernization at best as irrelevancies, at worst as minor obstacles to be extin-
guished on the way to development. Having refused to die a natural death . . . they
demand now not just restoration of their history, further splintering the already
cracked façade of modernity. The demand is almost inevitably accompanied by
a reassertion of the local against the universalistic claims of modernism. . . .
Secondly [the repudiation] has allowed greater visibility to ‘local narratives’. . . .
The history of modernization appears now as a temporal succession of spatially
dispersed local encounters, to which the local objects of progress made their own
contributions through resistance or complicity. . . . Also questioned in this view
are the claims of nationalism which, a product of modernization, has sought to
homogenize the societies it has claimed for itself.
(Dirlik 1996, p. 25, emphasis added)
The challenge to universalist narratives is part of the promise of the local, as it
promotes the consciousness of local history and difference and the locations for the
emergence of alternative narratives and social movements. The local then becomes the
22 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

source of resistance and liberation, and of the rejuvenation of discarded histories. On

the other hand, the local also suggests fragmentation which, when combined with
narratives of ethnic or religious difference, generates separatist impulses and conflicts.
Moreover, the local retains earlier forms of exploitation and hierarchization, now
further complicated by becoming the site of contemporary global operations of
capital. It is an unavoidable fact, therefore, that the proper investigation of the local
involves the study of the operations of capital. Take for example the increasing popu-
larity of documentaries (such as The Take (2004) which depicts the consequences of
Argentina’s spectacular economic collapse in 2001, or Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), an
intriguing documentary on the effects of globalisation in Tanzania). These are now
shown in cinemas in major metropolitan areas. A similar increase is seen in the
audience appreciation of non-metropolitan films such as Amores Perros, Rabbit
Proof Fence and The Weeping Camel, which explore material realities and indigenous
histories in Mexico, Australia and Mongolia.
While such films may be taken as either challenging dominant narratives or as
engaging with non-metropolitan localities and make visible the ‘castaways from his-
tory’, they, nevertheless, have to work within the capitalist system of production and
distribution. Further, as Dirlik argues, ‘global capitalism represents a further deter-
ritorialization, abstraction and concentration of capital. In a fundamental sense,
global capitalism represents an unprecedented penetration of local society globally by
the economy and culture of capital.’ A consequences of this is that ‘the local under-
stood in a “traditional” sense may be less evident than ever. It is ironic then that capital
itself should justify its operations increasingly in the language of the local. The irony
allows us to see the local in all its contradictoriness’ (Dirlik 1996, p. 28).

The politics of cultural production

The proliferation of local cultural formations, even if penetrated by global capital,

offers the opportunity for the expression of difference. As Featherstone observes,
Rather than the emergence of a unified global culture there is a strong tendency
for the process of globalization to provide a stage for global differences not only
to open up a ‘world showcase of cultures’ in which the examples of the distant
exotic are brought directly into the home, but to provide a field for a more dis-
cordant clashing of cultures. While cultural integration processes are taking place
on a global level the situation is becoming increasingly pluralistic.
(Featherstone 1995, p. 13)
One trend in local cultural production is in the form of an intervention on the
global, particularly where the global is equated with Westernization. Interestingly,
in the arena of local cultural production as a response to the perceived threat of
Westernization, two apparently contradictory moves happen, which illustrate the
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 23

creative tension between the global and the local. This is demonstrated, for example, in
the forms of cultural nationalism that have recently emerged in India and China. While
these have assumed diverse shapes and ideologies in different localities, the character-
istic that they share is that this cultural protectionism happens almost simultaneously
with economic liberalization. They, therefore, illustrate Dirlik’s observation about the
contradictoriness of the local.
For instance, as Fernandes (2000) demonstrates, advertisements selling consumer
goods on Indian television straddle this dichotomy – while the advertised products are
often made abroad and are internationally known brands, the narrative and the mis-en-
scène of the advertisement texts refer to local Hindu iconography. Fernandes makes
a convincing link between these texts and the rise of right-wing Hindu politics in
India.
In the case of China the tension between the local and the global has been mani-
fested in a different way, as a tension between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’,
leading to a creative chaos, as summarized in Yue Daiyun (1998):

one side advocated the rethinking of the traditional culture, a restoration of

traditional values and attitudes; the other side urged the importation of Western
theories and discourses. The rapid transition from tradition to innovation and
from Western ideas to Chinese ideas led a dazzling chaos.
(1998, p. 33)

Another response has been a reassertion of local values, riding either on claims of
religious exceptionalism, as in the case of protests in New Delhi against the portrayal
of a lesbian relationship in the film Fire, or as Tam et al. (2002) argue, on the basis of
recovery of Confucian as part of what has come to be known as ‘Asian values’:

[In China] Along with the economic development and the desire to affiliate with
the global capitalist system there is the resurgence of a form of cultural national-
ism. Hence the local and the global meet in a culturally specific and historically
contingent way in contemporary China. The recent revival of interest in Confu-
cianism in China, as well as other parts of East Asia, is indicative of this inter-
action between the local and the global, as well as on a larger scale of the Asian
cultural reassertion.
(Tam et al. 2000, p. xiv)

However, the local is not merely a site of particularistic politics or a counter-

discourse to the totalizing logic of the global. Their interaction assumes other shapes
too, where the globally dominant discourses inform local cultural practices, complex
artistic and intellectual negotiations that require sustained study:

the complex, multiple and ambiguous relationships of cultural production to

cultures that they inhabit demand a multi-faceted inquiry. . . . In East Asia, the
interplay between the local and the global has a dimension not only of cultural
24 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

reshaping, but also of cultural disorientation. While traditional indigenous culture

can be understood as a continuous historical process, contemporary culture is
conceived as a phenomenon of transnational formation resulting from the forces
of global stratification. In China this is particularly the case. Not only can
one find Coca-Cola and McDonald’s in almost every city in China, but also the
visage of postmodernism in popular music, architecture, literature and theatre
performance.
(Tam et al. 2002, p. xiii)

The complex mix of particularistic politics, reassertion of traditions, negotiations

with global practices and forms, together constitute the promise and the predicament
of the local. The resulting cultural formations may at once, and the same time, address
both the local and the transnational. What Benzi Zhang (2002) refers to as cultural
diaspora, that is, the presence of Third-World cultural products in ‘the global market
place previously occupied by the West’ (p. 36), demands an inquiry that takes into
account local politics, local histories and local social formations, all in the context of
the global.

The ruthless globalisation and sustained local resistance suggests a relationship of

opposition; however, beyond the historical opposition, there are other possible
relationships between the global and the local. The two processes – the globalisa-
tion of the local and the localisation of the global – are both antithetical and
convoluted in ever changing configurations.
(Benzi Zhang 2002, p. 36)

To end where we began, the study of global cultures, their local formations and their
co-implication with or resistance to the global, needs to acknowledge existing patterns
of inequality. It is a question of contextualization, and the context can be summarized,
very broadly, in two ways. Firstly, as Hall (2000) points out in relation to the issue of
the postcolonial, the term ‘post-colonial’

does not signal a simple before/after chronological succession. The movement

from colonization to post-colonial times does not imply that the problems of
colonialism have been resolved, or replaced by some conflict-free era. Rather,
the ‘post-colonial’ marks the passage from one historical power-configuration or
conjuncture to another. . . . Problems of dependency, underdevelopment and
marginalisation, typical of the ‘high’ colonial period, persist into the post-colonial.
However, these relations are resumed in a new configuration.
(Hall 2000, p. 213, emphasis in the original)

Whereas in the earlier configuration relations of power were articulated in terms of

the colonizer and the colonized, ‘[n]ow they are restaged and displaced as struggles
between indigenous social forces, as internal contradictions and sources of destabliza-
tion within the decolonised society, or between them and the wider global system’
 ONE GLOBAL CULTURE OR MANY ? | 25

(ibid.). The direct rule of the colonial period, in which power was exercised directly
through government institutions, has been
by an asymmetric globalized system of power which is post-national, trans-
national and neo-imperial in character. Its main features are structural inequality,
within a deregulated free-trade and free capital-flow system dominated by the
First World, and programmes of structural adjustment, in which western interests
and models of government are paramount.
(Hall 2000, p. 213)
The validity or otherwise of local political struggles, including nationalism, as well as
the cultural forms these assume, as in the case of expressions of cultural or ethnic
difference, indigenous forms of representation and so on, is contested and negotiated
in the terrain that accommodates this structural inequality. Secondly, contemporary
forms of global capitalist production, distribution and consumption acknowledge and
celebrate difference. Difference, therefore, has itself become in some respects, a com-
modity or a marketing logic, be it local configurations of the global, such as the global
chain McDonald’s selling locally appropriate products, or an overt celebration of
ethnic or racial ‘difference’, as exemplified in some of the Benetton advertisements.
In the process of globalisation, the slogan ‘Think globally, act locally’ has become
the motto of many transnational corporations in their business operations; such a
mind-set has also generated a new cultural phenomenon, in the sense that the
global is concretised in the local. . . . [T]his is the moment in history when the
local and the global are co-implicated in complex and unanticipated ways.
(Tam et al. 2002, pp. x–xi)
The stir caused among both academic and the wider community by the publication of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000) is indicative of the enduring popu-
larity among interested readers of attempts to erect a theoretical edifice that captures
the essential aspects of the contested and annoyingly unfixable process of globaliza-
tion. The book, perhaps understandably, has inspired both adulation and coruscating
critique. Timothy Brennan (2003) begins his review with a rhetorical question that
chimes with the concerns of this present book: ‘what is the predicament of cultural
theory today?’ He answers by claiming that ‘theory has become a code word for
relatively predictable positions in the humanities and social sciences, most of which
turn on the ideas of social transformation, historical agency, the disposition of state-
hood (however understood), and the heterogeneity of cultures’ (p. 337). Brennan is,
however, deeply sceptical of the revolutionary claims of theorists, since their ‘ideas
have become routine in their very disruptiveness (or the other way around)’ (ibid.).
This chapter began by positing the concern that a majority of theorizations of the
globalization process fall short of acknowledging or taking into account with sufficient
seriousness developments on its ‘underside’. A consequence of this, it was argued,
is the neglect not only of the impact of aspects of globalization on less privileged
26 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

communities, but also of the political and social struggles within non-Western com-
munities, their histories and alternative voices. Apart from significant exceptions such
as Sivanandan (1990b), Wallerstein (1991), and Ahmad (1992) whose critiques of con-
ceptual orthodoxies have been acknowledged in the literature, most theoretical explan-
ations of globalization and cultural homogeneity and difference are guilty of what
Brennan asserts is the problem with Empire:
the authors barely nod in the direction of guest-worker systems, uncapitalized
agriculture, and the archipelago of maquiladoras at the heart of globalization’s
gulag. Apart from a handful of passages where they are fleetingly adduced, the
colonized of today are given little place in the book’s sprawling thesis.
(Brennan 2003, p. 338, emphasis in the original)

Further reading

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.
Skelton, T. and Allen, T. (eds) (1999) Culture and Global Change. London: Routledge.
Tam, K. et al. (ed.) (2002) Sights of Contestation: Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Production
in Asia and the Pacific. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press.
Wilson, R. and Dissanayake, W. (eds) (1996) Global/Local. Durham: Duke University Press.
2 THE CULTURAL POLITICS
OF DIFFERENCE

Notions of cultural difference permeate much political practice, be it on behalf of

nationalism, state sovereignty, multiculturalism, or the formulation of human rights.
Events occur from time to time, which challenge the liberal perception and conception
of cultural diversity as pluralistic cohabitation in a ‘global ecumene’ or a multicultural
nation. These events both exemplify the precariousness and significance of cultural
politics as well as contribute to the reification of difference that resurrects the divi-
sions between a professed ‘us’ and an ostensible ‘them’ drawn along the lines of
cultural uniqueness and difference.
The attacks on the icons of American economic and political power on 11 September
2001 are an obvious example, based as they were on a perceived ‘enemy’, drawing on
incommensurable moral imaginaries. The latter engender the politics of ‘you are with
us or with the terrorists’ dichotomy on the one hand, and on the other a projection of
an ‘evil West’ as Islam’s ‘Other’, used to justify the unjustifiable acts of terror. Both sets
of cleavages operate to amplify public discourse on the horrific event. As Montgomery
(2005) suggests, unlike earlier terrorist attacks that had been referred to as acts of
criminality or ‘mass murder’, in this instance news discourse coalesced to report the
event as ‘an act of war’.
The 9/11 attacks are considered by some commentators (Roger Scruton, West and
the Rest) as a watershed event, marking the transition into a new form of global
governance predicated upon a deep cleavage of cultural difference between those
regions of the globe that enjoy the alleged ‘freedoms’ of democracy and those that
persist under the yoke of premodern values inspired by religious fanaticism. Concur-
rently, a similar essentialism underlies the self-proclaimed global Islamic community
that is seen to subsume linguistically, ethnically and nationally divided groups and
is presented as being united against perceived injuries inflicted by a unitary ‘West’.
These discursive projections of ‘enemies’ to ‘freedom and democracy’ or the ‘Islamic
28 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

community’ have both, in effect, constructed mutually incomprehensible configurations

so implacable that they render a dialogue between the two impossible.
A more recent, and perhaps more subtle, illustration of that kind of cultural politics
was witnessed in Australia in May 2005, when an Indonesian court found Schapelle
Corby, an Australian citizen, guilty of smuggling drugs into Bali and sentenced her to
20 years in prison. The public outcry in Australia that followed the ruling, and which
was reported in the media, invoked the notion of ‘difference’ in terms of the Indonesian
justice system, represented as somehow lacking in comparison to the Australian legal
system. Noticeable in the subsequent fall-out was a racially informed invocation of
cultural difference, most often wearing the thin veneer of politically correct recognition
and acknowledgement of national difference (what Stuart Hall has referred to in
another context as ‘inferential racism’). At times this spilled over into more overt
stances in which Corby – a white Australian – was described as ‘one of our own’, and
thus synecdochically representing Australia and ‘Australian values’ against an allegedly
corrupt and backward Indonesian populace.
A relatively extreme response was the package containing a ‘biological agent’ sent to
the Indonesian embassy in Canberra. As reported in The Australian, ‘an envelope
containing a biological agent has been sent to the Indonesian embassy in Canberra in
an apparent reprisal for Schapelle Corby’s jailing in Bali’ (1 June 2005). Australia’s
Foreign Minister’s warning that such sentiments were counterproductive:

to continually attack Indonesia and denigrate its institutions and leaders will
build up a good deal of anti-Australian sentiment in Indonesia and it will make it
very difficult to conclude (prisoner transfer) agreements of this kind, particularly
through public institutions like the Indonesian parliament.
(The Australian, 1 June 2005)

This is itself indicative of a pragmatic rather than a principled stance against anti-
Indonesian attitudes. Another revealing public response was in the form of attempts
from sections of the Australian population to withdraw previously pledged support to
the Indonesian victims of the Christmas 2004 tsunami as an apparently justifiable
response to the Corby judgement.
Entrenched in this discourse is a challenge that questions the ethical and professional
validity and legitimacy of the Indonesian justice system while simultaneously repre-
senting the Australian-British system as normative. Both individually, in the case of
Corby as a white Australian, and collectively, in terms of a perceived lack in Indonesia,
this case embodies the politics of cultural difference that animates several contempor-
ary discussions revolving around identity politics, multiculturalism and nationalist
discourse. Intrinsic to this is the enduring dichotomy of the West and the Rest, which
involves a process of symbolic othering. As San Juan puts it,

one cannot theorize on the vicissitudes of the ‘culture wars’ in the United States
(or in Europe) without being implicated in their geopolitical resonance, in that
 THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE | 29

paradoxically normalized excess called the ‘Third World’ that threatens market
stability but makes cultural sublimations (‘Western democracy’, signifying ‘free’
elections, ‘free’ speech, etc., is still referenced as a norm to be emulated) possible.
(San Juan 1998, p. 55)

At least two vectors of the politics of ‘othering’ converge in this particular instance:
one of those is the racialization of the case, whereby the vocal support mobilized
around Corby as a white Australian and consequently ‘one of us’. The other enlists
national difference to oppose Australia to Indonesia, in which Corby as an Australian
provokes a spirited defence against perceived extremes and flaws of the Indonesian
judges. In her essay exploring the merits of cosmopolitanism in relation to the dangers
of patriotism, Martha Nussbaum asks, in response to Richard Rorty’s appeals to
shared values in the USA, whether he seems

to argue effectively when [he] insists on the centrality to democratic deliberation of

certain values that bind all citizens together. But why should these values, which
instruct us to join hands across boundaries of ethnicity, class, gender, and race,
lose steam when they get to the borders of the nation? By conceding that a morally
arbitrary boundary such as the boundary of the nation has a deep and formative
role in our deliberations, we seem to deprive ourselves of any principled way of
persuading citizens they should in fact join hands across these other barriers.
(Nussbaum 1996, p. 14)

To take another example: in a grizzly extension of the Rushdie affair of the 1980s Theo
Van Gogh, a Dutch film-maker, was murdered in 2004 by a member of the Muslim
community in Holland for the alleged crime of blasphemy. Despite, or perhaps because
of, the extreme nature of this event, it encapsulates a few of the main conceptual and
political issues that are explored in this chapter. Discussions in Chapter 1 demon-
strated the pertinence of the concept of ‘difference’ both at global and at local levels.
Animating notions of cultural and/or ethnic difference is culture conceived, con-
ceptualized and expressed in diverse ways. Central to this is both the form and the
content of representation. The politics inherent in representation addresses not only
content but also seeks to transgress and transform the form of representation, which is
frequently incorporated into the mainstream as the logic of the market incessantly
recuperates diverse modes of address into its commercial domain. As the discussion in
the following chapters demonstrate, cultural production from the margins – be it in the
context of multiculturalism, nationalism, or indigenous identity – involves a constant
balancing act between the wide appeal of commercial forms on the one hand, and the
search for innovative forms that enable the delineation of the complex realities of
marginal experience and life on the other.
On the global level, academic publications from different political standpoints
such as Jihad vs. the McWorld, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, or The Clash of
Civilizations, together with the political rhetoric that has become prevalent more
30 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

recently as in, for example, President Bush’s infamous ‘you are either with us or against
us’ cleave the world community of nations, peoples, cultures into two. Our critical
engagement with the canon of literature on globalization has to consider such develop-
ments and the manner in which such intellectual and political moves inform policies
and practices involving for instance, immigration, passport control and the treatment
of refugees. In the current post 9/11 political climate, this question is fraught with
difficulty, punctuated at one end by religious and ethnic fundamentalists whose
extreme notions of ‘difference’ at times lead to extreme acts of violence, as in the
murder of Van Gogh. At the other end of the spectrum are those for whom ethnic
difference and any proclamation of it are threats to the unity of the nation-state.
As an example of the argument that the active promotion of multiculturalism risks
‘balkanizing’ the nation, Giroux (1994) refers to Patrick Buchanan’s professed fear that
cultural democracy is inimical to national unity and the ‘American way of life’:
According to Buchanan, calls for expanding the existing limits of political repre-
sentation and self-determination are fine as long as they allow [white] Americans
to ‘take back’ their country. In this conservative discourse, difference becomes a
signifier for racial exclusivity, segregation, or, in Buchanan’s language ‘self-
determination’. For Buchanan, public life in the United States has deteriorated
since 1965 because ‘a flood tide of immigration has rolled in from the Third
World, legal and illegal, as our institutions of assimilation . . . disintegrated’.
(Giroux 1994, p. 33)
The murder in Holland also exemplifies, once again in an extreme fashion, the politics
of cultural uniqueness (in this instance conceived along the spurious lines of religious
morality), their significance as well as the moral discourses that underpin and are
mobilized by them – the battles being fought in the name of cultural representation,
embroiled with other issues such as authenticity, voice, propriety and agency, are real
and have real consequences. Conceptions of ‘difference’, inspired by religious extrem-
ism or realpolitik and drawn along the lines of ethnic, racial or allegedly ‘cultural’
uniqueness, imbue the politics that separates the ‘us’ from the ‘them’, and at times spill
over into violence. This is the case not only in the West or the metropole, as demon-
strated by the fury of the protests against the film Fire in the streets of New Delhi. On
that occasion it was the Hindu fundamentalists who protested in the name of the
putative ‘purity’ of Indian and Hindu culture. As we have seen, this is complemented
by the suspicion of expressions of difference, and the clampdown of cultural-political
expression in the name of national unity and security. Within the national context, it
is often the case that dominant, mainstream representations position minorities in
certain ways. Challenges to these have had to negotiate a path that stays clear of
fundamentalist or ‘essentialist’ proclamations of uniqueness while at the same time
seeking to depict those aspects of experience that are consistently ignored or passed
over by dominant forms of representation. The question of difference, therefore, has
political, intellectual and symbolic dimensions.
 THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE | 31

Culture wars

In one of their recent books Hardt and Negri (2004) describe the different responses of
two Italian travellers to India: Alberto Moravia, the writer, underlined the differences
between Europeans and Indians, concluding that ‘the difference of India is ineffable’
(p. 127); ‘the other writer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, tries to explain how similar India
is’ (ibid.).
It makes you wonder if the travel companions even saw the same country. In fact,
although polar opposites, their two responses fit together perfectly as a fable of
the two faces of Eurocentrism: ‘They are utterly different from us’ or ‘they are just
the same as us.’ The truth, you might say, lies somewhere between the two – they
are somewhat like us and also a little different – but really that compromise only
clouds the problem. Neither of the two Italian writers can escape the need to use
European identity as a universal standard, the measure of sameness and
difference.
(p. 128)
Hardt and Negri’s argument is pertinent to our discussion as the main issue here is
with regard to the question, ‘sameness and difference in relation to what?’. ‘Euro-
centrism’ as a critical concept has in recent years come to provide a valuable stance
against the excessive normative force of epistemologies and ethical values seen as being
specifically European or Euro-American in origin, and bear its imprint, thereby casting
alternatives as outside the norm. The location of the colonialist impulse behind the
production of knowledge in support of the exercise of imperial power, as in the case of
‘Orientalism’ (Said 1978) has generated a productive space from which to critique
certain kinds of academic and political discourse, and of cultural and material mar-
ginalization. This critical position has been mobilized by academic fields of enquiry
such as postcolonial studies and cultural studies. It is pertinent to our current concerns
in broadly two ways: firstly, it underlines our concerns, outlined in Chapter 1, of the
particularistic nature of the totalizing narratives contained in much of the literature on
globalization. As we saw, the academic discourse on globalization, the doxa, is
restricted to the addressing of selective aspects of the process and the simultaneous
neglect of its ‘underside’. Further, and even more significantly, since it provides the
main impetus to the arguments in the book, addressing this sanctioned ignorance
involves locating and focusing on alternative cultural and political practice, be it in the
form of perilous nationalism, minority aesthetic, or indigenous challenges.
The ‘culture wars’ that Giroux (1994) and San Juan (1998, 2002) are concerned with
originate in the challenges to such Eurocentric notions of universalism. These chal-
lenges punctuate the politics of cultural difference. Cultural production in and from
the margins, as expressions of alternative histories and life stories, pregnant with issues
of exploitation and neglect, challenge dominant narratives in several ways. ‘Dominant
cultural traditions once self-confidently secure in the modernist discourse of progress,
32 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

universalism, and objectivism are now interrogated as ideological beachheads used to

police and contain subordinate groups, oppositional discourses, and dissenting social
movements’ (Giroux 1994, pp. 29–30). Issues including the politics of nationalist dis-
course, indigenous land and cultural rights, cultural difference and multiculturalism,
criss-cross and intersect in complex ways at both the global and the national levels.

Struggles over the academic canon, the conflict over multiculturalism, and the
battle for either extending or containing the rights of new social groups dominate
the current political and ideological landscape. . . . Underlying the proliferation
of these diverse and various battles is a deeper conflict over the relationship
between democracy and culture on the one hand, and identity and the politics of
representation on the other.
(ibid.)

The intellectual, ideological and cultural assaults on the Eurocentric academic canon
are central to this debate, couched in terms of identity, culture and democracy. These
challenges have, according to Giroux, led to a reconstitution of cultural politics that
focuses on issues of representation, examining the hegemonic functions of discourses,
but also various social formations, including race, and ‘institutional conditions which
regulate different fields of culture’ (Bennett 1992, p. 25).
The political dimensions of this struggle over representational practices and cultural
politics in the conception of the ‘contemporary politics of citizenship’ formulated by
Hall and Held, as they see it, must address

questions of membership posed by feminism, the black and ethnic movements,

ecology and vulnerable minorities like children. But it must also come to terms
with the problems posed by ‘difference’ in a deeper sense: for example, the diverse
communities to which we belong, the complex interplay of identity and identifica-
tion in modern society, and the differentiated ways in which people now participate
in social life.
(Hall and Held 1990, p. 176)

For Giroux, such a politics is crucial as it illuminates the struggles over the question of
difference, identity and culture that are central to citizenship in a democratic society.
This ‘political side of culture’ is made even more relevant by the conservative politics
advanced by the New Right in the USA during the Reagan-Bush era that inaugurated a

cultural blitz . . . that has continuously chipped away at the legal, institutional,
and ideological spheres necessary to the existence of a democratic society. . . . The
New Right has focused on postmodernist, feminist, postcolonialist and other
minority discourses that have raised serious questions regarding how particular
forms of authority are secured through the organization of the curriculum at all
levels of schooling.
(p. 32)
 THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE | 33

In the conservative discourse of the New Right, the politics of racial and cultural
difference is represented in authoritarian populist discourse as a threat to the nation, as
a marker for racial exclusivity. The complex ramifications of this politics of cultural
difference and representation are illustrated in the ethically and conceptually pre-
carious nature of nationalist politics. For instance, the rise of religious fundamentalist
politics in various parts of the postcolonial world and the active participation of
women in these developments have posed tricky questions for cultural studies scholars
and for feminists. As Ania Loomba notes in the context of the rise of right-wing Hindu
politics in India,

it has surfaced as a major factor in women’s relationship to ‘the nation’ and to

postcolonial politics. . . . The crucial point here is that often women themselves
are key players in the fundamentalist game: in India women like Sadhvi Rithambara
and Uma Bharati have stridently mobilised for Hindu nationalism by invoking
fears of Muslim violence. In other words, women are objects as well as subjects of
fundamentalist discourse.
(Loomba 1998, pp. 226–7)

On the other hand, however, contestations of existing relations of power include the
promotion of alternative visions and other voices. As Stam (1999) argues in connection
with debates on multiculturalism in the USA,

Neoconservatives accuse multiculturalists of Balkanizing the nation, of emphasis-

ing what divides people rather than what brings them together. That the inequit-
able distribution of power itself generates violence and divisiveness goes
unacknowledged; that multiculturalism offers a more egalitarian vision of social
relations is ignored. A radical multiculturalism calls for a profound restructuring
and reconceptualization of the power relations between cultural communities.
Refusing ghettoising discourse, it links minoritarian communities, challenging
the hierarchy that makes some communities ‘minor’ and others ‘major’ and
‘normative’.
(Stam, p. 101)

Challenging the attempts to delimit representations of alternatives either through

silencing other voices or the foreclosure of debates on the spurious grounds of, for
instance, national unity consequently requires two complementary moves: questioning
what is presented as the ‘norm’, while steering clear of the excesses of particularist
positioning that so easily follows on into essentialism or fundamentalism. San Juan
sees these ‘culture wars’ in Gramscian terms, as a combination of ‘a war of manoeuvre’
and a ‘war of position’ in the struggle for hegemonic power:

culture wars are emblematic: they signify engagements with the ideological-moral
positions that at some point will generate qualitative changes in the terms of
engagement and thus alter the balance of power in favor of one social bloc against
34 | PERSPEC TIVES ON GLOBAL CULTURES

another. In modern industrial formations, the struggle is not just to occupy the
city hall, as it were, but also . . . tranform the relations of power, their bases and
modality, on both material and symbolic levels.
(San Juan 2002, p. 167)

While his use of Gramsci highlights the significance of challenging the hegemonic
relations of power, his emphasis on both symbolic and material transformation, that is,
changes to the socio-cultural as well as economic aspects of minority or marginalized
experience underlines the importance of achieving transformation at both levels. The
discursive dimensions of the ideological-moral positions indicative of the global
(im)balance of power have become profoundly marked, particularly in the aftermath
of 9/11. As the subsequent war in Iraq, the terrorist attacks in Spain and elsewhere, and
political repression in places like Chechnya have demonstrated, the mediation of the
discourse on the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘spread of democracy and freedom’ has gone
hand in hand with material or ‘real’ aspects on complex and diverse ways.
Two aspects of the politics of representation immanent in potential and real
challenges to dominant discourses concern us here: firstly, the apparent Eurocentrism
inherent in ‘universalist’ discourse such as ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, and
secondly, the racial dimensions of the politics of cultural difference. Benhabib (2002)
begins her exploration of the former by asking ‘is universalism Eurocentric?’ (Benhabib
2002, chapter 2). Fundamental to the question, for her, is the presupposition that we
know who the ‘West and its others’ are, which risks homogenizing cultures and civiliza-
tions: ‘the answer in recent debates on cognitive and moral relativism has turned on a
holistic view of cultures and societies as internally coherent, seamless wholes’ (2002,
p. 25). Her complaint is that ‘this view has prevented us from seeing the complexity of
global civilizational dialogues and encounters, which are increasingly our lot, and it
has encouraged the binaries of “we” and “the other(s)” ’ (ibid.).
In the place of what she considers the unproductive explorations of the alleged
tension between relativism (which privileges the local and the particular) and universal-
ism, which promote theses of incommensurability and untranslatability, Benhabib
pleads the case for a dialogue between cultures that are considered not as complete and
coherent wholes, but as unstable, hybrid and ‘polyvocal’. ‘Politically, the right to cul-
tural expression needs to be grounded upon, rather than considered an alternative to,
universally recognised citizenship rights’ (p. 26). Benhabib’s vision includes a participa-
tory democracy involving a dialogic relationship between different perspectives
inspired by diverse cultural formations and value systems. In the place of an
unproductive dichotomy opposing an unexamined universalism to relativist particular-
ism, her recommendation for addressing the problem of equality is a conversation
among cultural communities with equal powers of enunciation.
In a similar vein, in her response to Nussbaum’s (1996) plea for the transcendence of
the parochialism of patriotic fervour into a cosmopolitan universal citizenship, Butler
(1996) presents her case for the continuing validity of universalism, a concept that
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