“The Residue of the National: Conditions of Production and the Transatlantic Divide,” in Christof Decker and Astrid Böger, Transnational Mediations (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, forthcoming) (original) (raw)
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Content Providers of the World Unite! The Cultural Politics of Globalization
crunch.mcmaster.ca
KTH 234, 1280 Main St W, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8S 4M4 (905) 525-9140 Ext. 27556 http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/\~global/ CONDITION INSTITUTE ON GLOBALIZATION 2003 HUMAN Preface This collection of short essays comes to the Institute by way of a conference entitled Content Providers of the World Unite! The Cultural Politics of Globalization, which was held at McMaster University in October 2001. The initiative for the conference came from Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman, both faculty members in the Department of English at McMaster University. They were ably assisted in their organizational efforts by Stephanie Parker, a part-time employee of the Institute at the time and a student in McMaster's Theme School on Globalization, Social Change and the Human Experience.
Frontiers and limits of European culture
2007
the publishers-the Institut für Auslandbeziehungen and the Robert Bosch Stiftungpointed out that the problem with European culture is not that there is not enough of it, but that it is never perceived as European. On the contrary culture is identified as Italian, French, German, and Hungarian... Hardly anyone would consider Alfred Hitchcock a 'European' film director, or Heinrich Böll a 'European' author. At least, not in Europe and among the educated public: you can expect an American or the general public not to tell a German piece of art apart from a Polish one; intellectuals, however, especially European ones, are trained to identify distinguishing features. Not 'seeing' (or pretending to see) the difference between a French and an Italian novel will alienate you from your intellectual friends. Paradoxically enough, there seems to exist a correlation between the discerning capacities of people and their European awareness, or, to be more precise, their openmindedness about European culture. The general public, on the other hand, contents itself with what it can understand: things that fall within their own referential framework. As long as it comes through their personal TV-set, is recommended by a friend or acquaintance, and, most importantly, is in their own language (translations or adaptations will do fine), people don't bother where their 'culture' comes from. Hence the success of global, mainly commercial formats, often referred to as 'low culture'. Anything that infringes the familiar setting is perceived as threatening.
2013
Can it be unequivocally accepted that globalisation as a process of internationality, driven by what is denounced as shallow consumerism, implies the standardisation and uniformisation of culture? And that a homogenised world will be suffused with
Culture -the cultural field -has, in the modern period, historically been the most fundamental and most powerful domain in which a sense of the 'national' of national identity, affiliation and belonging, has been developed, consolidated and embedded in both national and individual consciousness. Beyond the formal and legal national identity documents of the passport and the identity card, the myriad of national cultural 'documents'novels, dictionaries, folk tales, poetry, newspapers, art and museum collections, bibliographies, libraries, musical and literary traditions, national broadcasting systems, films -have constantly affirmed and re-affirmed, produced and reproduced, the deepest and most embedded sense of the nation and the national: what is inside and what is outside, the borders. These have been the cultural technologies of national imagining. National cultural and media policies -and policy frameworks -have historically been formed in this context and guided by this logic. But, increasingly, in the context of globalisation, transnational flows of people and cultural goods, the development of diasporas, and the 'virtual mobility' produced by the internet and mobile telephony, the national frame and policy remit is proving inadequate to address the realities of cultures which are both subnational and transnational in their allegiances and belongings. These are realities which are often beyond or below the horizons of visibility of established national policy frameworks.