Resistance, Accommodation, or Haggling: Postcolonial Theory and International Business Communication (original) (raw)
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Intercultural Communication Studies, 2005
Intercultural Communication Studies XIV: 1 2005 Mendoza "control," but as expansive lessons and teachable moments for learning different ways of being human. I offer it as my contribution to this festschrift volume for Dr. Heisey. A Daunting Task "Prepare to teach the most boring class ever and expect to get the worst student evaluations in your career as a graduate instructor," I was warned. Com 463, as it was numbered in our department, is the upper division undergraduate course in intercultural communication theory and research. That Spring semester, I was assigned to teach it for the first time. The course seemed to have a reputation alright-certainly not the easiest to muster. In all fairness, I was told that part of it is just the "can-we-please-just-get-it-over-with" and "oh-hey-give-us-a-break-it's-our-last-semester" sort of mentality that one finds prevalent among seniors in their last year of course work. But apparently, there was more to it than a mere case of senioritis; instructors who have taught the course earlier report having difficulty whipping up interest in the subject, much like a Sisyphusian endeavor, from what I gathered. I was determined to find out why. The two required textbooks for the course (decided beforehand by the senior faculty course committee) were Gudykunst and Kim's Communicating with Strangers (1997) and Samovar and Porter's (SP) Intercultural Communication: A Reader (1997). Although not part of the decision-making committee, I sought to approach the two texts with as much enthusiasm as though I had personally picked them myself; after all, knowing what is out there in the field is always good, even if sometimes all it gives one is something to push against. I must admit, though, that I found the continuing use of the word "strangers" in the Gudykunst and Kim title disturbing. Given the vastly differing conditions we live in today from those of the early 1900s when sociologist Georg Simmel originally developed the concept (and to whom Gudykunst and Kim acknowledge their indebtedness), the term would not only be theoretically problematic (what with the boundaries of "here" and "there" having become increasingly blurred even as there are those who would mark them more boldly. For that matter, even Gudykunst and Kim (1997, p. 24) do concede that the term is "somewhat ambiguous," if only conceptually. Furthermore, the term "stranger" these days carries with it all kinds of pejorative connotations including spectres of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments, rabid fears of difference, of "them" versus "us," and the oft-unstated assumption, "we better learn to manage this otherness lest it disrupt our well-ordered existence and manage us." Although never one to decide anything solely on the basis of "political correctness," still I wondered whether the use of a such a loaded term might not be doing a disservice in representing to those outside the discipline what we, as intercultural communication scholars, do, especially appearing as it does in a major textbook such as that of Gudykunst and Kim. This piece is not intended to be unduly critical of the work of these two prominent scholars in the field who no doubt have made tremendous contribution to our understanding of certain important aspects of intercultural communication. What happened in the class was that I fell flat on my face. I experienced a most disastrous semester with that first-time attempt to teach intercultural theory from a theoretically "balanced" and "neutral" stance (which I thought the textbook demanded), I felt I owed it to myself, if to no one else, to jot down my learnings and share them, and perhaps, out of the exercise, invite some exchange and discussion. After all, we build theory, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1981) remarks, from dialogue and contestation, i.e., from the engagement of differing points of view (versus
Journal of Media Research, 2016
This work looks for an understanding of intercultural studies and intercultural communication from a genealogical and critical perspective. It seems they could belong to a functional emerging practice and a discourse for socio-political and economic objectives related to the conflict solving regarding ethnic reclaim and migratory processes. This work is divided into four parts: (1) Beginning of the intercultural studies and intercultural communication as ideology and control; (2) The efforts to develop the intercultural studies and la “intercultural communication”; (3) Consolidation of the paradigm of civilization and barbarism; (4) The media studies and their logic of inclusion and exclusion of ethnicity. To conclude, intercultural studies and communication constitute discourse and a functional and instrumentalized practice for the “resolution” of certain sociopolitical and economical conflicts, after the reivindicative and migratory processes. Keywords: Genealogy, Critics, Intercultural Studies, Communication Studies, Discourse.
The Postcolonial Alien in Us All: Identity in the Global Division of Intellectual Labor
positions: east asia cultures critique, 2008
This essay is a combination of two unlikely topics. One is a long commentary on the work of Naoki Sakai, given at a workshop in Taiwan. 1 The other is a critique of latent ethnocentrism in current notions of globalization, from a paper given at a boundary 2 conference in Hong Kong. 2 It is not apparent at first glance why the two are related, but certain unsettling themes underlie both, tied together by a presumed reliance upon the centrality of identity. Sakai's recent work posits an implicit ethnocentrism in core axioms of humanistic understanding that have become, for him, a basis for postcolonial sensitivity. The boundary 2 conference was prompted by a call to find common intellectual ground among participants of apparently different identities. Both cases assumed identity's positionality without really problematizing its situatedness in other things. In anthropology, "writing culture" and debates surrounding the authority of native ethnographic positions 16:3
ABSTRACT This essay contributes to the discussions in intercultural communication scholarship on key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges in today’s world through the ethical framework of Emmanuel Levinas and his discussion of “absolute otherness” that informs and expands the dialogue on interculturality, cultural humility, and ethics. Levinas’s discussion of “absolute otherness” aims to preserve difference—the otherness of the other—by asserting the ethical relation prior to the ontological relation and carries significant communicative implications in terms of the relation of the self and the other as well as making sense of difference and identity, and offers a new way of talking about these issues in the field of communication studies, specifically in intercultural communication. An illustration of attending to the other beyond reduction to the same is offered through a pedagogical application of the Levinasian framework in the intercultural communication class.