Diasporas and Contra-Flows

Appadurai’s Disjunctive global Cultural Order

Ethnoscapes

Ideascapes

Technoscapes

Finanscapes

Mediascapes

•What is the global cultural imaginaire?

•Is it singular?

•Does it emanate from national sources only?

Flows and contra-flows

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Premios Juventud -2009- Makano

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Luis Fonsi

La 5a estacion

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Viva el Sueño

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Diaspora•Diaspora: group of

people dispersed away from their countries for political, economic religious reasons

•Diasporic media: telephone, letters, VCR, Satellite tv, Internet, etc.

•Univision: one of the most watched networks in America

Sabado Gigante

Premios Juventud

Diasporic Media as Global Media

•Diaspora as the locus of the transnational: they live in nation-states, but they also live beyond nation-states;

•Contra-flows provide unique paths to study the complex routes of media flows and contra-flows;

•Diasporas upsets the unity and cultural purity of nation;

•nation is still important but its boundaries are challenged by alternative media patterns

Diasporic Media as Global Media

•Diasporic identities are as much about the roots as the routes of of the diasporic journey;

•Diasporic media are transnational: they spring from and go to many directions;

•They’re in between the national and the global: cultures of opposition?

Diasporic Media as Global Media

•Diasporic media: discursive space of identity construction- a form of mediation;

•Parallel or extra public spheres are created;

•Nationalistic and cosmopolitan ideologies clash in the diasporic space (media);

The City

•The city: cosmopolitan space where purity is challenged;

•Movement from the periphery to center;

•rise of horizontal cultural formations and new consumerist transnationalism

Diasporic Media as Global Media

•Who is speaking and from what vantage point? who is representing whom? Who’s is listening/watching and with what impact? Legitmacy?

•Danger: uniformity of the diasporic space/subject/media, etc.

Diasporic Media as Global Media

•Are diasporic media necessarily contra?

•Are they necessarily the opposite of mainstream media?

•Plurality is key characteristic of diasporic identity, but boundaries are not completely eradicated;

•Is “contra” still a good way to think about the other flow of global communication?

Networked World

•Disjuncture in ethnoscape, technoscape, infoscape, financescape, and mediascape.

•Today’s world is “experienced through the identity politics of nations, individuals, and cultures and negotiated through contestations of locality, nationality and global citizenship”

•The global imaginaire is multiple

•Contra-flows remain squarely based on a frame of nationalistic essentialism and cultural notions of purity.

•Subcategories in contra-flows that don’t fit in well in this definition: A terrorist beheading video, a cricket game in the 1st world, etc.

•Constant conflict with traditional categories of the nation-state.