Content Providers of the World Unite! The Cultural Politics of Globalization

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. As a collection, these essays examine various aspects of the relationship between culture and globalization, while keeping questions of agency in the front of their thinking. Given the multidimensionality of globalization, it is always a danger that if one abstracts one dimension, culture, one will leave behind other critical dimensions such as the economic, the political, or the demographic. In fact, if one is concerned with agency as these essays are, then the analysis must remain fully multidimensional. As John Tomlinson (1999:14) has cautioned us, “lose the complexity and you have lost the phenomenon.” None the less, some theorists argue that culture is not just one dimension of several, but a crucial one. If we accept for the moment Tomlinson’s (1999:18) understanding of culture as “the order of life in which human beings construct meanings through practices of symbolic representation”, then culture becomes crucial because it enables or constitutes how we use contemporary technologies and cultural products to connect to others. These choices about how and with whom to connect can be constitutive for agency in a globalizing context. Or so, this is the message that is argued in many ways in the following essays. Arjun Appadurai (1996) helps us take this point further. In reflecting upon contemporary developments and the nature of the ‘rupture’ they introduce into history, Appadurai lays particular stress on the imagination. He suggests that the imagination as social practice is new because it has ‘broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies’ (1996:5). As cultural products enter the lives of these ordinary people, they provoke resistance, selectivity and occasionally agency. Research has increasingly shown that these people are not simply the dupes of the products of transnational media and cultural corporations. As Appadurai adds (1996:7), ‘it is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighbourhood and nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagination is today a staging ground for action, not only for escape.’ The following essays thus provide us with considerable intellectual stimuli for thinking through these issues. In their introductory essay, O’Brien and Szeman sketch out the context and the core questions that presenters at the conference sought to address. The remaining essays are grouped into three sections. First, Vetters, Henley and Brown focus on particular cultural forms. Vetters looks at how ‘celebrities’ acting through the mass media can serve as focal points or instigators for mobilization of resistance to particular aspects of globalization. Henley looks at how local cultural practices that arise from the indigenization of hip-hop culture in Vancouver create a basis for acts of resistance to global corporate culture and for assertions of local identities. Brown also takes us away from visual culture, so often analyzed in connection with globalization, and discusses more generally how music enacts relationships between individual bodies and constructed social worlds. The second section focuses more specifically on electronic communication and cyber-culture. Wiltse examines the dimension of ‘fandom’ and ‘communities of appreciation’ as affective tools that enable the construction of maps of what matters in the cultural world. And as individuals come to redefine their identities based on these maps, they imagine new cultural worlds, which may, in turn, become the basis for activism and ‘intervention’. Friedman deals even more explicitly with the imagination by examining the role of utopia in imagining alternative futures. He illustrates his argument by reflecting upon the utopian ideals and thus alternative futures associated with open source software. The third group of essays turns to look specifically at activism. Varadharajan uses Empire by Hardt and Negri in combination with the thinking of Amartya Sen to reflect upon the general possibilities for resistance to globalizing processes. Metzger takes us to media coverage of the protests in Quebec City during the meeting of political leaders on the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Finally, Draper uses a materialist standpoint epistemology to reflect upon two competing models of non-governmental organizations for challenging globalization. One model uses a kind of ‘top down’ approach, while the other begins at the ground with the standpoint of the Brazilian rural poor. He argues that the latter approach is more likely to be successful in constructing alternative imagined worlds that might serve as a basis for agency.

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