Culture, communication, and the challenge of globalization

Abstract

This essay deals with the problematics that globalization poses for critical communication scholarship. Globalization challenges our understanding of culture and identity in ways that both open up new directions for communication scholarship and invite a rethinking of current ones. First, we discuss how difference is unsettled and re/staged in the context of globalization. Second, we address how uneven patterns of global processes are enacted through cultural practices produced by the transnational flows of images and capital. This essay explores several areas of contemporary global growth with the overall objective of demonstrating the urgency of rethinking the study of culture in critical communication studies. One of the most important implications of globalism is simply that there is no longer a space elsewhere. This means that instead of thinking in terms of displacements, a movement elsewhere, it is important for cultural studies to think in terms of dis-location, which is the transformation of place. –Ackbar Abbas (1997, p. 312), “Cultural Studies in Postculture.” To think globality is to think of the politics of thinking globality. –Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (1999, p. 364), A critique of postcolonial reason.