Transnational audiences: geocultural approaches

Abstract

The exchange of information, discourse and meaning across a bewildering array of cultural, geographic and political barriers has become a central concern for a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, there is a growing body of empirical work in academic journals and doctoral theses that addresses particular instances of transnational reception. It is nonetheless fair to say that as a field of study, our knowledge of transnational audiences remains highly fragmented and lacks a common conceptual or comparative framework. In the main, overarching theories of global media flows and markets continue to rest upon theoretical understandings of media reception that are largely derived from a previous epoch where media mobility and intercultural communication was not a primary focus. As a consequence, contemporary studies of transnational media reception still require a coherent geography capable of addressing the unique demands of this kind of work. There is a pressing need, therefore, to articulate the theoretical work on the transnational itself with a technologically and politically updated configuration of media reception in the twenty-first century. Ambitious as this proposition might sound, defining this terrain in a comprehensive and accessible fashion has become a necessary step in furthering critical debates in this exciting and important field. This article will not achieve this goal, naturally, but will instead seek to lay out some of the conceptual terrain from which we might proceed.