Transnational Cultural Production Research Articles

Arabic Facts in Palestine: Clashing Hybridities in Transnational Cultural Production

In 2012, Bethlehem's Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Society undertook the challenge of co-producing Arthur Milner's Facts with the New Theatre of Ottawa for a nine-city tour in the region. The successful production and warm reception to the play highlighted the potential for more Canadian playwrights, companies, and artists to engage with Palestine through cultural and theatrical exchanges. It also highlighted a series of challenging political, cultural, and philosophical differences, which emerged in production, talkbacks, and audience reception. Palestinian communities in different cities reacted in remarkably different ways to the play, which tells the story of two Israeli and Palestinian investigators as they attempt to solve a murder mystery in the West Bank. In Bethlehem, political issues of security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel dominated the discussion. In Hebron, the audience responded to the engagement with settlers and the predominant presence of the Goldstein massacre at the end of the play. The mixed Israeli-Palestinian audience in Jaffa reacted in similar ways to the Canadian audience in Ottawa, focusing on the rift between religious and secular Israel. These varied responses reflected the transnational dimension of the production: the Canadian origins of the play, its hybridity in production, its international appeal, and its relevance to Palestine. I will outline the challenges of the production through a description, analysis, and critique of the process that led to opening night in Bethlehem's Dar Annadwa Addawliyya, and closing night at Al-Rowwad. From the checkpoint to closing night, I tell the story of a successful partnership, while revealing the inevitable clashes of values that took place in this transnational cultural production. In narrating my experience as the director of the production, I draw on contested concepts such as transnationalism, hybridity, and modernity without defining them, a frustrating condition for the reader of an academic journal. Although I hope that these concepts may be enriched by the documentation of this production, I describe some of the challenges in this journey not for the purpose of theoretical development, but to identify a space between what we think we are doing and what we actually are doing. In transnationalism and through hybridity, this theatrical production enters an alternative space that simultaneously belongs to Canadians, but doesn't. By travelling to an alternative geography, this play became an exploration ground for multiple clashing and complementary identities and values. The dislocation of the cultural production from its indigenous home and relocation to the address of its characters became the catalyst that contested and temporarily disrupted its/our legitimacy. Facts in Ottawa Arthur Milner's play investigates the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank through the lens of religious conflict and the institution of archaeology. Produced in Canada in 2010, the play presents a Jewish-Canadian playwright's examination of the conflict in three perspectives: a secular Israeli investigator, a Palestinian Authority investigator, and a right wing Israeli-American settler in Hebron. The two investigators, Yossi and Khalid, must work together to solve a murder mystery, in which the primary suspect is the settler, Danny. The following question drives the plot of the play: Did Danny murder an American archaeologist in Hebron? However, the underlying dramatic question throughout the play is whether a Palestinian and an Israeli can cooperate in the investigation, despite their deep-seated conflict over the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948, the ensuing events leading to the occupation of 1967, and the Israeli expansion into the West Bank through the systematic building of settlements, a substantial Israeli investment in urban planning, and the ongoing exploitation of resources in occupied territories. …

Precarity and Solidarity at Neoliberalism’s Twilight: The Potentials of Transnational Production Autoethnography

This essay uses autoethnography to illuminate the shifting conditions of global creative and academic labor. By reflecting on my experiences during a 2014 research trip to Manila, the Philippines, I, as a U.S. scholar, consider the different experiences of precarity in transnational cultural production, as academic and creative labor are both shaped by neoliberal structural forces. Through production autoethnography, I argue we may build forms of solidarity between cultural studies scholars and creative workers. Attending to the broader political changes that have occurred over the last several years, I conclude that as neoliberalism has lost its hegemonic authority, cultural producers, including cultural studies scholars, have the opportunity to help forge something better.

Gendering an International Outlook: Irish Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century

Gendering an International Outlook:Irish Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century Nora Moroney (bio) "Oh, countrymen! oh, patriots! oh, friends!"Ye cry to one another. Echo lendsHer voice—but answering time as yet no answer sends. (Charlotte Grace O'Brien, "France," 1877) Alice Stopford Green's and Charlotte Grace O'Brien's careers in the late Victorian London periodical press, as seen through their contributions to the Nineteenth Century, are a neglected element of Irish transnational cultural production. As writers engaging in internationally focused highbrow journalism, they were tangential to the traditional orientation of Irish national narratives, yet their place at the heart of one of Britain's most influential monthly journals enabled them to articulate a vision of social injustice as a means of challenging some of the hegemonic and gendered discourses of the day. Their pieces transcended boundaries, not only between Ireland and England but also, on a broader scale, between Irish and world affairs. Pivoting on issues of emigration and empire, the articles they published throughout the 1880s and 1890s convey a sense of social conscience and responsibility that informed the wider worldview of the Nineteenth Century, as well as influencing currents of British intellectual debate. Green's and O'Brien's public interventions in political and current affairs, moreover, represent a shift in the accepted narrative of late Victorian women's careers in journalism. Their presence in London's publishing scene and their pioneering work on victims of transatlantic migrancy and the Boer War were a highly visible form of investigative reporting. In their periodical writings, they counteracted notions of Irish provincialism (still evident at this time in the cartoons of Punch, for instance) and brought questions of gender to bear on issues of serious political and national [End Page 504] import. A consideration of these women writers, then, involves placing them in the context of both Irish literary developments and the British periodical market during the late nineteenth century in order to understand the varieties of borders—geographical, gendered, and journalistic—that they worked to undercut. W. T. Stead, writing as a champion of female journalists in 1892, advised aspiring applicants that "if [they] are to get on in journalism, or in anything else, they must trample under foot that most dishonouring conception of their work as mere woman's work."1 The methodology espoused here by Stead was, in F. Elizabeth Gray's words, one front of the broader phenomenon of "women journalists' search for new sources of recognition and new forms of identity through their writing for periodicals."2 Green and O'Brien fulfilled this criterion by cultivating distinctive voices in their respective Nineteenth Century articles. Through the social and political activism of these pieces, both women sought a public profile for their work, a task that was beset by challenges amid the late Victorian explosion in periodical enterprises. Writing anonymously for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in June 1893, another Irish littérateur in London, Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, described how in attempting to find a break on Fleet Street "one is horribly handicapped as a woman. A man meets other men at his club; he can be out and about at all hours; he can insist without being thought bold and forward; he is not presumed to be capable of undertaking only a limited class of subjects, but is set to anything."3 O'Brien and Green may have been cushioned somewhat from the urgent material needs of Eccles, but her experience points to the frustrations inherent in the construction of a professional identity as a woman writer within the elite press. For Irish women, especially, access to influential networks and the ability to socialize in the right circles were crucial for success in the publishing world. Operating at a remove from the male-dominated political discourse of the day, these women faced challenges that testify to the contingencies of periodical writing. Both Green and O'Brien relied on contacts within political and journalistic spheres: O'Brien's humanitarian articles were defended in Parliament by Charles Stewart Parnell, for instance, while Green was in regular correspondence with the Colonial Office regarding her South African visits. These institutional networks provided an important...

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism: The force of the fold in diasporic intimacy

The contemporary migration experience is mobile, fragmented and mediated, creating a new diasporic interface that interplays the three threads of media, culture and art. However, studies of transnationalism within media, culture and art scholarship continue to collapse into binary models, ultimately streamlining the complex cultural translations that occur in this interface. This essay argues that the notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism allows for a more rigorous account of the diasporic interface, keeping alive the kinetic element that permeates transnational cultural production.

Zaire ’74: politicising the sound event

This article focuses on the multidimensional sound event in order to articulate certain transnational vectors of political power, anti-imperialism and black power. It proceeds from Louise Bethlehem’s research methodology which recasts the anti-apartheid struggle as an apparatus of transnational cultural production through charting the movement of texts, sounds and images in a cold war setting. At the core of the paper is the analysis of the black music festival “Zaire ’74,” associated with the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight boxing match. Taken together, the two events brought “black power” into contact with “soul power” in Mobutu’s Zaire when both configurations were at their peak. Analysing this historical junction with reference to the type of affect it produced, demonstrates something of the tensions which existed between its various audiences. Concurrently, attending to the sounds it generated helps to shed light on the intersection between anti-colonial ambition and African-American resistance. The article introduces the concept of the “transnational sound event” which uses voice and sound to translate moments of disconnection into arenas for hope and solidarity. The analysis nevertheless reckons with the dark underside of the music festival as well as the political and material conditions under which it was held.

Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing ed. by Adele Parker, Stephanie Young

Reviewed by: Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing ed. by Adele Parker, Stephanie Young Polina Kroik Parker, Adele, AND Stephanie Young, eds. Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 301 pp. $84 (paperback). Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing is a wide-ranging, theoretically informed collection of essays that explore the interrelations between the concepts and categories of the title. The volume appears to be carefully curated, representing writing by women from many parts of the [End Page 320] globe. While some of the texts that the authors analyze are widely read, many are not well known. One of the volume’s strengths is in bringing critical attention to marginalized authors and texts. The volume’s authors and editors also raise important questions about the politics of identity and representation in an era of greater geographic mobility and increased transnational cultural production. Though the authors and editors offer some answers to these questions, the tension between the variety of perspectives represented in the volume seems more productive, opening up avenues for future inquiry. In their introduction, Adele Parker and Stephanie Young situate the volume within the field of transnational studies, distinguishing this perspective from a “global” approach, represented here by David Damrosch’s concept of “World Literature.” Citing Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih’s argument that the transnational perspective is “less scripted and more scattered” than the “global” and noting that it may be more attentive to cultural specificity, the editors conclude by leaving the political value of transnationalism open: “One of the debates currently in circulation is whether transnationalism is a move beyond the traditional nation-state paradigm, or is just another name for an institution that reinforces the nation state” (3). While few of the authors engage with transnationalism on a metatheoretical level, most regard the transnationalism in women’s writing as a positive “deterritorializing” force. For example, in Liama Durán Almarza’s essay about Josefina Báez’s performance Dominicanish, Almarza focuses on the liberatory character of the hybrid or “nomadic” identity that Báez seems to embrace in her work. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s influential The Location of Culture, Almarza writes that Báez creates “a Janus-faced ‘third space’ where traditional linguistic, ethnic, and generic boundaries are transgressed and transcended” (47). The author goes on to claim that “the transcultural body of the narrator is enacted in all her multiple embodied subjectivities” only at the “interstices” of the contacts between Dominican and US experience. Adele Parker’s essay on the Slovenian French-language author Brina Svit somewhat similarly (though less emphatically) suggests that transnationalism offers insights and reveals aspects of identity that cannot be accessed in a monolingual, national culture. Though these and a number of other contributors succeed in demonstrating that transnational encounters are symbolically rich and potentially liberating for individual subjects, the celebration of cultural hybridity does little to advance scholarly understanding of transnational literary production. Theorists like Homi K. Bhabha and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari—whose work underpins many of the arguments in this volume—made important interventions in the 1980s and 1990s when transnational experience and literature were still regarded with suspicion in hegemonic high and popular culture. Concepts such as hybridity, deterritorialization, and a “minor literature” allowed authors and critics to claim and study identities and cultural objects that were either devalued or excluded. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, many kinds of hybrid identities, as well as the capacity [End Page 321] for cultural and geographic mobility, have become highly valued in the dominant culture. Though this valorization is problematic and excludes other kinds of transnational identities, the theoretical apparatus needs to account for these historical changes. On the other hand, in this volume, essays that valorize hybrid transnational identities are placed in a productive tension with ones that portray transnational subjectivity as fraught, painful, or traumatic. Stephanie Young’s essay explores the work of Yugoslav author Dubravka Ugrešić, focusing especially on her experimental novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Young develops an interesting reading of Dubravka’s work in...

Arabic Facts Clashing Hybridities in Transnational Cultural Production

In 2012, Bethlehem’s Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Society undertook the challenge of co-producing Arthur Milner’s Facts with the New Theatre of Ottawa for a nine-city tour in the region. The successful production and warm reception to the play highlighted the potential for more Canadian playwrights, companies, and artists to engage with Palestine through cultural and theatrical exchanges. It also highlighted a series of challenging political, cultural, and philosophical differences, which emerged in production, talkbacks, and audience reception. Palestinian communities in different cities reacted in remarkably different ways to the play, which tells the story of two Israeli and Palestinian investigators as they attempt to solve a murder mystery in the West Bank. In Bethlehem, political issues of security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel dominated the discussion. In Hebron, the audience responded to the engagement with settlers and the predominant presence of the Goldstein massacre at the end of the play. The mixed Israeli-Palestinian audience in Jaffa reacted in similar ways to the Canadian audience in Ottawa, focusing on the rift between religious and secular Israel. These varied responses reflected the transnational dimension of the production: the Canadian origins of the play, its hybridity in production, its international appeal, and its relevance to Palestine. I will outline the challenges of the production through a description, analysis, and critique of the process that led to opening night in Bethlehem’s Dar Annadwa Addawliyya, and closing night at Al-Rowwad. From the checkpoint to closing night, I tell the story of a successful partnership, while revealing the inevitable clashes of values that took place in this transnational cultural production.

Što Te Nema?: Transnational Cultural Production in the Diaspora in Response to the Srebrenica Genocide

This article examines diaspora mobilization through transnational cultural production within Bosnian diaspora communities in Sweden and the United States in response to genocide. A discussion of diaspora mobilization in response to homeland politics is underlined with data from interviews and participant observation. An example of transnational cultural production through public performance art between an artist and diaspora is highlighted in particular. Its focus is Srebrenica genocide remembrance. The article argues that diaspora cultural production can be more moderate and aims to move beyond ethnonationalist public political debates evidenced in Bosnia and Herzegovina's postconflict political environment while reaffirming belonging to the diaspora in respective host countries.

Cinema at the crossroads: nation and the subject in East Asian cinema

Preface Introduction: What's in a Name? Postcolonial East Asia Chapter 1. The Other Empire: Japan and the Pornographic Imagination of East Asia Chapter 2. Can the Subaltern See? The Subaltern Vision and Looking Otherwise Chapter 3. Transnational Cultural Production and the Politics of Moribund Masculinity Chapter 4. When is it Postcolonial? Time-Space in East Asian National Cinema Epilogue

Transnational Book Markets and Literary Reception in the Americas

In her paper Transnational Book Markets and Literary Reception in the Americas, Molly Metherd argues that the most diffuse products of transnational cultural production in the come from mass media productions packaged for transnational audiences -i.e., Hollywood films, television shows, popular magazines, product advertisements -and that tend to homogenize messages, promote stereotypes, and simplify complex issues. However, another effort to make sense of shifting relationships in the is coming from a group of US-American and Spanish American literary figures. In their fiction, criticism, journalistic work, and public statements, such authors have been responding to the covalence of American cultures and interrogating mass media messages. Metherd examines the emergence of this transnational publishing industry which offers the institutional structure for authors to reach out to hemispheric audiences and its impact and relates the said situation to Chilean author Alberto Fuguet. She explores how, in order to accommodate these changing markets, Englishand Spanish-language publishers have formed strategic partnerships and introduced new imprints often releasing works simultaneously in English and Spanish and promoting authors to a larger hemispheric readership through shelf placement, advertising and book tours. Molly Metherd, Transnational Book Markets and Literary Reception in the Americas page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.3 (2008):

Transnational Cultural Production and the Politics of Moribund Masculinity

In this essay, I formulate newly revised notions of subjectivity and the body, especially in what I define as “moribund masculinity.” The term refers to masculine subjectivity that refuses to fulfill the economic and ideological demand made on the male body by global capitalism and the nation-state and remains outside the symbolic order that constructs the masculine national body. Moribund masculinity counters what I call expenditure with reserve, as a symbolic structure in which masculine death always yields social and cultural meaning. I consider death that leaves the symbolic reserve in the case of a Korean patriarch, Chŏng Chu-yŏng, whose death generates the myth of national genius. The preservation of the symbolic value that becomes possible through death as a meaning-making event is translated into the economy of the virtual that sustains the capitalist material relation through recourse to the virtual male body that avoids symbolic and material exhaustion. I find a point of resistance to this political economy of virtual masculinity in the history of Korean cinema. Specifically, I read the historical project of contemporary Korean cinema in light of the aesthetic and ideological engagement in the noneconomy of masculinity as expenditure without reserve, or a death without myth, and find its most compelling manifestation in a han-lyu star, Chang Tong-gôn.

Empire of the Chinese Sign: The Question of Chinese Diasporic Imagination in Transnational Literary Production

This paper begins with an examination of the burgeoning interest in literatures in Chinese. It argues that studies in literatures in Chinese map out a terrain where complex negotiations and interventions for different purposes are carried out. As studies in literatures in Chinese often imply a shift from the nation-state paradigm to the transnational paradigm, which implicitly celebrates diasporic imagination as a counterforce to the power of the nation-state, this paper proposes to examine the intersection of Chinese Malaysian literature and Taiwan literature at two specific moments of transnational literary production—the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and the late 1990s to the present—so as to demonstrate the unstable meanings of the diaspora sign. It highlights the importance of historicization in investigating phenomena of transnational cultural production and the need to reincorporate the notion of “place” into our agenda in conducting cultural critiques. The paper ends with a critique of the global city as a methodological concept and argues for a place paradigm without privileging the global city as a metaphor for transnational space.

Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (review)

Reviewed by: Cultural Erotics in Cuban America Lázaro Lima Ortíz, Ricardo L. Cultural Erotics in Cuban America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 337 pp. Ricardo L. Ortíz's Cultural Erotics in Cuban America seeks to expand the parameters from which to critique Cuban American cultural production beyond the limitations inherent to identitarian projects that seek legitimation through orthodoxies of state affiliation. The axis of this important study of Cuban American and Cuban transnational cultural production centers on how, for Ortíz, political resistance to compulsory forms of cubanidad can be most radically destabilized through an "erotic dynamic" that eschews normative ideations of sexuality, citizenship, as well as cultural and national affiliation. He accomplishes this by studying how the affective interplay between desire, diaspora, and the disappearance of national anchorings can allow us to imagine cubanidad outside the strictures of Cuba, the island, and Cuba as a transnational cultural imaginary against the still pervasive "specter of coherence . . . among national, cultural, and historical registers" of cubanidad (40). In keeping with this deterritorialized analysis of cubanidad, Ortíz studies cultural production from as varied a contingent of geopolitically dispersed cultural agents as Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, Rafael Campo, Albita Rodríguez, Eduardo Machado, Cristina García, and Celia Cruz, among others. Engaging these literary and cultural producers also entails revisiting their critical legacies in order to reimagine their futures, and Ortíz does so with brilliant critical dexterity. In so doing, he generously considers his critical intervention as additive, rather than corrective, to the work done by other prominent Cuban and Cuban American studies scholars in the field, yet the overarching theoretical and interpretive strengths in this work supply a corrective course for the still emerging field of Cuban American studies. Ortíz establishes the framing question for his project in the introduction when he asks, "What . . . should be the fate of Cuban-diasporic thinking and the Cuban-diasporic study it might produce . . . away from and against the originating [End Page 224] national term according to which it persists in naming itself?" (36). The book's three principal divisions go about engaging this fundamental query. The first part of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, "Bodies of, Bodies in Evidence," is comprised of three chapters in which Ortíz reads Reinaldo Arenas's work, especially the Doorman and Before Night Falls, as well as Arenas' own life, as emblematic of the fundamental tensions surrounding a highly symbolic psychoanalytic construction of Cuban political reality that could be read as "a quasioedipal struggle between the . . . hated Fidel, el hombre, él, and Cuba bella, patria, the feminine gendered fatherland to whom Cuban exiles consecrate their deepest loyalty, their most profound fidelity" (44). The purpose for Ortíz here is to interrogate how Arenas's writerly erotics, his sexual and political desires, can lead "to more direct political questions of what kind of labor (and by whom) produces politically efficacious forms of pleasure (and for whom)" (45). Central to a possible answer is the role of art in just such an enterprise where queer desire can be expressed as both a desire for a free state and as forms of affective and erotic affiliation that aren't within the state's control. Ortíz positions Arenas's work and life as a bridge between a pre-1980s Cuba rendered narratively in much of his work as political critique written in s/exile and a post-Cold War Cuban "Special Period" that saw cultural texts, such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), gesture toward less repressive forms of sexual and state subjection for consumption outside of the island, while keeping the revolutionary ideals of "el hombre nuevo" on the island distinctly heteronormative even half a century after its introduction as a progressive revolutionary imperative. The second chapter in this section takes up Cuban "prison writing"—including Arenas's and his commentators', especially Ricardo Pau-Llosa's evocation of Arenas in his poem "Conscience"—to show how this narrative investment in memorializing the state subjection of homosexuals as political dissenters effectively "queers" all political dissenters by positioning both as antirevolutionary irrespective of erotic object...

Conflation and conflict in Brazilian popular music: forty years between ‘filming’ bossa nova in Orfeu Negro and rap in Orfeu

Popular music plays important roles in two related films portraying Brazilian slum life. Based on a 1953 play by Vinícius de Morais, Marcel Camus's 1959 film Orfeu Negro, and a 1999 feature by Brazilian director Carlos Diegues titled Orfeu, augment traditional samba styles with bossa nova and rap, respectively. Interpreting musical style as allegorical texts within fictive landscapes, this paper examines conflation and conflict among musical meanings, Brazilian social histories, and discursive identities marking the twentieth century. Broad aspects of Brazilian political and socio-cultural development are implicated, such as authoritarianism, the politics and sociology of race, technological advances, mass media, and modes of modernisation. Here, bossa nova and rap engage society through reflexive and generative interpretations within a narrative designed to illustrate connections between processes of innovative, trans-national cultural production, myths of national identity, social change, and the powerful role of popular music in film.

American Poetry and Chinese Art: New Perspectives on a Cross-Cultural Relationship

It was a common belief among classical Chinese poets that poetry and painting shared the same source of creativity (shi hua tong yuan), one that enabled them to transcend the mundane and capture the sudden revelations of visionary moments in a permanent form of beauty. Thus, to paraphrase the Song poet Su Shi's famous observations on the Tang poet Wang Wei, a good poet possesses the capability of making his verse simultaneously display verbal and visual sublimity. Such a conviction, as Zhaoming Qian suggests in his new book, influenced the American poets Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, not only inspiring their creative practices but also constituting the key to an important aspect of American literary modernism that Qian calls the response to Chinese art. Qian's book is both impressively erudite and highly readable, sustained by lucid writing, insightful perceptions, and cogent arguments. By exploring a hitherto overlooked subject, his inquiry makes significant contributions to several fields, including modernist poetry, comparative literature, and transnational cultural production. More intriguingly, it also raises issues impelling us to reconceptualize the enterprise of orientalism. Qian's book is intended to appeal to several types of audience in addition to readers of modern American poetry. This intention is reflected in the thoughtful organization of 14 essays in five parts, a framework that allows him to concentrate on a set of primary issues from coherent perspectives, both critical and chronological, rather than on individual poets. For instance, students of Chinese art and art history would find part 1 particularly informative. In addition to shedding fresh light on the three

Media Capital

Prior studies that emphasize a one-way flow of US programming to the periphery of the world system are now being reassessed in light of the increasing volume and velocity of multi-directional media flows that emanate from particular cities, such as Bombay, Cairo, and Hong Kong. These emerging centers of transnational cultural production suggest a need to supplement the current scholarly emphasis on national media systems with a more intensive examination of media capitals. Examining the histories of Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Chicago television, this essay illustrates how scholars might use media capital as a concept that would foster empirically grounded analysis of the temporal dynamism and spatial complexity of the global media environment.

Mobile Citizens, Media States: A Panel at the 2000 MLA Convention

The idea for this panel grewout of discussions among Anton Kaes, David Rodowick, and me during our stint as members of thePMLAEditorial Board in 1998–99. We were interested in developing a theme that would build on some of the issues raised in a priorPMLAspecial topic devoted to globalizing literary studies but that would concentrate more pointedly on the politics of transnational cultural production and the effect of global media on literature, art, and cinema. Working with the assumption that categories of citizenship and local forms of identity have become increasingly mobile, nomadic, and hybrid and drawing on theories of transnational citizenship in philosophy and social theory, we identified a number of interrelated subjects as our focus: the internationalization of aesthetics in a global culture industry; the influence of globally exported mass culture on nation-states worldwide; the consequences of the emergence of “cybernations”— virtual communities defined by electronic and Internet culture; the question of whether the dynamic push for economic and cultural internationalism will produce a return to political nativism and a renewed insistence on cultural difference; the politics of translation, not only across borders but in aesthetic exchanges between literature and cinematic and televisual forms; the shifting tensions between monolingualism and nonstandard language as new, displaced minority cultures emerge as consumers of transnational media and makers of alternative literatures and media; and the relevance of analogies between the borderless cartographies of the new Europe and medieval Christendom to discussions of global cultural production.

BABYLON'S 'NATURAL MYSTIC': THE NORTH AMERICAN MUSIC INDUSTRY, THE LEGEND OF BOB MARLEY, AND THE INCORPORATION OF TRANSNATIONALISM

Bob Marley's significance as a popular cultural icon, both during his initial emergence in North America in the 1970s and after his death in 1981, has been a constantly evolving phenomenon. As American society and culture has adapted to the presence of new, racialized, West Indian immigrants, so too has Marley's legend been adapted to fit the changing moods of the past three decades. This article identifies and examines three aspects of Marley's changing image in the United States. From the Rastafarian outlaw of the 1970s through the natural family man of the 1980s to the natural mystic in the 1990s, Marley has represented ideologies of national liberation and black power, multiculturalism, universal pluralism and, most recently, transnationalism. In this article, I show how the construction of Marley as the ‘natural mystic’ reflects the growth of the multinational corporation and mass media industries in this era of postmodernism and late capitalism. The resources and networks available to American record labels have been central to the wide-scale promotion of Marley‘s message across the world. However, in addition, Marley’s life and work also profoundly benefited from a rich, century-long tradition of black internationalist movements and ideologies, which I term ‘black transnationalism’. This black transnational legacy tells a larger story, one which contests the more mainstream versions of Marley which have made him more palatable to a white liberal audience in America. He therefore stands as an interesting case study ofthe impact of black transnational cultural production on American popular culture.

Bigas Luna's Huevos de oro : Regional Art, Global Commerce

Bigas Lunas Huevos de oro: Regional Art, Global Commerce Marvin A. D'Lugo Clark University Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art— Andy Warhol1 Huevos de oro (1993), Bigas Luna's ninth feature-length film, is as much an effort to capitalize on the huge commeicial success of his previous Jamón Jamón (1992), as to expand his sciutiny of a series of subjects and characters introduced in that film. Huevos fixes on rwo interconnected themes: the transformation of national cultural identity that has accompanied Spain's aggressive entrance into European and global markets in recent decades, and the particular image of the Iberian macho as a symptomatic reflection of the shifting parameters between local and global cultures. Like Jamón, Huevos is a self-referential film, affirming and yet interrogating its own condition as the product of transnational cultural production, principally through an intense focus on a specific male stereotype, the chorizo or small-time punk. Through this formula, Bigas once again restages within his film the double imperative of his work in general: to address film audiences outside of Spain by "folklorizing" certain cliches and stereotypes of Spanish culture and to engage national audiences in the self-reflection of their own status. What makes Huevos distinctive, and not merely the clever exploitation of an earlier commercial success, is the way Bigas constructs a highly Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 64 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies original reciprocal narrative. Contemporary Spanish identity politics is made to illuminate the symptomatic condition of individuals formed in the shadow of globalization. Bigas's own condition as film auteur becomes self-consciously implicated in this ironic structure as the figure of the individual, understood as a manifestation of the authorial, poses questions about national culture. Through this narrative mirroring, Huevos plays allegories of authorship and of national identity against one other. This textual dualism that blends individual and collective narratives into a single ironic text reflects Bigas's own self-definition as a liminal figure: a Catalan filmmaker whose career has insistently challenged the assumption of a Castilian-based national cinema by playing the margins of Spanish culture against the center; a self-styled auteur who has consciously positioned himself both within and against the territorial ideology of Castilianized Spain, as he did in Jamón, reaffirming the vitality of the very cliches of Spanishness he otherwise rejects. Bigas's approach to filmmaking may be productively viewed as a variation of what Hamid Naficy has called transnational auteurism (Naficy 123), with his work embodying a dialectical vision within and beyond national spaces, similar to that of filmmakeis such as Raúl Ruiz (Chile) or Fernando Solanas (Argentina). Those directors, however, shaped their transnational aesthetic through difficult periods of political exile, while Bigas derived his sense of identity as a transnational filmmaker from his own precocious awareness of the commercial and artistic limits of both Catalan and Spanish cinemas. His career began in the immediate aftermath of the Franco dictatorship, when, in films such as Bilbao (1978) and Caniche (1979) he was drawn toward sensationalist themes intended to shock audiences while establishing his own identity as a film auteur. In such films, Bigas clearly repudiated the parochialism of Francoist cultural mores and fiercely affirmed the consumerist culture that was taking shape during the early years of transition. Like Andy Warhol, whose career as a graphic artist turned filmmaker suggests certain illuminating parallels with his own, Bigas fashioned himself an entrepreneurial auteur. Promoting himself became a way of promoting his films and vice versa, thereby blurring the distinction between filmic art, celebrity, and commerce. By cultivating his own celebrity persona through a combination of highlighted personal idiosyncracies (always appearing in public dressed in black, for instance) and the seemingly scandalous nature of some of his films, he self-consciously sought to construct the perception of himself and his cinema as continuing the line of Spain's best known international filmmaker of resistance to dominant Spanish culture, Luis Buñuel.2 Marvin A. D'Lugo 65 Almost from the start of his filmmaking career, the same entrepreneurial logic that guided Bigas's self-packaging began to...