Page 78 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Bollywood and the Ind an D aspora |

by communications technologies, not only highlights how social relations have
changed but also raises an important question: how do migrants reconstruct a
sense of belonging in new places, far removed from their homeland? Often, the
most available resources are media products, but does a notion of citizenship
that is based on consumption serve only the interests of the cultural industries?
What do migrants stand to gain or lose in defining citizenship through media
consumption?
While globalization is observable at many levels, and indeed, pervades many
aspects of daily life, defining what the term means has remained difficult partly
because it involves many different dimensions. However, it is possible to high-
light two interrelated features of globalization for they are central to understand-
ing how relationships among culture, place, and identity have changed over the
past two decades. These are migration, and technologies of communication.
Rapid mobility of people across local and national borders, and new tech-
nological developments that ensure the flow of information and images across
these borders, have transformed social relations. There is nothing “local” about
where we live now, for every realm of our lives—work, finance, entertainment,
health, and so on—is now connected to other places and people around the
world. Easier and cheaper access to telephones, cable and satellite television,
and the Internet have opened up newer routes for us to visit faraway locations
and “go places,” all from the comfort and familiarity of our homes and local
settings.
Our experience of the world has also been changed by another kind of flow
that lies at the heart of globalization—migration. How do migrants craft a sense
of community and cultural identity? What cultural resources are available and
how are these resources mobilized towards fashioning a sense of cultural iden-
tity that avoids the two extremes of cultural ghettoism and complete assimila-
tion into the host society?

mEDia anD DiasPoriC iDEnTiTy
If understood as a problem of reconstructing a sense of “home” away from
“home,” we can recognize the important role that imagination plays in every-
day life in migrant settings. Driven in part by memory and nostalgia, diasporic
communities are involved in a constant dialogue between their past and a new
present, with the homeland embodying tradition and authenticity. In this set-
ting, music, films, and television shows from “home” have not just enabled large
numbers of people to maintain relations across great distances, strengthening
transnational kinship, religious, economic, and political ties. Transnational
media function as repositories for content and images that help reimagine culture
that was formerly tied to a specific locality. In other words, media are not mere
artifacts evocative of a “home” left behind—in shaping how the “home” is re-
membered, they reconfigure memory and nostalgia in important ways. With
few other cultural institutions in place for immigrants to tap into, media have
assumed a central role in diasporic communities’ maintaining and reinventing
sociocultural linkages and identities.