Page 185 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

164 Critical investigations in political economy

domination: the third main challenge concerned the notion of imposition of culture,
usually conceived as Americanisation or Westernisation. By contrast, it was
argued that cultural imports, whether products or ideas, are indigenised, hybri-
dised and appropriated in various ways that transform their meaning (Tomlinson
1991). Where cultural imperialism had feared growing cultural homogenisation,
it was now argued that more complex processes of differentiation were taking
place. Insofar as there was a predominant flow of ‘cultural discourse’ from the
West (or North) this should not be regarded as a form of domination but as a
multiply directed transition to global modernities.
According to cultural globalisation theories, the global and transnational is
eroding the national. Above all, this constitutes a shift from the dominance of
national media, such as national broadcasting, to a new media order whereby
‘[a]udiovisual geographies are thus becoming detached from the symbolic spaces
of national culture, and realigned on the basis of the more “universal” principles
of international consumer culture’ (Morley and Robins 1995: 11). For García
Canclini (1995), migration and modernity have broadened cultural territory
beyond the traditional nation-state. According to Thompson (1995: 175), ‘As
symbolic materials circulate on an ever-greater scale, locales become sites where,
to an ever-increasing extent, globalized media products are received, interpreted
and incorporated into the daily lives of individuals’.

Beyond cultural imperialism and cultural globalisation
Globalisation theory challenged and helped to discredit the cultural imperialism
thesis. In place of what were regarded as crude domination theories, cultural
globalisation emphasised popular agency, yet downplayed the problems of
power, inequality and imposition that gave rise to the original CI thesis. There
are ongoing efforts to move beyond the limitations of both paradigms and to
integrate cultural theory into critical media scholarship more effectively. We will
examine these perspectives below but first it is helpful to identify some key
responses from critical political economy and key areas of divisions.

Imbalances in cultural flows

That cultural flows are diverse and multidirectional is uncontested; what is
challenged is the claim that significant imbalances no longer remain as problems
to tackle. While US cultural hegemony is declining, the US remains the world’s
leading exporter of audiovisual content. There was a fivefold increase in US film
and TV exports between 1992 and 2004, largely serving the massive expansion
of private TV channels worldwide. There are contra-flows, ‘subaltern’ flows such
as films from the global South and East. There is increasing global circulation of
products from a much wider range of creative hubs such as Mumbai challenging
US cultural hegemony, yet no cultural exports match the global reach and
influence of US-led Western media, which represent the dominant media flows.