Page 143 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 134
resistance against reading and literature within the community) only because it enables an
evocative mode of interpretation which is congruous with the Warlpiri graphic system,
the way writing does not (and which might thus be much more destructive to Aboriginal
culture, as Michaels more or less suggests). In this sense, what might be called
‘Aboriginal modernity’ is an extremely precarious and fragile, perhaps transitory cultural
formation.
Cut now to Trinidad, a place which is peripheral in the global scenario in a very
different way than Aboriginal Australia. It is an independent nation-state with its own,
formally ‘sovereign’ cultural apparatus and national media industry, but contrary to, for
example, Hong Kong or India or even Nigeria, Trinidad cannot be, and will arguably
never be, the primary producer of the images and goods from which it constructs its own
cultural modernity (Miller 1992). As such small postcolonial nations will generally
depend heavily on Western products, it is, again, the transformative properties of local
consumption which are crucial for an appreciation of their cultural distinctiveness.
When British anthropologist Daniel Miller went to Trinidad to document
contemporary life on this South Caribbean island, he was soon confronted with the
centrality of the American soap opera The Young and the Restless in the population’s
everyday cultural experience. Why? Miller interprets this popularity by associating it
with the uniquely Trinidadian concept of bacchanal. If one asks Trinidadians to describe
their country in one word, by far the commonest response is ‘bacchanal’, ‘said with a
smile which seemed to indicate affectionate pride triumphing over potential shame’
(Miller 1992:176). Bacchanal designates a way of experiencing the everyday world in
terms of gossip, scandal, exposure, confusion and disorder, representing a local sense of
truth for many Trinidadians, who are acutely aware of the fluidity and dynamism of their
national reality precisely because of its location on the periphery, subject to
uncontrollable external forces, past and present. The Young and Restless, says Miller,
could become central to the Trinidadian imaginary because it ‘reinforces bacchanal as the
lesson of recession which insists that […] the façade of stability is a flimsy construction
which will be blown over in the first storm created by true nature’ (ibid.: 179) The fact
that it is an imported product of mass-mediated culture that could acquire this centrality,
muses Miller, stems precisely from the fact that local TV productions cannot incorporate
clear expressions of bacchanal, concerned as they are with the ‘serious’, official concerns
of the nation-state. Instead, what the popular consumption of The Young and the Restless
in Trinidad accomplishes is not only the indigenization of the soap opera as Trinidadian,
but also ‘the refinement of the concept of Trinidad as the culture of bacchanal’ (ibid.).
Miller provides a useful historical context for this apparently paradoxical state of affairs:

It is hard to talk of a loss of tradition here, since Trinidad was born into
modernity in its first breath, a slave colony constructed as producer of raw
materials for the industrialising world. The result is an extremely fluid
society which makes itself up as it goes along.
(Miller 1992:179)

The fact that, in the late 1980s, an American soap opera became a key instrument for
forging a highly specific sense of Trinidadian culture reveals the way in which the local
can construct its syncretic, postmodern brand of cultural identity through consumption of