It is fair to say that, in general, the impact of globalization in the cultural sphere has been viewed pessimistically. In general, it has been associated with the destruction of cultural identities, victims of the accelerated invasion of a homogenized and westernized consumer culture. This view, whose constituency ranges from (some) academics to anti-globalization activists (Shepard and Hayduk 2002), tends to interpret globalization as a continuing extension of Western cultural imperialism, indeed, as a euphemism. In the discussion that follows I want to approach this claim with a great deal of skepticism.
Postmodern culture, the politics of poststructuralism, and the influence of globalization on identity are topics that have received much critical attention and have given rise to complex debates. Whether in the field of cultural and media studies, (post)colonial discourse analysis, or aesthetics, these discussions are often perceived as extremely complicated, confusing, or removed from everyday reality. The topic of postmodernity is no longer restricted to the enlightened debates of the intellectual elites: its appearance in the discussions of the media on topics as diverse as architecture, theater, fashion, literature, music or cinema It has become almost a daily occurrence. The importance of debates about the cultural impact of television is evident in light of the fact that television is “an asset open to virtually everyone in modern industrialized societies, and one that is increasing in visibility across the globe” (Barker, The Cultural impact of television, 3).
Cultural Studies in a Global Context fosters interdisciplinary research and teaching among scholars in the social sciences and humanities, focusing on the complexities of increasing globalization and intercultural contact. These changes have stimulated formal and informal dialogues and collaborations among faculty, graduate students, departmental faculty, and programs. Recently his works have focused on environmental issues in postcolonial contexts; empire, masculinity and gender; ethnic and religious violence; migration and diasporas as they occur today in the face of accelerating globalization and from a historical perspective; theories of cultural hybridity and interculturality in the context of asymmetric power relations; and geopolitical and other borders where differences of all kinds cause peoples to clash and intermingle.
Two powerful scenarios dominate the public discourse on the cultural consequences of globalization. The only very common scenario depicts globalization as cultural homogenization (eg Benjamin Barbers McWorld vs. Jihad). In this scenario, the world’s culturally distinct societies are being invaded by globally available goods, media, ideas, and institutions. In a world where people from Vienna to Sydney eat Big Macs, wear Benetton clothes, watch MTV or CNN, talk about human rights and work on their IBM computers, cultural traits are at risk. Since these goods and ideas are mostly of Western origin, globalization is perceived as Westernization in disguise. The other scenario is that of cultural fragmentation and intercultural conflict (Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and more recently “confirmed” by ethnocide in Yugoslavia).
But can we really reduce the processes of cultural globalization (that is, the process of world interconnections) to these two stereotypes? What about the meaning that local people attach to globally distributed goods and ideas? Why do people drink Coca Cola and what sense do they make of the soap operas they watch? Do they really change their centuries-old life worlds for the types of Madonna and Bill Gates? And how does the scenario of homogenization fit in with its rival, the impending cultural fragmentation? (Joana Breidenbach and Ina Zukrigl).
Global and local analysis is inseparable. Global forces enter local situations and global relationships are articulated through local events, identities and cultures; includes studies of a wide range of cultural forms including sports, poetry, pedagogy, ecology, dance, cities. The new global and translocal cultures and identities created by the diasporic processes of colonialism and decolonization. Cultural studies considers a variety of local, national, and transnational contexts with special attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as categories that force us to rethink globalization itself.
It is very important how local and private discourses are being transformed by the new discourses of globalization and transnationalism, used both by government and business as well as in critical academic discourse. Unlike other studies that have focused on the politics and economics of globalization, cultural studies today, by articulating the global and the local, highlights the importance of culture and provides models for cultural studies that address globalization and the dialectic of local and global forces.
Globalization leads to a new cultural diversity. Culture is one of the most prominent global concepts and is appropriated in many different ways. Since its origins, cultural studies have defined its interdisciplinary impulse as a necessity derived from the nature of its object of study. Stuart Hall locates the origin of cultural studies in the refusal to allow “culture” to be distinguished from the social and historical totality of human practices, as exemplified by the refusal of cultural studies to recognize the autonomy of high art from popular or mass culture. or the autonomy of cultural artifacts from the practices of reception and consumption in everyday life. Thus, globality leads to the emergence of new cultural forms, a process that signals that everywhere cultural tradition mixes and creates new practices and worldviews.
One of the key questions in globalized cultural studies is whether we have now entered a new moment in the institutionalization of cultural studies and interdisciplinary work in general. Cultural studies also has a long history of skepticism and self-criticism directed at its own institutionalization. Typically, the way in which cultural studies seeks to make its methodologies reflect the “totalizing” nature of its subject matter is cited as a defense against reductionist institutional coding along disciplinary lines, which it is feared will not only reduce cultural studies to formula, but it will also remove the interdisciplinary forms of dialogue, collaboration, and critique of disciplinary boundaries that have informed the history of this movement. The logic of epistemological mobility and border crossing that cultural studies shares with its definition of culture is supposed to provide an inherent resistance to disciplinary training, the traditional mode of academic legitimation. The interdisciplinary logic of cultural studies makes possible an alternative mode of institutionalization, so Stuart Hall distinguishes “institutionalization” as a positive process from the dangers of “codification.” On one level, what institutionalizes a cultural studies program is its own skepticism toward institutionalization as a discipline.