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Review of Communicating the Nation

Review by
Radhika Gajjala

Communicating the Nation: National Topographies of Global Media Landscapes, by Anna Roosvall, Inka Salovaara-Moring. Nordicon: Gothenburg, 2010. ISBN 978-9189471962. 256 pp.

Review of Communicating the Nation

This is a book I would recommend for anyone struggling to negotiate how the nation is simultaneously (under)theorized and made abstract, and even made virtual, through some existing media studies writing. Much of currently existing media studies scholarship that takes into account nationalism and the media does not adequately handle the balance between critical theorizing and empirical mapping of nationalism as it plays out in mediated contexts. Work that critiques the politics of globalization while mapping the empirical and daily practices of nation-writing and nation-building through mediated environments exists but it still does not address the shift in how the “imagining” of nation is happening in present day mediated environments and what sorts of relationships are forming around producers and consumers of media texts within a global/local continuum (not binary). We must resist the urge to make these movements into static placements by naming them through distant and abstract, yet academically pinpoint and name through coining terms such as “glocal” or “hybrid” as universalizable concepts. We need to push against the boundaries of these understandings to see what these categories old and emerging are getting configured into. What shifts of power are enabled and what hierarchies are insidiously reinstated – colonial and national?

The editors frame the book through a much needed call to balance the theoretical articulations with a clear examination of empirical contexts to note how the nation in each specific instance. I commend the editors for attempting this. They foreground the “simultaneous paradox” in media studies writings about nation and globalization where, on the one hand nation is under-theorized as claims of “post-national” and “global” are taken to mean the nation need not be accounted for, and on the other hand the term nation is “over-used often as an un-motivated and un-problematised unit of analyses; serving as an explanation of difference”. The question, of course, is whether the essays contained in the collection live up to this promise for such a balancing.

The essays are indeed incredibly interesting and contain contemporary investigations of the relationship between the global, the inter-national and the nation-state. They definitely do engage the problematic – this is done in each essay through the specific intersection and context being elaborated on in relation to the tension between nation and globalization in a context of transnational capital ebbs and flows. Issues of nation as branding, issues of interwoven national and inter-national politics in the formation of the global and the politics of nation in various mediated contexts are taken up. A couple of the essays even touch on the empirical realities of nation-building in digital space such as video games, computer games and internet activity such as that visible in Russian livejournal communities, even though they do not take the opportunity to push the empirical envelope in quite the way promised and hoped for in the introductory framing of the collection. Further, while changes in immigration policies, politics and economics are engaged the impact of actual policies and how mediated environments shape and contribute to them through intervening in the ways that labor and capital flow transnationally is another topic that seems to lead out of the discussions in this volume and will hopefully be taken up in other such a volume. Hierarchies produced through the interweaving of developing world nation-state complicity in relation to dominant first world “globalizing” policies where nation-states adjust their national education, labor and trade policies to meet the demands of a global economy that privileges particular kinds of transnational business become important sites for examination as we move towards a balancing of the theoretical and empirical within internet-mediated commercial space, for instance. This encourages the self-branding of nation-states and they attempt to fill niche needs within this global economic framework shaped by multinational business needs. Racial and gendered hierarchies are also reproduced and produced in sync with policies of the more economically powerful and dominant nations of the world. Some of this is hinted at in the various essays in this volume and there is opportunity for other scholars to take up where they left off.

All in all, this book provides a possible rupture in the ways that the issue of nation and imagination of nation has been taken up in media studies in the recent past. Thus the media studies scholar who is juggling theoretical abstractions and empirical observations and trying to puzzle through and map out the relationship between nation, inter-nation, globalization and transnational labor and capital flows can use the writing in this book to help her work through her own dilemmas and contradictions.

What does it mean anymore in the digital era, where, apparently, we live in a post-national era of scattered networks, connecting through mediated nodes? While this question is not fully central to this collection – it is implied in several of the essays. The concept of nation is not dead or useless – rather it is renewed, renegotiated and redeployed in the service of economic globalization. Some essays address this more directly – others imply it through the arguments they make. The essays in this collection centrally raise the issue of the role of nation and nationalism in relation to global mediated environments. In fact, the editors see the nation as “a nodal point of media discourse; an ‘empty’ but privileged centre around which discourse is organized” (p.9). In a neoliberal framing of global commerce and cultural exchange, how might this play out? They argue that we need to revisit the role of the nation in media environments in the global era because the nation has been under-theorized as a social category in media studies while at the same time the nation has been a central organizing principle in empirical studies and un-problematized as a unit of analyses. Further, the editors make the argument for a re-theorizing of nation and media in relation to globalization because in present times through a re-organization of space and time “all spheres of human activities create their own geographies.” Thus it is important to “(re-)politicize the role of nation in media studies, while explicating it theoretically as well as empirically” (pg.10). Several of the chapters move beyond the notion of “imagined community” and actually address implicitly the fact that one cannot simply transpose that notion onto communities and national-identity in new media time. I was happy to note that all the essays in the volume did not stop at quoting Anderson’s imagined community as the framework through which to examine the idea of nation in mediated space. What these essays signal towards is the shifting but very much present Nation-state’s role in/and globalization. As Anu Kantola points out in her chapter in this book, “[s]omewhat paradoxically, nationalism has become perhaps the most international of all political ideas” therefore it is essential that we examine the “flexibility of nationalism and contemporary economic globalization.”

Some themes raised overall and those that I find most interesting, are those of representation/communication, nation as local vs global, individual/community, old and new community formations, identity and appearance, economic practices and identity, marketing and nation as brand, old and new audiences where the idea of interactivity is not just located as an internet phenomena but as part of an ethos of producing the individual governed through neoliberal frameworks. The chapters are organized in three sections - the making of nations; nations and empires revisited and national selves and others.

In the first section, “the making of nations” there are four essays. Essays in this section do the important work of laying the methodological groundwork that centers inter-nationalism and comparative media research in the context of “flow studies.” The nation itself is viewed as a media “Event” in one of the essays in this section and shows how the media produce “nation” in an global space. This section also contains at discussion that notes explicitly how global market needs shape how nation is “sold” in global space – nation itself is now a brand. The second section of the book takes us into an examination of how mediated nationalisms either form or are shaped by neo-imperialist politics. The essays in the third section of the book further tackle the binaries that emerge through the grid of self and other in present day mediated articulations of the nation in relation to globalization. The themes coming from the chapters in this section include an examination of how national history is produced both in opposition to and in conjunction with the global in the “Global TV Era” and the very important examination of the relationship between economic globalization and nationalism by noting the flexibility of nationalism when faced with economic globalization. The main goal of the editors of this volume was to re-politicize the role of the nation in media studies. Their goal was achieved, in my view.