Deconstructing the Frontiers: New Trajectories in International Communication Theory and Research

Review by

New Frontiers in International Communication Theory. Mehdi Semati (ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: New York, 2004. 306 pp. $32.95 paper. (ISBN 0-7425-3019-1)

International communication as a field of study has been teeming with inundating diversity and blending boundaries at various disjunctures in a manner that genuinely parallels the study of communication as a whole. In a gesture that was meant to poke some fun, but nevertheless was disconcertingly serious, Stevenson (1992) suggested that, as a field, international communication is too elusive to be defined by “substance” or “research method.” Only geography succeeds in positing a unifying field umbrella to a range of studies concerned with communication issues outside the United States. With the foundational international communication text, Four Theories of the Press, that international bent and particular geography bound delimitation of the field was definitively pronounced and thus utterly irrevocable. These problematics might not pose any novel challenges because the whole field has been plagued with these arguments about “boundaries,” demarcations and disciplinary puritanism.

Even though its stated objective is to transcend the traditional identity crisis and intellectual exercises prominent within international communication, Mehdi Semati’s edited volume, New Frontiers in International Communication Theory, remains deeply enmeshed in those broiling arguments and debates. The mission of this intellectual enterprise is, in Semati’s words, “first, to refigure the problematics that configure the field of international communication studies and, second, to move conceptually beyond the limits of extant formulations, approaches, and trajectories—to chart new frontiers of inquiry”(p. 1). This mission is the thread fastening a collection of articles all aiming at “rethinking” international communication as “a discrete field of study” with the goal of “organizing inquiry” (p. 1). Semati’s introduction revisits the genealogy of international communication and sums up the political forces and influences that shaped the field’s institutionalization. The field has spanned widely from the early propaganda studies, through communication as development and modernization prompter, to the contributions of critical and cultural studies theorists and their responses (dependency theory and audience’s roles, respectively).

Such historical and theoretical grounding allows Semati to seamlessly organize the book in four parts that map previous research areas, and then introduce new frontiers in studies of international communication. Part I of the volume, “Rethinking Problematics in International Communication,” is a revisitation of the foundational moments of the field as well as a renewed look at the development and modernization paradigms that have branded and dominated the study of international communication. In Part II, “The Global Vectors of Communication,” different chapters chart and delineate unique perspectives on global media and transnational events as well as ponder the role of the international communication scholar. While part III, “Models and Tools for Inquiry in International Communication,” engages new modes and methodologies of international communication research, Part IV, “On the Political- Theoretical Horizons of International Communication,” reestablishes the book’s engagement with new frontiers of research in examining the paramount issues of culture and hybridity as well as the problematics of political Islam and Eurocentrism. The diversity and richness of the material warrant further exposition from this review.

John Nerone’s interesting chapter on the Four Theories of the Press includes well thought out, albeit somewhat unconventional reflections on the academic and intellectual life span of this comparative international media systems model. The chapter explores the undeniable appeal of this outdated model, predictably relating its “accidental” rise to geopolitical considerations of the Cold War environment (a familiar argument by now). The most important portion of the chapter, I would argue, is the reflective thoughts on the Four Theories as “an index of the relationship between communication education, media scholarship, and political affairs” (p. 21). Nerone adulates the book as an elegant teaching tool, possessed of a clarity and sweep that “provide both a globally convincing framework for understanding historical developments and a compelling set of normative principles” (p. 27). For Nerone, the book’s “philosophical failure supports its ideological success” (p. 30) thereby redeeming the whole enterprise as one grounded in the practices of its authors. Nerone’s reappraisal of this foundational text, I would think, risks falling into the tricky discourse of apologia for the book’s cultural myopia and insensitivities.

The other chapters of the first part include one by Sujatha Sosale on the discourse of development communication from an alternative perspective that marries critical cultural studies to poststructuralism. The “modernization paradigm” that Sosale interrogates as a “master signifier” continues to be germane to a discourse that “interpellates peoples, determines national agendas, and defines social change” (p. 49). Such interpellation also occurs in Amin Alhassan’s chapter on international communication and its linkages with the postcolonial nation-state. Alhassan’s focus on this “blind spot” of international and development communication problematizes the roles of the (postcolonial) nation state as an actor in the international flow of media and culture instead of reproducing the old discourse of victimization or collaboration. The concluding chapter in this “rethinking” section of the book, by John Nguyet Erni, seeks to reconsider health communication in the international arena by reconceptualizing the flow of health-related information technology. Erni does indeed construct a fresh look at the global stakes and dimensions involved in the international health debates and his critical humanist perspective is especially illuminating.

The second part of the book provides a poststructuralist perspective on global media circuits as well as engages in new modes of writing up related research. These fresh perspectives engross the field in its globalized moment of visually condensing both time and space. The effective metaphorical use of “vector” serves the function of commenting on the circuitry of global communication and the flow of images in global media. François Debrix opens this section with a chapter on what he labels “the terror of the image,” observing how ghastly images of human and natural(ized) disasters have been commodified in the age of CNN and the ensuing desensitization ceases only when the images are closer to home (e.g. the hijacking and subsequent crashing of two commercial airliners in the World Trade Center towers). The most important contribution of this chapter is its interrogation of the “global mediatrix” and how images could serve to destabilize it and induce the human subject into a reflective mode. The postmodernist streak of the article does a fascinating connection of the field of international relations with that of international communication, and thus provokes more thought on how to sophisticate these linkages.

The remainder of this part engages in similar poststructuralist and postmodernist pursuits of examining other frontiers of international communication. McKenzie Wark reflexively writes on “the weird global media event” and the role of “the tactical intellectual.” Wark views media technology as a “vector,” to describe the incomprehensible, intriguing and unfixed connections global media induce, that ultimately opens up new horizons for the “tactical intellectual”(the challenger to media monopoly and undemocratic institutionalization). In a somewhat similar effort, John Downing examines Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, media and war only to conclude that anti-war alternative media voices represent “a serious attempt to enable horizontal linkages and to amplify the voices of those whose vision transcends the savagely armed kindergarten politics of war” (p. 137). The chapter remains an engaging critique of the preexisting conceptualization of communication and war. Downing’s serious proposals on the utility of digital and technological innovations to promote peace and justice catapult glimmers of hope into the arms of the international communication scholar.

The frontiers of international communications that the book navigates reach into the modes of inquiry and methodological concerns in conducting research within this academic field (Part III). Clifford Jones’s case study of the legal and cultural implications of “transfrontier media” in the European Union (Ch. 8) provides interesting insights into transnational media’s role in forging cultural identity and the difficulties besetting the process. The media’s consolidation and the ensuing sociopolitical and cultural practices are difficult to isolate. That is why I think Rick Rockwell’s chapter, dealing with the issue of corruption in the media landscape of Central America, is strategically situated in the book. The chapter illuminates the tensions beleaguering media practitioners and journalists in their efforts to fight the widespread corruption in their ranks. Focus on corruption, as an inhibiting factor in the promotion of more democratic, transparent and open professional practices, is another model of inquiry that the chapter sheds light on. The last chapter in this part of the book reflects on ethnography as a methodological enterprise to be carried out in international communication. Michael Evans revisits existing approaches to ethnographic research, raising the usual questions of Self versus Other and re-emphasizing the importance of context in the whole enterprise. For Evans, ethnography offers the “international communication scholar an opportunity to understand the underlying, situated nature of communication more thoroughly” (p. 222). Despite its insights, I believe the chapter has not fully resolved the identity crisis of ethnographic research.

The final part (Part IV) of New Frontiers is devoted to charting and approaching new trajectories and concerns in international communication, and even “transgressing” its political-theoretical borderlines and frontiers. In the opening chapter of this section of the book, Heidi Brush tackles the intricacies of the web and the issues of security and governance. The porous nature of the “networked society” invites new attempts to “reterritorialize transnational flows into a regulatable grid for defense” (p. 232) in contradistinction to what Brush terms “counter-Net” that seeks to elude state control and capture. The chapter problematizes the cyber frontier breaking down the hierarchies of security and defense discourses and the regulatory impossibilities enveloping the transnational flows of information. Marwan Kraidy’s chapter on hybridity in international communication renews the field’s incessant engagement with the implacable cultural realm. This frontier of international communication has always been subject to a lot of contestation and argumentation but Kraidy cogently employs hybridity, a no lesser contested concept, to make the claim that it is high time scholars of international communication embraced the continuities in the fundamental concepts of the local and the global, the economic and the cultural and discard the crude binary polarities of yore. Hybridization in culture, as Kraidy illustrates, does not equal an end to cultural domination and the initiation of balanced cultural relations and international communication research would benefit from breaking artificial polarities.

The final section of the book also introduces two more “frontiers” of international communication research, namely that of science, the transnational debates on genomes and eugenics, and religion (political Islam). Marouf Hasian asserts that despite claims to the contrary, eugenics (the study and improvement of a race and its hereditary traits) as a bio-political discourse is still alive and popular in the mass media. Hasian’s chapter explores the basic arguments from the Chinese experience and the reactions of the international press. The chapter unleashes a new vista of inspecting eugenics and genome debates and discourses of this new century in relation to the media’s role. The call for scholars to be critical and self reflective so as not to allow the re-visitations of past abuses is indeed well framed. The book concludes with S. Sayyid’s chapter on Islamism (in relation to Eurocentrism) whose evident relevance to the fraught atmosphere of the so-called “war on terror” makes it more than a timely engagement and frontier of the field. Political Islam or Islamism, as Sayyid argues in the chapter, is more of an expression of a not very nascent “Muslim subjectivity.” The chapter is designed to contribute, Mehdi Semati explains, to “an Islamic perspective” in international communication with the goal of sharpening the field’s engagement with “cultural and civilizational conflicts” (p. 230), and it is a brilliant formulation in that direction.

My synoptic exposition of Semati’s volume might not have done justice to all contributions but I hope to have adequately sketched the new frontiers of international communication that the book sought to chart. The contributions have mapped new territories as the mission statement of the book suggests. These (new) frontiers remain however a little short of pronouncing a substantial vision for the future directions of the field. In my opinion, these frontiers, as the editor admits in the introduction, will always invite “transgressions” for that is the essence of the field. Transgressions are still desirable forays that unlatch wider theoretical scapes for the scrutiny of issues constituent of what we recognize as international communication. One instance of this is the book’s inclusion of poststructuralist and postmodernist analyses that deconstruct the notion of borders and frontiers more than establish new ones. Writing as research is itself an object of critical and creative engagements that I have enjoyed in quite a few chapters. The book also succeeds in capturing and drawing readers’ attention to the ascent of (pseudo) scientific, fundamentalist and xenophobic discourses in cross border mediated messages.

One last point I wish to make concerns the precept of “rethinking” the field of international communication. I think this volume has just scratched the surface of that tremendous enterprise. And that is still commendable for the volume has rightly embraced a reflexive interdisciplinarity while undercutting the seeping insularity that potentially plagues the study of communication.

References

Stevenson, Robert L., "Defining International Communication as a Field", Journalism Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3 (Fall 1992), pp. 543-553.

Return to Book Review List | Return to Top of Review