Media globalization and post-colonialism: Patterns of power.

Review by Lee Artz, Purdue University Calumet

International Media Studies (2007). Divya C. McMillin. Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell. ISBN 1-4051-1810-5 (paper). $24.95

Divya McMillin makes a vital contribution to media studies by providing a post-colonial guide to the history and development of international media studies. Her post-colonial sensibility reveals insights not available to the self-definitions of other perspectives. One strength here is the brief, but nuanced survey of the historical trajectories of modernization, dependency, world systems, and cultural imperialism theories. Following an overview of these traditions, McMillin uses specific examples of media consumption to reveal the new practices and processes of transnational media operations, which continue hierarchies of power. She challenges claims that the marketplace brings democratic freedom to emerging societies while identifying possible sites for resistance to corporate media globalization. The weakness (as in most post-colonial theory) is the conflating of class to one of many subaltern, understood as "a synonym for any marginalized or disempowered minority group, particularly on the grounds of gender or ethnicity" (p. 60, citing Young, 2001, p. 354). Thus, although power is repeatedly problematized, it is never fully dissected in its social position or political implementation—the nation, correctly characterized as "a heterogeneous space, one with uneven development, always under construction, and never complete" (p. 3) floats as a signifier of ill-defined Western power, or in post-colonial situations perhaps even as an "imagined community" (p. 58). Even in chapters two and four, which explicitly address the nation-media relation, no definition of nation appears, no discussion of who directs or how a "well-ordered, centralized government, education, and communication system" might be constructed and operated. Even as McMillin insists on detailed comparative studies of global cultures, global and local media and international networks of power and resistance, social class never appears as an entity worthy of comment.

McMillin is certainly capable of unpacking the complex, as demonstrated in her thorough rendering of hybridity, including a brief account of the Asian satellite network, Star TV (which ultimately became a Murdoch enterprise as it standardized global media products for local consumption) (pp. 104-108). She ably recounts the major theoretical positions of Bhaba (1994) and Canclini (1995), as well as their critics such as Harvey (1995). Her synthesis nails the problem: hybridity’s abstractness and ambiguity obscure the very real struggles between the global and the local. McMillin’s treatment of "hybrid programming as a lucrative strategy" exposes cultural proximity as a market-based approach that translates "odorless" formats across cultures to better sell programs, advertising, and ideology. This chapter, "Competing Networks, Hybrid Identities" is particularly rich with examples drawn from across the post-colonial world and (although McMillin does not explicity intend) the examples quite effectively refute pluralist claims about the democratic diversity of cultural difference in hybridity. One might conclude that indeed, like the bilingual dictionaries produced cooperatively by British and Indian scholars, hybrid media products are "the output of power differentials" (p. 125) and there is no "new age of expression and identity that allow even citizens of the global south to partake of narratives of progress" (p. 126). McMillin’s summary of Fernandes’ (2000) fieldwork in Mumbai deserves emphasis, because it most clearly exposes the naked reality of cultural hybridity in the context of capitalist globalization: "The marketplace and its commodities lent the nationalist project its rhetorical strategies, equating consumerism with nationalism and brand loyalty with patriotism. [Hybridity] is linked to the class identities of the urban middle class…facilitates the reconstruction of social inequalities…curtailing the freedoms" of the local, whether class, gender, or ethnically-defined. (p. 127).

McMillin offers not only a fresh look at globalization from a media studies perspective, she has centered her work on the primary question often avoided: "Where is power located?" And, although she never quite discovers the sites of power—avoiding in particular class notions of power and agency—she has thoroughly debunked the myths of audience agency and cultural hybridity. As a post-colonial theorist, McMillin recognizes the continuing power of the nation-state, but wishes to replace its efficacy with reconstructed communities of citizen-actors—a worthy goal, but lacking recognition of the palpable coercive and hegemonic power of nation-states around the globe, a goal unlikely to be reached. Here, McMillin and other post-colonialists, would do well to revisit their appreciation of Gramsci, a seminal post-colonialist who remained tethered to the material, historical conditions of struggle. McMillin moves in that direction, noting that "interconnections between states and markets" demand "basic competencies," "employee-worker interactions," "appropriate modes of dress…" (p. 194), arguing that programming does not simply promote consumerism, but "urges the viewer" along a larger trajectory that is part of the "neocolonial capitalist machinery, making meaning of her or his existence within a delegated position that awards a limited degree of freedom and pleasure" (p. 195). In other words, subordinate and allied classes consent to the leadership of contemporary global capitalism because of real benefits—media provide a means of communicating desired representations and relations essential to that hegemonic relationship. McMillin would do well to pursue this insight, as it informs her conclusion that the problem with much international media study is the belief that nation-states and their governments are "pitted against the corporate global" (p. 215). By asking who are "the formidable avatars of centralized power" (p. 215) who help manage "multiple groups and curtail the dissent" (p. 216) by projecting "a unified modernity" (p. 217), McMillin indirectly asks for a more thorough-going hegemonic analysis of nation, state, and media. Ironically, even for the post-colonialists, it seems the ultimate hybrid triumph of post-colonial globalization continues: media scholarship which elevates diverse local or global identities (whether gender, ethnicity, national, or other) coupled with an unwillingness or inability to articulate the nature of class (and its state rule) or even recognize its existence as agent, arbiter, leader, and protagonist. Nonetheless, in every other respect, McMillin’s text is an outstanding, comprehensive assessment of the current state of international media studies.

May 2007