Read Chapter 5-Cultural Globalization, of the textbook International and Global Studies. Submit a one to two-page and single-spaced analysis reflecting your understanding of the reading. For your dire
Chapter 5 reading
Flows of People
The shifting demographics of the world’s population occur both intentionally and unintentionally. Many individuals choose to move from one place to another, crossing borders intentionally. These individuals fall into two categories: immigrants and sojourners. Immigrants are individuals who have willingly and legally left their home countries to work and live in a new country, either for an extended period of time or permanently. Unlike refugees, who face a documented fear of persecution or even death if they remain in their home countries, immigrants most often move for economic or family-reunification purposes. They arrive in their new countries with travel documents that indicate they have come legally. In some cases, they must possess a certain amount of money or a certain skill set. This is often the case if the receiving country has granted them immigrant status in order to receive an infusion of monetary investment in the private financial infrastructure or to make up for a shortage of skilled workers, particularly skilled scientists or engineers.
Some international students remain in the country in which they have gone to school. Most, however, return to their home country, or perhaps settle in a third country. Students who temporarily live in a place to receive an education are part of a group of individuals known as sojourners. International students have been the subject of much study and speculation, but they form an almost invisible presence in the globalization kaleidoscope. They are in classes next to you, yet perhaps you have never thought of the role your fellow students are playing in Tapias’s “global tsunami.” Heynemann (2003) notes that in many countries, international-education flow can actually be tabulated like other commodities. This includes not only students going from one country to another but also students studying in a virtual environment, paying one country to take courses online while living in another country. In addition, the export of textbooks and materials, as well as tests such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or International English Language Testing System (IELTS), often involves the exchange of currency across borders.
During the 2011–12 school year, the countries that sent the most students to the United States were China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. In 2011, 764,495 students chose the United States as their academic study destination. In 2012 this number increased to 819,644 (Project Atlas 2013). The landscapes of the campuses that they came to have shifted substantially from past years. In some cases, more than 10 percent of the student body is composed of international students. Presence of international students, however, does not necessarily guarantee a globalized education experience for anyone. Milton Bennett (2002) argues that simply being in a new country or being in a contact zone with someone from another place is no guarantee of any substantial intercultural contact taking place. We also know, however, that without contact, there is no possibility for personal change. By extension, shifting the demographics of the people within your place of study increases the probability that your college experience will be different from that of your peers on campuses with fewer international students. Additionally, your international connections may extend into your life after graduation. For example, “the probability of an Indian student in the United States marrying a U.S. citizen is almost 200 times that of a resident of India” (Rosenzweig 2006, 78).
In his vision of European higher education, Figel (2008) suggests “it should be the norm—rather than the exception—for university students to undertake a period of study or a work placement in another country of the European Union.” Academic institutions outside Europe, Figel hopes, would emulate European outcomes for their own educational planning: “There is a lot of interest from outside Europe for the European Qualifications Framework, which could inspire policy makers across the globe” (2008).
In Canada, international students play a key role in the national economy. Le-Ba (2007) cites trade statistics indicating “that international students contribute over C$4 billion (US$4.2 billion) annually to the Canadian economy.” As in the United States, students who remain and become permanent residents are seen as individuals who can contribute quickly and efficiently to the growth of the economy. Sadly, not all international students who remain in the country where they were educated will find employment. Le-Ba (2007) suggests that there is often a mismatch between immigrant jobs and their skill set: “Foreign-educated immigrants earned C$2.4 billion less annually than native-born Canadians with comparable skills, because they work in occupations below their skill levels [ultimately costing] the Canadian economy between C$3.5 and C$5 billion a year.” Many Canadian immigrants lack Canadian work experience, and their credentials are often not recognized (Le-Ba 2007).
Recent terms used to describe circular migrants (those who come and go from one place to another and back) include “astronaut fathers” and “parachute children” (Yu 2009). Astronaut fathers work in a distant place but come to visit their family throughout the year. Parachute children are under the age of eighteen and live in their adopted countries without either one of their parents living permanently with them. Investigate these two terms with respect to either the United States or Canada. See if you can find a strong example of each term.
There is no question, though, that these immigrants are becoming increasingly important to the international economy, to the extent that they are impacting the evolution of the English language globally. One example can be found with the approximately 10 percent of international students who become permanent residents and remain in the United States as immigrants after their studies (Rosenzweig 2006). Southeast Asian students graduating in fields such as engineering have suddenly found themselves listening to the English spoken by their Indian engineering colleagues in a U.S. setting. Korean, Chinese, or Japanese students often have little experience listening to Indian English accents, and, in like manner, they have little experience adjusting their accents to be more understandable to their Indian colleagues. Globally, interactions in English between individuals whose first language is not English will continue to become more prevalent than interactions between individuals whose first language is English (Hahn-Steichen 2008).
While the flows of international students are an important international force, they are also impacted by political and natural situations. For example, in the late 1970s, Iranian students were the largest international student population in U.S. universities. Soon after the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, Nigerian students dominated the U.S. higher education population. At the present time, in both the United States and Canada, students from Asian and South Asian countries like China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, and India dominate the landscape. However, a recent U.S. initiative has begun to bring Saudi and Libyan students into the United States at a rate not seen for over a decade. Typically, support from their home governments requires students to return home to serve their countries after completing their degrees. With the advent of the Islamic Revolution, many Iranian students were unable or did not choose to go home, and the anticipated return on the home country’s investment did not occur. In the mid-1980s, the Malaysian government sent thousands of students to English-speaking nations as part of a human-development campaign, most of them going to the United States. If this initiative had taken place in 2010, many fewer Malaysians would have come to the United States because it would be much easier to get them into Great Britain and Australia than wade through Homeland Security paperwork, which has extended the time required to apply for a student visa by six months or more.
These pressures can create difficulties for universities that welcome large numbers of international students. When global-health scares occur, student flows change. With the advent of the SARS virus in 2002–2003, for example, three American universities—the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and Syracuse University—closed their campus-based, intensive English programs due to a lack of students—specifically, Chinese students, who had represented the bulk of those enrolling in these programs but were banned from entering the United States. Though not a light decision, programs that had been in existence for decades ceased. In the summer of 2009, numerous overseas programs prevented U.S. students from going to their expected destinations due to fears of the H1N1 (Swine Flu) virus. Those that did let students travel frequently found them quarantined in hotels in places like Korea and China instead of experiencing a season of tourist explorations.
Traditionally, study abroad is promoted as both a long- and short-term investment for the growth of students and the communities they interact with. When student flows change drastically in the short term, we need to expect long-term consequences. Certainly, no treaties are signed, but overseas study is often a first contact, and from such contacts, later contacts emerge. It is these later contacts that can permanently shift landscapes within and across borders. This is not to say that landscapes (and Appadurai’s other scapes) are not changed by temporary flows, but permanent shifts occur more frequently with involuntary flows of people. We turn now to these involuntary flows, looking at the example of refugees and internally displaced peoples.
People who do not choose to move from one place to another, particularly from a homeland to a new space, include refugees and internally displaced persons. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) crafted a convention in 1951 that is still in place. Article I defines a refugee as “a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence who has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution” (UNHCR Self-Study Module 2 2005).
As of December 31, 2012, the UNHCR placed the total number of refugees worldwide at 10.5 million. The top receiving nations were the United States, Germany, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland. Three nations—Syria, Pakistan, and the Republic of Macedonia—accounted for an increase of 22,600 claims for asylum in industrialized nations. In addition, while the UNHCR Convention does not cover internally displaced peoples, the organization estimated their number to be over 17.7 million in 2012. These individuals have been displaced most frequently by domestic and international wars, insurrections, and natural disasters. Internally displaced peoples have fewer resources to draw upon than those identified as refugees, in spite of danger and sordid conditions that occur in many of the refugee camps that are set up. Refugees are forced to create new lives and, to varying degrees, new identities. Because many of them remain for extended periods of time in refugee camps, they are literally caught in a kind of third space, neither here nor there. Turner (1967) refers to this state as one of liminality. A liminal person is usually in a less-than-defined space for a temporary period of time, frequently in a socially created transition, between the teens and adulthood in age, and between civilian status and full enlisted status in the military. Remaining in a liminal space for an extended length of time stresses the body, soul, and, ultimately, the social bonds that have created community. Refugees and immigrants do not expect to return; they are expected to shift their identities in some fashion to better accommodate a new culture for the long term and frequently must use the private sector as the space to maintain home language and home-culture attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs. In some cases, these individuals develop a strong, grounded, bicultural or multicultural identity. In other instances, they develop what Peter Adler (1998) terms a “multiphrenic” identity, shape-shifting in a manner that causes long-term stress and potential disability.
Another group of individuals, temporary asylumees, are those who intended to stay in a new place for a brief period of time due to something like a natural disaster but are subsequently unable to return home. This would include people displaced by hurricanes or tsunamis who expect to return home after a period of rebuilding, only to find that their homes have been completely destroyed. In some cases, they are assigned “temporary asylum status” or “temporary protected status” by the UN and allowed to settle for an indeterminate but not indefinite period of time in a country that agrees to temporarily accept them. In 2007, for example, Reuters reported that 962 out of 1,020 temporary asylum applications in Russia were from Afghanistan (UNHCR struggles to find solutions for Afghan asylum seekers in Russia, 2008).
These individuals do not possess equal status with members of the dominant culture that they come in contact with. When they move from their home space to another, they rarely exist in equal situations of power with the dominant culture. When wars, genocides, and incursions occur, people move from their homes (and often homelands) to other spaces, where they are typically treated differently from the general population. In some cases, the movements are temporary, isolating them not only from their countrymen but also from their new hosts. Many refugee camps are walled off or sealed by barbed wire to prevent culture contact between those in the camps and those outside the camps.
Climate refugees (ecological immigrants) are individuals who are forced to relocate because of climate-induced changes to their homelands. Their numbers are anticipated to double from 25 million (2010) to 50 million in less than five years. Investigate this phenomenon further. What Arctic and Pacific regions may be particularly affected?
The UNHCR and a variety of global organizations track in detail the global situation of refugees and internally displaced persons. Videos are available on YouTube, officially posted by the UNHCR. Reuters has an Alert Net (www.alertnet.org) with working pages detailing country profiles, offering ways that individuals can help, and providing research tools for practitioners, much as the UNHCR site does. Because this is such a large and dramatic problem, it is difficult to summarize information on refugees into a concise form. What is central to our discussion at this point is the knowledge that the number of refugees and displaced peoples is not likely to decline in the near future. Wahlbeck (1998, 8) reminds us “undoubtedly, the process of globalization has a profound impact on the social relations of refugees and migrants in the contemporary world.” The responsible resettlement of these individuals will continue to fall within the purview of international organizations, national governments, and private aid organizations.
Diasporas and culture mixing have profoundly shifted our landscapes, both real and imagined. Ten percent of the population growth in Europe is driven by migration (Tapias 2008). In 1950, 90 percent of the U.S. population was white, but by 2040, only 50 percent of the population will be. The United States is at the halfway point: 40 percent of U.S. citizens age ten years or younger are racial minorities. As various authors look at the power of migration to cause these shifts in peoplescapes, many focus on the stress that exists between former systems and patterns and newer systems and patterns. May (1999, 154) looks at what he terms “nomadic identities,” suggesting that the “large-scale displacement of people from the rural to the urban or across nations has heightened the precariousness of arbitrary boundaries while fueling the contemporary identifications with ossified national identities.”
In other words, the mixing of the various types of individuals described above into what were formerly not panethnic spaces is changing who interacts with whom and for what purposes. Appadurai’s ethnoscapes are changing. Just as the kaleidoscope picture shifts with a twist of the wrist, linkages between people change. Many strive to recreate a narrowly defined ethnic community in the new locations that they have migrated to. Others use global flows of information, discussed below, to stay in touch with their former homelands. Still others use intercultural contact to fuse new identities and new friendships and, ultimately, to establish more connections with more kinds of people in more places than ever before. In all cases, there is often stress in change—whether at the personal level or the societal level. Globalization, for all its positive aspects, takes a toll. In the next section of the chapter, we explore how various kinds of information assist individuals and societies in making connections—again, for better or for worse.
Flows of Information
At one point in time, only smoke, drums, and carrier pigeons could cross borders without control. Over time, radio and television waves were included. Now we have information flows via fiber-optic cables and wireless Internet. In the future, there will be forms of communication that we cannot now imagine. Appadurai’s mediascapes will change just as ethnoscapes have changed. Pennycook (2007, 25) reminds us that all media serve as vehicles “enabling immense and complex flows of people, signs, sounds, images across multiple borders in multiple directions.” Much of the information is regulated, but much is also pirated. Films cross borders without permission; pirated versions of DVDs are available at a fraction of the real non-pirated cost. Identities are brokered and maintained via these technological connections. In this section, we explore the forces responsible for these flows.
Music
Pennycook (2007) draws on work by Connell and Gibson (2003, 271), who suggest that “music nourishes imagined communities, traces links to distant and past places, and emphasizes that all human cultures have musical traditions, however differently these have been valued.” Individuals who are no longer physically at home can recreate their sense of space through links to their traditional music via electronic sources or gatherings of individuals in new spaces. In addition, global connections have allowed people around the world easy access to the musical traditions of those in other areas. A brief review of just one music catalog by Putamayo reveals scores of albums showcasing music from around the world, as well as “third culture” or “fusion” music, made when musicians from different contexts come in contact with each other to create completely new forms. Afropop is an example of such a fusion form.
At the same time, local languages have been used to produce new types of music. One example is Sami rap. If you are a Sami in Lapland, the rap music you write in your own language and distribute over the Internet may be enjoyed by many music lovers, but within a short span of years, no one will be able to understand it because your language is dying out (Boevers 2006). By recording rap music on the Internet in Sami, it is possible to not only maintain a living record of the language but also creatively preserve Sami’s identity even as the language is dying.
This transcultural flow of information has accomplished three things: individuals in the diaspora have been able to remain connected to the music of their own culture; new music has been created as a function of contact; and local and sometimes dying languages have emerged in new music forms and are thus maintained. Connell and Gibson (2003, 270) reflect on the ability of music to play an active role in how people interpret the world around them, going so far as to suggest that music can even play a role in flattening diversity insofar as it becomes omnipresent.
In the U.S. presidential election of 2008, hip-hop music became a political tool for reaching out to young people and drawing them not only into national politics but also into an international political party. Rosa Clemente, the vice-presidential candidate for the Green Party, represented the hip-hop community, crafting a platform clearly linking music with political activism and, ultimately, national and international concerns. Clemente, a scholar-activist, explained in her acceptance speech: “Well, I am from the Hip-Hop generation, and we can remix anything. . . . We can lead the nation with a microphone. Hip-Hop has always been that mic, but now the green can be the power that turns up the volume of that microphone”
Pennycook (2007, 5) sees hip-hop as a way for the global to shape the local and vice versa. As he suggests, “If English can be used to express local cultural practices, can such practices include more recently localized forms such as hip-hop?” The transcultural flow of hip-hop allows it to move among and beyond nations. For example, hip-hop is very popular in Japan. Pennycook examines the Japanese site Nip Hop and its characterization of the hybridity that occurs when a language and hip-hop enter a singular contact zone: “Hip-hop is a culture without a nation. Hip-hop culture is international. Each country has its own spin on hip-hop. . . . Japanese Hip-Hop has its own culture but a culture that has many similar aspects of Hip-Hop around the world. These aspects include the DJ, MC, dancers, and urban artists (taggers, spray paint art)” (2007).
Dance, Theater, and Sports
As with music, other embodied art forms pull us into contact zones. Dance is perhaps the most embodied form of transcultural flows. McIntosh (2005, 24) characterizes the physical and behavioral in cross-cultural movement: “I further associate global citizenship with related capacities of the physical body. . . . The global citizen knows his or her body not as a tool for mastery or beauty, but as a body in the body of the world.” One example of this is Pascual Alvarez’s (2008) description of the visit of the Dutch hip-hop group Ish to the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in which he notes the paradoxical nature of a U.S. dance form being successfully appropriated by another international dance company.
The theater is a close second to dance in terms of embodied forms of transcultural flows. Pascual Alvarez, a young Columbian international student at a small, private, liberal arts college in the Midwest United States, explores how a novel written in West Africa roughly twenty years ago can make its way to a Minneapolis children’s theater. Describing the staging of Amina Sow Fall’s The Beggar’s Daughter, Pascual Alvarez (2008) observes the nature of global flows that have brought the issues of begging, tourism, and religion to the United States, suggesting that there is something particularly powerful in theater’s ability to move across nations and bring the world to a local audience. Pascual Alvarez (2008, 129) also cites Peter Brook’s idea that the “complete human truth is global, and the theatre is the place in which the jigsaw can be pieced together.” Clearly, there are many more examples that could be explored, but what has been demonstrated here is that theater plays a central role in creating hybridity, allowing local context to shape a universal theme. When young theater patrons are introduced to global themes and global pieces of writing, they “are given a window into a world society and are empowered to enact change” (Pascual Alvarez 2008, 146).
Sports are not necessarily considered art forms. However, the transcultural flow of athletes accounts for average individuals becoming familiar with the rest of the world through their local sports. When European soccer superstar David Beckham moved to Los Angeles, ticket sales for the Los Angeles Galaxy games tripled. When the NBA All-Star basketball player Yao Ming lifted a young Chinese earthquake hero onto his shoulders at the 2008 Summer Olympics, spectators typically uninterested in global affairs thought not only about sports but about the devastating effects of an earthquake and the leadership demonstrated by individuals to ensure the safety of their fellow citizens. Sometimes, sports are used for international political purposes. If not a global citizen, Ming can at least be seen as a global icon. While apartheid was still in effect in South Africa, poet Dennis Brutus organized artists to use international sports schedules as a vehicle of protest, creating boycotts and actually interrupting the transglobal flows of athletes—disrupting everything from cricket schedules to the Olympic Games. As Appadurai (1996, 61) points out: “All lives have something in common with international athletic spectacle[s].” Moving from the three-dimensional planes of theater, dance, and sport, we now explore how information flows through fiber-optic cables and radio waves.
The Internet and Radio
Perhaps the two key changes in terms of mediascapes that have occurred in the past decade are the ways the Internet and radio have, first, created sociopolitical venues for information to leave countries cracking down on dissidents and attempting to severely restrict access to information and, second, established powerful virtual connections for diasporic communities. Lisa Taraki
(2007, 529) cites what she terms “the excessive charms of the Internet.” Taraki argues that, at least in the Middle East, “Internet-based resources vastly expand individuals’ abilities to access greater social information, for example, the importance of blogs . . . from which we can presumably better understand the subjectivities of middle-class intellectuals and other cultural workers or identify the burning public issues as seen by citizens of the region. . . . The same applies to the veritable explosion of Internet sites featuring videos, fatwa forums, celebrity gossip, and myriad other issues of the day.” Blogging has become an essential way for citizens in various countries to express themselves in forums safer than face-to-face speech; it serves a key role in freedom of expression and civil society. The degree of government control of electronic communication also affects language.
Iran currently has one of the highest numbers of bloggers in the world. Alavi (2005, 1) indicates “Farsi is the fourth most frequently used language for keeping on-line journals. There are more Iranian blogs than there are Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, or Russian.” Yet Iranian bloggers cannot count on being able to access their sites in a reliable manner. Many bloggers have had to leave the country due to persecution. Others have had their sites closed and have had to set them up over and over with new names and URLs. This has become such a problem that Western political pressure is being used to protect bloggers throughout the Middle East via a project known as the Voice Initiative (Ephron 2007). Ephron reports on the difficulties endured by Syrian blogger Ammar Abdulhamid. In spite of being the son of a famous musician, he cannot escape governmental scrutiny when he blogs about negative aspects of his homeland. Michael Totten and others decry the travails of an Egyptian blogger with the moniker “Sandmonkey” who was actually forced to close down his blog in a situation similar to that of the Iranians discussed by Alavi (Totten 2009). In addition to blogging, more recent social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have played critically important roles in providing information to the world during events such as the protests preceding and following the elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran in the summer of 2009.
Explore the coverage of a recent international event—for example, the Olympics, the World Cup, the Global Climate Forum, or G-20 summits. Referring back to Appadurai’s notion of “mediascapes,” identify the degree to which the event you have tracked demonstrates the true interdisciplinary nature of media.
Taraki notes two other dimensions of the Internet that are related to knowledge exchange. One is that academic scholarship can go on in spite of problems such as mail strikes. The second is that the Internet permits a “vastly enhanced ability of . . . scholars to act as public intellectuals, that is to invoke their scholarly responsibility and/or authority to express themselves on issues of public concern” (Taraki 2007, 528). For many of us who live in less censored or more stable societies, it is difficult to imagine what it is like to work as a scholar but not have the freedom to interact with colleagues around the world.
For most scholars in the West, speaking out entails less risk than in many other places. In terms of leadership on these “issues of public concern,” Kuttab (2007, 535) further comments on the role that Internet-streamed radio has played in allowing traditional radio to thrive while also subverting national restrictions on print media: “Perhaps the most important lesson on the AmmanNet experience is that the creation and success of an Internet radio station in a country [Jordan] of state-run monopolies offers a major forum for activists, liberal politicians, and government officials as they help their press reform and push to allow terrestrial radio to broadcast with freedom.” This dimension links mediascapes with ideoscapes.
Returning again to the link between ethnoscapes and mediascapes, we see that Internet-streamed radio allows individuals around the world to access local programs in a variety of languages. As with satellite dishes, this ability to connect in a specific language with a particular radio station halfway around the world is often very empowering. Globalization, in this case, has pulled together the best of what is local and what is global. Non-Internet, community radio programming in various languages allows members of the diaspora to remain connected to their languages and culture. In the future, we can expect these various forms of social networking to continue to create and maintain transcultural flows and to provide voices for dissidence as well.
Film, Television, and Satellite Programming
Film, television, and satellite programming provide another means to cross borders virtually. As competing sites such as the famed Bollywood in India have given Hollywood a run for its money, we can see shifts in financescapes. Again, the kaleidoscope lens has shifted. Films have long been understood to be carriers of culture and to provide opportunities for outside individuals to come to know and understand more about the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the home culture of a particular film. In some cases, particularly those films exported by the United States and other English-speaking nations, there is some question as to how the power of the visual pulls viewers into either a love or hate relationship with what Braj Kachru (1988) terms “Inner Circle” English and culture and what is perceived as its hegemony. Inner Circle countries are those where English is spoken as a native language, including the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Kachru argues in all of his work that English can belong to all who use it and that the distribution of English-language films moving throughout the world does not necessarily imply an overt or covert agenda of cultural imperialism (1988). Films invite viewers into an imagined contact zone. They provide one set of lenses from which to view the human condition. But it is the context and the interaction of particular viewers with particular films that is the true determinant of cultural flows. Perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of general film distribution all over the world is the degree to which films can be viewed multilingually, particularly in DVD formats.
Television broadcasting reaches around the globe. In places like the United States, Great Britain, and Italy, viewers watch an average of 27–28 hours of television per week (NationMaster Media Statistics 2008).
In many situations, individuals who are no longer living in their native countries access television in their home languages, either via local programming or satellite programming. For example, Panagakos (2003, 210) found that in the Greek immigrant population in Calgary, Canada, that she surveyed, “viewing Greek television from satellite dishes was strongly favored by the first generation. . . . [O]ver 54% of first-generation [Greek] immigrants were viewers.” She goes on to characterize the power of the activity: “Watching satellite television is a prestige-generating activity and has the ability to intensify preexisting or generate new discourses on homeland activities.”
Karim (1998, 8) looks at the economic power of broadcasting to and for ethnic communities: “The growing ethnic-based commercial broadcasting infrastructure is integral to the increasingly global ethnic economy.” Numerous scholars routinely examine the effects of satellite programming in various languages around the world, noting how both diasporic populations and local populations are affected (see Panagakos 2003; Georgiou 2006; Jeffres 2000; and Karim 1998). Media studies throughout the world introduce students to the role of global television programming and the power of digital satellite broadcasting (DSB) systems. Panagakos (2003, 203) sees the power of both media and information technologies in the maintenance and negotiation of identity building on the part of immigrants. She states that mass “computer-mediated technologies can create new spaces for identity formation.” She goes on to characterize these technologies as a “forum for expressing and cultivating [ethnicities in the diaspora]” (Panagakos 2003, 207). In like manner, indigenous groups have been able to use various media sources to maintain local language and identity (Couldry 2003).
The Written Word
Poetry and fiction provide yet another glimpse into transcultural flows of information. What does it mean to be comfortable writing in a language other than one’s own? In most of the previous chapters, we have drawn primarily on various social science and environmental science disciplines to present information. Here, we see the power of literature to capture feelings of displacement in a manner accessible to those of us who have not been displaced. Olaoluwa (2007, 223) suggests that the theme of exile “occupies a conspicuous place in poetic exploration in particular and literary expression in general.” Iranian American A. Naderpoor looks at longing and exile in his poem “Shards of Memories” (2010): Oh land of my birth
Oh land whose shards hold memories for me
I’m caught in thoughts of you
absent and homesick
Homesickness like a candle, burning
from the inside.
My homeland, I can’t deny you
for you are the truth and undeniable
Tossed into the fire of my heavy heart.
Olaoluwa (2007) sees the poet as a medium, able to capture the experiences of those described in the section above on flows of people. The descriptions describe states of mind, behavior, and, most important, emotions, something less frequently captured in the other disciplines we have drawn from throughout this text. In like manner, poets who have not left their homelands can capture historical pain experienced by ancestors. Korean-American poet S. K. Kim, in her 2003 collection Notes from a Divided Country, includes a poem titled “Borderlands.” In the poem, dedicated to her Korean grandmother who lived in Korea at the time of the Japanese occupation, Kim creates a painful landscape: “We tried to escape across the frozen Yalu, to Ch’ientao or Harbin / I saw the Japanese soldiers shoot” (Kim 2003). The poet goes on to create a question in her grandmother’s mind as to why she survived.
Individuals who indicate they have multiethnic identities draw frequently on their own personal border crossings around the world (compare Japanese American poet David Mura and Chinese Singaporean Edwin Thumboo). The anguish of transferring from writing in one’s mother tongue to writing in a second tongue also poignantly reflects the affective dimensions of border crossings (Li 2007; Jin 2008). In addition, comparative perspectives on universal processes such as attending school; interacting with members of new groups; discovering oneself; and even encountering war, racism, and prejudice provide us with ways of comparing border crossings (Adiele and Frosch, 2007).
The genre of fiction provides yet another dimension of border crossing. There is a plethora of writing from contact zones—immigrants as protagonists in numerous novels socialized into new lives, trying to retain shards of the old while exploring the new. One large volume of such fiction focuses on Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Indian immigrants settling in the United States and Great Britain. Writers include individuals such as Jumpha Lahiri, B. Mukerjee, and Bharti Kirchner, among others. While some of these stories might question exactly how a homeland long-abandoned or never seen must look, others see the power of multicultural individuals able to evoke imagined communities all over the globe.
How does this information connect to the other parts of the chapter that have been exploring flows of information in a less personal way? First, the field of international studies has room for scholars of the heart—those who explore affective dimensions of crossing borders. Second, work in identity theory, critical theory, and diaspora studies is often centered in scholarship in humanities—literature, film studies, and culture studies. Examinations of positive and negative dimensions of globalization as discussed in chapters 3 and 4 frequently find their way into the literature. Authors such as Nigerians Ken Saro Wiwa and Chinua Achebe draw on globalization and colonialism themes. As you begin to work your way around the map of international studies, literature and culture studies may become part of your program choices.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have examined flows of people and information in ways that transcend traditional border crossings. We have examined how changes in places cause deep identity shifts for individuals. At the same time, landscapes at the local and national levels have shifted, changing the ways schools deliver education, and community governments deal equitably (or not) with individuals who speak different languages and do not resemble their neighbors physically. The lives of individuals who have involuntarily left their homelands are infinitely more stressful than the lives of those who have left voluntarily (Berry 2006). Like a kaleidoscope, the frames painted by the intersections of these individuals with those who have never left home or even encountered people different from them are complicated. Cross-cultural communication scholars suggest that intercultural competence is an integral component of successful interactions in contact zones. These zones will continue to increase—in real-time and space as well as virtually. In like manner, media and technology have framed new relations for students, scholars, and others seeking connection.
Communities are formed by individuals. With increasing person-to-person contact around the globe comes an increasing responsibility to connect in an ethical manner. While what Hammer (2009) terms “monocultural mindsets” are quite functional for individuals who will never leave their home cultures, they are not functional for those who interact face-to-face or virtually with individuals from other cultures. Some level of intercultural competence is necessary for these individuals. Hammer (2008) defines intercultural competence as “the capability to shift cultural perspective and adapt behavior to cultural differences and commonality.” Unless we are able to walk in the shoes of people who are different from those who live in our immediate neighborhood or our country of origin, or who communicate with us from afar via technology, we will experience fear, a lack of safety, and an unwillingness to engage in making connections. Without the warp and woof of these connections, our world as we know it will unravel. As global citizens, we can keep this fabric from unraveling, serving as edge walkers, gatekeepers, and the thread that joins various human and technological forces together. Your ability to perceive differences in perspectives, to be curious about what accounts for successful movement in and out of particular cultures, and to tolerate the ambiguity that arises when individuals with strong differences come in contact with each other will allow you to play a facilitative role in how people relate to one another. The following chapter on development will revisit economic, political, and cultural dimensions of globalization as they relate to particular nation-states and provide a more extended description of one setting in India where shifts in culturescapes and financescapes have caused more harm than good.
