Narratives Of Difference In Globalized Cultures

This book is about how the marketing of transnational cultural commodities capitalizes on difference and its appeal for cosmopolitan consumers in our postmodern globalized world. At what price? What ethical and political conundrums does the artist/writer/reader confront when going global? This volume analyzes why difference - whether gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, or linguistic - has become such a prominent element in the contemporary cultural field, and the effects of this prevalence on the production, circulation and reception of cultural commodities in the context of globalization. At the intersection of globalization, diaspora, postcolonial and feminist studies in world literature, these essays engage critically with a wide variety of representative narratives taken from diverse cultural fields, including humanitarian fiction, multilingual poetry, painting, text-image art, performance art, film, documentary, and docu-poetry. The chapters included offer counter-readings that disrupt hegemonic representations of cultural identity within the contemporary, neoliberal and globalized landscape.

The story of arts and cultural policy in the twenty-first century is inherently of global concern no matter how local it seems. At the same time, questions of identity have in many ways become more challenging than before. Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World explores how and why stories and identities sometimes merge and often clash in an arena in which culture and policy may not be able to resolve every difficulty. DeVereaux and Griffin argue that the role of narrative is key to understanding these issues. They offer a wide-ranging history and justification for narrative frameworks as an approach to cultural policy and open up a wider field of discussion about the ways in which cultural politics and cultural identity are being deployed and interpreted in the present, with deep roots in the past. This timely book will be of great interest not just to students of narrative and students of arts and cultural policy, but also to administrators, policy theorists, and cultural management practitioners.

The collection brings together established and emerging scholars from the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University to reflect on the lived-experience of globalization. It uses a narrative approach to explore how key concepts in the field of globalization studies relate to the experience of everyday life.

What does the notion of the ‘global south’ mean to media studies today? This book interrogates the possibilities of global thinking from the south in the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Through lenses of millennial media cultures, it refocuses the praxis of the global south in relation to the established ideas of globalization, development, and conditions of postcoloniality. Bringing together original empirical work from media scholars from across the global south, the volume highlights how contemporary thinking about the region as theoretical framework ・ an emerging area of theory in its own right ・ is incomplete without due consideration being placed on narrative forms, both analogue and digital, traditional and sub-cultural. From news to music cultures, from journalism to visual culture, from screen forms to culture-jamming, the chapters in the volume explore contemporary popular forms of communication as manifested in diverse global south contexts. A significant contribution to cultural theory and communications research, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of media and culture studies, literary and critical theory, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and sociology and social anthropology.

Stories of Culture and Place makes use of one of anthropology's most enduring elements—storytelling—to introduce students to the excitement of the discipline. The authors invite students to think of anthropology as a series of stories that emerge from cultural encounters in particular times and places. References to classic and contemporary ethnographic examples—from Coming of Age in Samoa to Coming of Age in Second Life—allow students to grasp anthropology's sometimes problematic past, while still capturing the potential of the discipline. This new edition has been significantly reorganized and includes two new chapters—one on health and one on economic change—as well as fresh ethnographic examples. The result is a more streamlined introductory text that offers thorough coverage but is still manageable to teach.

Attention is given to television and cultural identities in the context of globalization. The representation of sex, gender, race and nation on television is analysed.

Written with passion, the stories told in this book are those of the search, loss and recreation of identities. From the Fiji-born women living in Canada looking for themselves to the Japanese of Korean origin having lost touch with their original culture, from the Catalonian demand for recognition to the quest for a common European heritage, we can read of the endless need of peoples to find their rightful place in our multicultural societies.