Departures and Arrivals: Globalization, Media and Migration

Instructor: Sandra Zito

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Course Description: This interdisciplinary class explores the effects of globalization and transnational capitalism on borders, states and identities in terms of the increasing mobility of mass-mediated information and humans across national borders. Forced and voluntary migration and mediated forms of culture and knowledge are not new to human history. Whether the movements have been from the countryside to the city, colonizing migrations from metropoles to colonies, enslaved and forced migrations, or migrations from postcolonies to former colonial city centers, people, information, goods and culture have circulated throughout human history. However, many scholars agree that since the late twentieth century, the scale, speed, and scope of the flows of information, ideas, cultures, goods, and peoples is unprecedented. This class uses the acceleration in scale and scope of migrants and mass-mediated information flows as a lens to analyze the stakes that are involved in the debates over the interpretations and experiences of increasing worldwide interconnection and interdependence. By focusing on the themes of “departure,” “in-transit,” and “arrivals,” students will learn how globalization is transforming old political relationships and how new political relationships are emerging. Topics include the uneven international distribution and division of knowledge, labor and resources, time-space compression, “Americanization” or cultural imperialism, national and diasporic public spheres, flexible accumulation, postfordism and mode of information, mobile privatization, postmodernism, deterritorialization, racial-national absolutism, structure and agency, cultural heterogeneity and homogeneity, cultural syncretism, global warming, hospitality, citizenship, democracy, and human rights.

Student Learning Objectives:

By the end of class students should be able to:

· Define key concepts in the debates on the relationships between globalization, media and migration studies

· Summarize individual scholars’ contributions to defining key concepts and stakes involved within the debates

· Compare and contrast interpretations of the relationships between globalization, media and migration

· Explain key historical processes, events and concepts for interpreting the relationships between globalization, media and migration

· Synthesize the main debates over globalization, or complex worldwide interconnection and interdependence, from the perspective of the history of migration and mass-mediated information and culture

Required Texts:

Course Reader

Course Assignments:

Class Participation 10%

Attendance 10%

Response Papers 20%

Mid-term Exam 30%

Final Exam 30%

***Syllabus Subject to Change***

Weekly Schedule:

Week 1: Introduction: Departures-In Transit-Arrivals; Globalization, Media, Migration

Tomlinson, John. “Globalization and Culture,” in Globalization and Culture, 1999; 1-27.

Morley, David. “Introduction,” in Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity, 2000; 1-12.

Module I: Departures

Week 2: Modern-Colonial Departures: Leaving “Home”

Naficy, Hamid. “Framing Exile: From Homeland to Homepage,” in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, 1998; 1-17.

Hoerder, Dirk. “Worlds in Motion, Cultures in Contact,” in Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, 2002; 1-19.

Week 3: Modern-Colonial Departures Since 1945

Hoerder, Dirk. “Twentieth Century Changes” and “New Migration Systems Since the 1960s,” in Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, 2002; 443 and 508-559.

Depardon, Raymond and Paul Virilio. “Conversation,” in Native Land/Stop Eject, 2008

Week 4: Uneven Departures: Distributing Mass-Mediated Images

Hannigan, John. “The Global Entertainment Economy,” in David Cameron and Janice Gross Stein, eds., Street Protests and Fantasy Parks: Globalization, Culture, and the State, 2002; 20-48.

Response Paper # 1 Due

Week 5: What is a National Homeland? Media and the Production of Imagined National Communities

Anderson, Benedict. “Cultural Roots” and “The Origins of National Consciousness,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 1983; 9-49.

Week 6: Departing from the “Motherland”: Gender and Race and the Production of Imagined National Communities

McClintock, Anne. “No Longer a Future in Heaven,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspective, 1992

Gilroy, Paul. “Nationalism, History, and Ethnic Absolutism,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, 1993; 63-74.

Response Paper # 2 Due

Module II: In Transit

Week 7: Routes of Capital and Labor: Intertwining Histories, Overlapping Geographies of Colonialism

Said, Edward. “Introduction,” and “Empire, Geography, and Culture,” in Culture and Imperialism, 1993; xi-15.

Hoerder, Dirk. “Europe: Internal Migrations from Seventeenth to Nineteenth Century,” in Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, 2002; 277-303 (Selections)

Film: Mississippi Masala (1991); Mira Nair

Week 8: Routes of Capital and Labor: Mode of Production to Flexible Accumulation

Harvey, David. “The Political-Economic Transformation of Late Twentieth-Century Capital,” in The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990; 121-189.

Film: Life & Debt (2001); Stephanie Black

Midterm Exam

Week 9: Routes of Media: Mode of Information and Consumption

Poster, Mark. “Introduction,” in Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context, 1990; 1-21.

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding,” (1977) in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 1993; 90-103.

Week 10: Moving In-Between and Across: Blurring Borders between Time and Space

Virilio, Paul. “Overexposed City” (1984) in Lost Dimension, 1991; 9-29.

Rosler, Martha, “Travel Stories” Grey Room No. 8 (2002); 108-137.

Week 11: Moving In-Between and Across: Blurring Borders between Public and Private

Williams, Raymond. “The Technology and The Society,” in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 1974; 1-26.

Colomina, Beatriz, Homi Bhabha, and Tim Griffin “In Conversation: Domesticity at War,” Artforum XLV: 10, 442-447.

Chow, Rey “Listening otherwise, music miniaturized: a different type of question about revolution,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 1993; 382-403.

Response Paper # 3 Due

Module III: Arrivals

Week 12: Modern-Colonial Arrivals: Displacement and Difference

Appadurai, Arjun. “Here and Now” and “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 1996; 1-11 and 27-48.

Week 13: Arrivals: Diasporic Public Spheres, Identities, Culture

Gilroy, Paul. “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at: the dialectics of diasporic identification,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, 1993; 120-146.

Shukla, Sandhya. “India in Print, India Abroad,” in India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England, 2003; 175-213.

Film: I’m British But…(1990); Gurinder Chada

Week 14: Arrivals: Uneven Reception of Migrants and Mediated Information

Said, Edward. “Traveling Theory,” (1982) in The Edward Said Reader, 2000; 195-218.

Virilio, Paul. “Stop/Eject” in Native Land: Stop Eject, 2008; 184-204

Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, et al. “Video Control Room,” in Native Land: Stop Eject, 2008; 289-299.

Response Paper # 4 Due

Week 15: Cosmopolitan Citizenship, Diasporic Democracy, and Imagined World Community

Ong, Aiwha. “Flexible Citizenship Among Chinese Cosmopolitans,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, 1998; 134-163.

Final Exam: