Critical Reading Analysis

(Dis) Placing Culture and Cultural Space

Chapter 4

+

Chapter Objectives

Describe the relationships among culture, place, cultural space, and identity in the context of globalization.

Explain how people use communicative practices to construct, maintain, negotiate, and hybridize cultural spaces.

Explain how cultures are simultaneously placed and displaced in the global context leading to segregated, contested and hybrid cultural spaces.

Describe the practice of bifocal vision to highlight the linkages between “here” and “there” as well as the connections between present and past.

+

Introduction

Explore the cultural and intercultural communication dimensions of place, space and location. We will examine:

The dynamic process of placing and displacing cultural space in the context of globalization.

How people use communicative practices to construct, maintain, negotiate, and hybridize cultural spaces

How segregated, contested, and hybrid cultural spaces are both shaped by the legacy of colonialism and the context of globalization.

How Hip hop culture illustrates the cultural and intercultural dimensions of place, space, and location in the context of globalization

+

Placing Culture and Cultural Space

Culture, by definition, is rooted in place with a reciprocal relationship between people and place

Culture:

“Place tilled” in Middle English

Colere : “to inhabit, care for, till, worship” in Latin

In the context of globalization, what is the relationship between culture and place?

Culture is both placed and displaced

+

Cultural Space

The communicative practices that construct meanings in, through and about particular places

Cultural space shapes verbal and nonverbal communicative practices

i.e. Classrooms, dance club, library.

Cultural spaces are constructed through the communicative practices developed and lived by people in particular places

Communicative practices include:

The languages, accents, slang, dress, artifacts, architectural design, the behaviors and patterns of interaction, the stories, the discourses and histories

How is the cultural space of your home, neighborhood, city, and state constructed through communicative practices?

+

Place, Cultural Space and Identity

Place, Culture, Identity and Difference

What’s the relationship between place and identity?

Avowed identity:

The way we see, label and make meaning about ourselves and

Ascribed identity:

The way others view, name and describe us and our group

Examples of how avowed and ascribed identities may conflict?

How is place related to standpoint and power?

Locations of enunciation:

Sites or positions from which to speak.

A platform from which to voice a perspective and be heard and/or silenced.

+

Displacing Culture and Cultural Space

(Dis) placed culture and cultural space:

A notion that captures the complex, contradictory and contested nature of cultural space and the relationship between culture and place that has emerged in the context of globalization.

Time-space Compression:

A characteristic of globalization that brings seemingly disparate cultures into closer proximity, intersection and juxtaposition with each other.

+

Displacing Culture and Cultural Space

“In-hereness AND out-thereness”:

A characteristic of globalization in which a particular “here” is linked to “there,” and how this linkage of places reveals colonial histories and postcolonial realities.

The particular “here” is linked to “there” and this linkage of places reveals colonial histories and postcolonial realities.

Glocalization:

The dual and simultaneous forces of globalization and localization.

First introduced in 19802 to describe Japanese business practices

The concept allows us to think about how globalizing forces always operate in relationship to localizing forces.

+

Case Study: Hip Hop Culture

Back in the Day: South Bronx

Black and Puerto Rican youth created forms of cultural expression to reclaim their belonging to place, such as the streets, neighborhoods, and cities

Introduction to hip hop culture

Going Commercial:

Attracted a wide range of audience, including the White youth.

Commercialization and commodification

Gained both criticism and praise for its controversial lyrics and messages.

Going Global:

Hip Hop Community Center in India

Appropriation: “Borrowing,” “mishandling,” and/or “stealing” across the world

+

Case Study: Paradoxes of Hip Hop Culture

It enables economic mobility and provides a platform for speaking.

It also promotes stereotypes about communities of color and valorizes danger, violence, misogyny and homophobia.

It provides communication vehicles for the marginalized.

It also promotes commodification of culture and benefits those who control the music industries, primarily White Americans.

+

Cultural Space, Power and Communication

Throughout history and today, space has been used to establish, exert and maintain power and control

Power is signified, constructed and regulated through size, shape, access, containment and segregation of space

Examples?

The use of space communicates

Examples?

+

Segregated Cultural Space

Cultural spaces that are segregated based on socio-economic, racial, ethnic, sexual, political and/or religious differences

Voluntary or involuntary/imposed

Examples:

The word “ghetto” originally referred to an area in Venice, Italy where Jews were segregated and required to live in the 1500s.

The reservation system imposed on Native Americans.

The Jim Crow laws (1865-1960s) that segregated Blacks.

The isolation of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Sundown towns or “whites only” towns.

Schools today are re-segregated to the same level as in 1970s

In Hurricane Katrina, low-income, working class neighborhoods were hit the hardest

Gated communities

+

Contested Cultural Space

Cultural space where people with unequal control and access to resources engage in oppositional and confrontational strategies of resistance and/or contestation

Examples:

Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. to work from the 1850s onward were forced to live in isolated ethnic enclaves known as Chinatowns in large cities such as San Francisco and New York

In the early 2000s, in Hudson, New York, a small town of 7,000 just 100 miles north of New York City, residents joined together to protest the building of a massive, coal-fired cement factory

Occupy Wall Street; Occupy Oakland; Occupy Boston, etc.

+

Hybrid Cultural Space

The intersection of intercultural communication practices that construct meanings in, through and about particular places within a context of relations of power.

Examples:

McDonald’s in Russia

Wal-Mart, Starbucks and other American companies are mixed into local cultural spaces around the world

Hybrid culture spaces are not simply the blending of cultures and cultural practices

Rather, hybrid culture spaces involve a negotiation of power

+

Hybrid cultural space as site of intercultural negotiation

Hybrid cultural spaces as innovative and creative spaces where people constantly adapt to, negotiate with and improvise between multiple cultural frameworks.

Example:

Cultural space of “home” experienced by Asian Indian immigrants in the U.S.

Immigrants create hybrid cultural space to creatively maintain their relationship to their culture and tradition.

+

Hybrid cultural space as site of resistance

Hybrid cultural spaces where people challenge stable, territorial, and static definitions of culture, cultural spaces and cultural identities.

Example:

Asian Indian immigrants create hybrid cultural space as a form of resistance to the dominant American culture.

Hybrid cultural space allows them to avoid total assimilation and a loss of their own culture.

+

Hybrid cultural spaces as sites of transformation

Hegemonic structures are negotiated and reconfigured through hybridization of culture, cultural space, and identity.

Example:

Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua uses the notion of “borderlands” to transform the experience of cultural marginalization into a space of oppositional and liberatory identity.

+

Summary

Placing Culture and Cultural Space

Place, Cultural Space, and Identity

Displacing Culture and Cultural Space

Case Study: Hip Hop culture

Segregated, Contested, and Hybrid cultural space

+