Interdisciplinary Research and Globalization, Communication Review, December 2006

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Interdisciplinary Research and GlobalizationRaka Shome a

a Department of Communication, Arizona State University, USA

To cite this Article Shome, Raka'Interdisciplinary Research and Globalization', The Communication Review, 9: 1, 1 — 36To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10714420500500828URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714420500500828

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The Communication Review, 9: 1–36, 2006Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN 1071-4421 print / 1547-7487 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10714420500500828

GCRV1071-44211547-7487The Communication Review, Vol. 09, No. 01, December 2005: pp. 0–0The Communication Review

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND GLOBALIZATION

Interdisciplinarity and GlobalizationR. Shome Raka Shome

Department of Communication, Arizona State University

This essay examines the implications of conducting interdisciplinaryresearch in globalization. It emphasizes the need for transnational inter-disciplinary practices that ethically remain aware of the inequalities ofglobalization that continually inform intellectual practices, especially inthe West/North. The overall goal of the essay is to invite communicationscholars to reflect on, and rethink, the (U.S.)-centered orientations thatoften inform interdisciplinary research in the field, especially when con-sidered in the context of inequalities of globalization.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I canhear her breathing.

—Arundhati Roy,“Confronting Empire,” speech given to the World Social Forum (2003).

This article examines the implications of conducting interdisciplinaryresearch in globalization. In recent years, the field of communicationstudies, like many other traditional fields in the humanities and social sci-ences, has been significantly influenced by interdisciplinary frameworks.The influence of cultural studies—especially British cultural studies thatfirst found a significant home in the American academy through commu-nication studies—and feminist studies has been prominent in fosteringthis influence. Further, the growing, albeit still scant, work in critical raceand queer communication studies and the influence of continental theory(Marxism, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, and “deconstruction”) oncommunication scholarship have also reflected significant interdisciplinary

Parts of this article were presented at the 2004 Conference of National CommunicationAssociation. The author thanks the anonymous reviewer for her/his useful suggestions andeditors of The Communication Review for publishing this.

Address correspondence to Raka Shome, Department of Communication, Arizona StateUniversity, Phoenix, AZ 85069. E-mail: [email protected]

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2 R. Shome

tendencies. Such work and tendencies highlighted the need for interdisci-plinary scholarship by rightly pointing out that traditional disciplinarycontent and boundaries are inadequate in producing scholarship about his-torically marginalized subject matter and population. Such a growinginterdisciplinary impulse in our field, as well as in other fields in thehumanities and social sciences in the United States’ academy is, ofcourse, now common knowledge. Its politics has been the subject of manydiscussions1 and even attacks that are reflective of larger cultural warsand “moral panic” regarding citizenship and “belonging” that have per-meated the U.S. political landscape since Reaganism. This scenario needslittle elaboration.

And yet, after 9–11, as knowledge itself is once again being visiblyand unapologetically regulated as information that is pressed into the ser-vice of larger national and international politics, as it is being policed inthe name of national security, and as it is being used to create massparanoia and hysteria (for instance, what kinds of knowledge are “anti-American” or “anti-democratic” and what are not), it seems important torevisit the politics of interdisciplinarity—to explore their implicationsfor academic research and intellectual belonging in the current globalmoment. How do we, post 9–11, produce knowledge that cuts across,and questions, borders and boundaries of disciplines and nations? Howdo we rethink the scope and limits of interdisciplinary work in the con-text of our being and belonging in the U.S. in which the disciplinary ori-entations from within which we work and cannot escape—even as weresist them—are so often tied to the logic of the U.S. nation-state? Theseare important questions that confront us today. They invite us to recog-nize that interdisciplinary practices, as Caren Kaplan and InderpalGrewal (2002), note are not “natural” … [they] “have specific historiesand they are produced in particular places and in specific times“ (p. 68)(italics added).

Such a revisiting of the politics of interdisciplinarity that this articleinvites is fueled by the recognition that the politics of interdisciplinarity isalways a politics of the moment. And the moment that I am interested in isglobalization. That is, the stakes informing interdisciplinary research, theway in which those stakes play out, the way in which they matter, andequally important, how we engage in interdisciplinarity is always shapedby the times within which interdisciplinarity is engaged. The issue is notone of interdisciplinarity for interdisciplinarity’s sake; rather it has to dowith the “how,” and the ends or goals, of interdisciplinarity; it has to dowith asking what kinds of interdisciplinary engagements are necessary at agiven time. In other words, it has to do with the ethics and politics of inter-disciplinarity, especially when considered from the perspective of our situ-ated-ness as scholars in a highly regulated nation such as the United States.


Interdisciplinarity and Globalization 3

To that extent, this article discusses the importance and implications ofcritical interdisciplinary research in communication studies in the contextof our present time of globalization. Specifically, I want to advance thenotion of transnational interdisciplinarity as a desirable model for inter-disciplinary work in communication studies in our times.2 I want to insistthat in our current times, interdisciplinary work and agendas must crossgeographical and spatial borders; it must engage in, and try to connect to,knowledge formations and vocabularies that reside in other modernitiesand other temporalities that are either refused recognition, or are not ade-quately translated, in machines of knowledge production in the West, andin particular, in the U.S. In positing this, I am concerned not just with theintellectual crossing of geographical borders, but more with the issue of“how.” I am suggesting that we see the issue of crossing geographicalborders in our research itself as a “method.” And what matters in this“method” is how we cross geographical borders, how we connect acrossand against borders, and what kinds of borders we should cross, in orderto produce what kinds of knowledge so as to enable more democratic waysof living, being, and belonging in the world as intellectuals, scholars, and,simply, human beings.

For communication scholars, this issue is especially important torevisit given the discipline’s dominant leaning towards a hard and heavysocial science logic of positivism and the fact that the field acquired insti-tutional presence around the same time (1950s) that America’s hegemonyas a world power was on the rise. Hence, its implication in nation-centeredboundaries of American-ness needs to be theorized and unpacked.

It is important to clarify my use of the term “transnational” in “transna-tional interdisciplinarity.” I use the term transnational not to suggest aheady blinding touristy cosmopolitanism, nor a cultural pluralist, andsometimes orientalist, research vocabulary redressed as “international.”Rather, I use it to argue for a research impulse that in crossing geographi-cal boundaries (which is not necessarily the same as territorial bound-aries) is centrally focused upon the cracks and crevices, and silences andsutures of the global. As a caveat, I should state here that the transnationalinterdisciplinary impulse I am advocating has to be considered from theperspective of our situatedness in the parochial logics of America (and theAmerican academy). In an/other and more globally marginalized acad-emy (for example, academies in the global South), such a move may notalways be politically useful. In other words, the “transnational” moveitself must be contextually situated. How one engages with transnationalinterdisciplinarity and what intellectual politics should guide it, is itself amatter of where, and how, one is geographically situated.

Finally, to advocate a transnational interdisciplinarity is not to cele-brate a borderless intellectual imagination that naively ignores that


4 R. Shome

national and local borders still inform and regulate the limits and imagi-nations of our scholarship. The transnational as I use it here is not pre-mised on the logic of “disappearance” or erosion of the power of thenation (in globalization). That is, I do not use it to mean “post-national”(a term whose usage often minimizes the centrality of the nation). The“trans” in the transnational is not about transcending the nation. As EllaShohat (1998) has emphasized, it must be seen as a relational conceptthat implies thinking across, over, and against the lines (both seen andunseen) that dis/connect nations in continually shifting but alwaysunequal ways (pp. 46–47). In other words, the mere crossing of nationalborders to connect to any kind of “difference” is not the issue here. It isnot just national (or global) difference but alterity that we are talking ofhere. In what follows, I first remind us of the relationship betweennations and disciplines. Then I call attention to some nation-centeredlogics in many current interdisciplinary impulses in our field as well asothers. Finally, I offer some theoretical frameworks for thinking abouttransnational interdisciplinarity as a method and politics.

DISCIPLINES AND THE NATION

Disciplines and nations (in the western world), for the most part, formallygrew up at the same time, as part of the same social formation of westernmodernity. Traditional disciplinary organization of knowledge has had anintegral relationship with the emergence of nation-state. Sociologist CraigCalhoun (2002) has lucidly examined the relationship between disciplinesand nations. For instance, history emerged at the time that different (colo-nial) histories of nations were being formed and forged in Europe. Eco-nomics emerged as debates about mercantilism, and national andinternational productivity became central in rethinking economic founda-tions and philosophies of western nations in the era of industrialism.Anthropology, focused on the study of “other cultures,” was a centralmachinery of European colonialism for mapping “other worlds,” and ren-dering them nativist and barbaric. Psychology, in its organized origins inthe 19th century, was committed to understanding and disciplining (e.g.,Freud’s treatment of women as hysterics) the psyche of the individual asthe most basic unit of the nation-state, and hence integral to the health ofthe nation. And geography became important in mapping the worldthrough trajectories that would enable the flow and domination by west-ern colonial economies and territories of power, and that needed informa-tion systems that would become central in these endeavors (GeographicalInformation Systems (GIS) is an extremely valued and much fundedresearch area in the U.S.).



There are also other connections between nations and organized dis-ciplines. Craig Calhoun (2002), for example, notes that disciplinaryknowledge, like the nation, is founded on the myth of internal coherenceand unity. Further like the nation, disciplinary belonging and modes ofinvestigating the world are often couched in familial terms, with artifi-cial turfs and boundaries to protect. Additionally, in universities, disci-plinary knowledge usually tends to be spatially organized. Disciplinesare housed in discrete buildings, and farther away the knowledge of onediscipline is supposed to be from another, the farther the spatial dis-tance. So it is not unusual to find engineering departments housed onone side of the campus, and sociology or English on another. The effectof this is a reduced interaction amongst faculty in such seemingly dis-parate fields of knowledge. The logic is that they have little relation toeach other instead of recognizing, for example, that the vulnerability ofprograms such as women’s studies or ethnic studies are directly con-nected to the “strength” of programs such as engineering or business orfinance.

These traditional modes of arbitrary coherence and stability imposedupon the organization and production of knowledge in western modernformations held sway well until after the Second World War. In fact,after the Second World War, particularly in the U.S. when America’shegemony as a world power was on the rise, the link between disci-plines and the nation-state was never more strong. Cary Nelson andDilip Gaonkar (1996) point to “the unwritten and unsigned pact” of thepost World War II era that disciplines made with state power. “It was aMcCarthy era pact guaranteeing silence and irrelevance from thehumanities and collaboration from the social sciences, a pact disguisedby (and structured in terms of) the proprieties of disciplinarity and itsproper boundaries, limits, and conduct” (p. 2). In fact, for us in commu-nication studies, this post World War II moment is an important one tomark for this is the time when our relatively young field “formally”began acquiring a presence in universities and (mass) communicationsresearch was seen as being important (and mass communications is acentral vehicle through which American hegemony has been securedworldwide).

But in the mid-to-late 60s, and then 70s, social shifts began occurring;the hard earth upon which disciplines saw themselves firmly and unequiv-ocally grounded began shaking; the unquestioned boundaries of knowl-edge began to be questioned by some scholars; the widely held notion of“purity” through which each disciplinary knowledge formation hademerged suddenly started getting messy. And all of this occurred becausethis was the time period in which the social contexts of several westernnations began undergoing major shifts and revolutions. May 1968 in


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France, student movements in Europe, Britain, and the U.S., protestsagainst the Vietnam War, a growing pan-African movement, the civilrights and gender movements, the labor movements in Britain, the youthmovement in the U.S. and the U.K, the fall of Fascism in Europe, the sex-ual revolution of the 60s and 70s, and more, resulted in a situation inwhich several disciplines—particularly in the humanities (e.g., the nowfamous “crisis of humanities”)—found themselves in chaos in that theirknowledge structures did not and could not reflect, nor theorize, thesedemocratic upheavals and tensions. Thus, the bourgeois, elitist, andexclusivist foundations of disciplines began to be questioned; knowledgeformation began to be explicitly politicized as the boundaries of tradi-tional disciplines were challenged and seen as reflecting and containingthe boundaries of white male, upper middle class, heterosexual worldviews. The exclusion of knowledge for and by women, minorities, andother historically marginalized groups were noted and, once noted, theseeming purity of disciplines was seen as a “purity” whose effects wereundemocratic.

Thus, in the 80s and even early 90s, interdisciplinarity began finding asignificant presence in the social sciences and humanities as young fac-ulty whose minds had been formed by the events of the 60s and 70s estab-lished themselves in the academy and refused, resisted, and redrew thecontours of traditional disciplines. Like the times in which they grew up,neat, clear-cut boundaries of knowledge made little sense to them. Insta-bility more than stability, fluidity more than fixity, questions more thananswers, captured the social spirit of the times and found themselves tooin the academy, and interdisciplinarity was, at least at one level, the intel-lectual child of this social mood. In fact, today in the social sciences andhumanities, and especially in our field, interdisciplinarity has becomesomewhat of a signifier for left-oriented and progressive scholarship thatchallenges traditions and tries to connect to the “politics” of the “realworld.” It is often seen as fashionable, trendy, and hip, and interdiscipli-nary research is frequently seen as havens for cutting edge scholarshipthat attracts graduate students with a radical and democratic researchimpulse.

And yet, as interdisciplinarity becomes a buzzword for nontradi-tional, newer, and progressive research around issues of identity, cul-ture, race, gender, sexuality, etcetera, and as it begins to have asignificant presence in our field (and many others) especially under thelabel “critical studies,” it still manifests limits that ironically and inad-vertently repeat many of the logics of earlier and traditional disciplinaryformations that were tied to the nation-state. It is these limits that I nowturn to in order to subsequently move to my arguments about transna-tional interdisciplinarity.



The Parochialism of Interdisciplinary Scholarship (in Communication Studies) in the U.S.

First, interdisciplinary scholarship in our field such as gender studies,race studies, and even much of cultural studies work, as well as otherkinds of interdisciplinary work that broadly goes under the label “criticalscholarship” often tends to be significantly nation-centered. That is, thebounds and scope of interdisciplinary interrogation often tends to beconfined to, and within, boundaries of America, and across organiza-tional structures of disciplines within the U.S. Or, every now and then,the interdisciplinary impulse in communication studies crosses theAtlantic to find intellectual allies in Europe, Britain, and Australia (as infeminist scholarship which has been so influenced by Continental The-ory or even cultural studies that has been influenced by the British andAustralian tradition).3

For example, as the impulses of recent cultural studies work in Asia—especially the interrogations of the Inter-Asia cultural studies group thatplayed an important role in critiquing and marking the narrative of (British)“origins” of cultural studies—have brought to the fore, the fact that wehave phrases which have acquired intellectual currency such as “Britishcultural studies,” “Australian cultural studies,” “American cultural stud-ies,” but not for instance “South Asian cultural studies”—at least carryingthe same weight—is noteworthy.4 Or, that in the 1970s and 1980s, Britishand Continental Marxism became a reigning paradigm in communicationstudies, but not the Marxism of the South Asian Subaltern studies groupwho around this same time were producing some sophisticated theoriesregarding the functioning of ideology, hegemony, and class relations inanother modernity is significant. Or even that the names of Stuart Halland Antonio Gramsci roll off our disciplinary tongues (in communicationstudies) with ease (no disrespect intended as I am a strong admirer of boththeir works) but not Shahid Amin or Ranajit Guha is remarkable. Recog-nizing such issues is less to point fingers and more to understand the(geo)politics informing the travel and recognition of politically commit-ted interdisciplinary scholarship.

Second, even though interdisciplinary scholarship—especially aroundquestions of race and ethnicity—often tends to be performed by racialminorities (but not only)—since this is a group that rarely finds theirworld views reflected within traditional disciplinary boundaries—theknowledge about “race” that racial minorities often produce too oftenspeak only to America, the West, and its boundaries. For instance, in ourfield of communication studies, there is now a growing and much neededresearch emphasis on race and multiculturalism, and such researchoften draws on ethnic studies and other race-oriented interdisciplinary


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formations. Conferences at NCA and ICA regularly demonstrate panelson race and ethnicity. And yet, rarely is the “ethnic” or “race” outside ofthe U.S. probed; rarely is the connection between the production andmanagement of the domestic “ethnic” inside the U.S. and larger global-ized racial politics addressed in “domestic” race research.5 Rarely is itacknowledged that minorities within the U.S., when we consider a largerglobal scale, make up a “privileged” minority. Saying this is not to denytheir complex racial positions, and continued abuse, within the U.S. land-scape; rather it is to recognize how race research in the U.S. often seemsto have little idea or interest about the plight of the subaltern or minoritiesin other parts of the world, and how that plight may be connected tominority politics here. The untranslatability of racial and cultural perspec-tives from “other worlds”—worlds upon whose backs the cultural andeconomic landscape of the U.S. is constantly nourished—results in animpermeability of knowledge about them in western spaces that evendomestic racial minorities sometimes cannot unpack for they, after all, arealso written into and by the narrative of “America” (however contentiousthis writing may be).

The arguments raised here are in line with some of the discussions thathave unfolded in American Studies about American exceptionalism in thefield. Janice Radway, Jane Desmond, Virgina Dominguez, Robyn Wiegmanamong others, have rightly lamented the nation centeredness of multicul-tural engagements in the field. For instance, Desmond and Dominguez(1996), following the impulses of the Chicago School’s “critical multicul-turalism” project, argue for a “critical internationalism” (Benjamin Lee’s[1995] term) in American Studies. They observe that even when interna-tional cultural perspectives are embraced in American Studies, suchperspectives

often assume and reproduce the paradigms of U.S. scholarship, whilesketching similarities and differences. That is, they adopt the terms ofdebate generated in U.S. scholarship about the United States and applythem elsewhere, to another country. This is an important step in denatu-ralizing U.S. cultural and social formations and revealing their histori-cal specificity, but it does not simultaneously reveal how the terms ofintellectual investigation and the generation of topics for debate arealso an American product of American history (italics added). (p. 485)

The issue of how far the terms of our discussions of culture within theUnited States allow us to critically examine the (U.S.) nation and situateit against larger global flows is critical here in trying to address multicul-turalism’s limits and possibilities in the current global conjuncture.Indeed, does the multicultural logic enable us to understand well social



diversity and inequality in other global contexts? Is the hype of multicul-turalism itself underwritten by a North Atlantic temporality? Is the dis-course and logic of multiculturalism exhaustive enough to understand thecomplexities of race in globalization or does it reveal some nationalistleanings?6

For instance, what do we do for parts of the world where particulargroups—such as subaltern groups—may not even see or recognizethemselves as having a cultural identity, and consequently are oftencoerced and slotted by the state into some predefined “ethnic” labelthey may care little about. In the U.S, Britain, and Europe, culturallymarginalized groups tend to be very conscious of their cultural/ethnicidentities and collectivities—something necessary as a first step formulticulturalism to become a political movement. But what if this is, asit sometimes is, not the case in many other parts of the world—forinstance in parts of South and Southeast Asia? Further, what if the axisof ethnicity is not the central or even a significant axis around whichminority groups in many other parts of the world experience them-selves, and organize—if they do—around that experience. Or, to pushthis even more, what if identity—another “keyword” in critical interdis-ciplinary scholarship—is not always the central organizing frameworkthrough which inequalities, and their communication, are organized in“other worlds” or, more important, understood, mapped, and experi-enced by minorities? As Grossberg (1993a) has argued, “it is importantto ask whether every struggle over power can or should be organizedaround issues of identity” (p. 98). This is not to suggest that identitydoes not have salience in other global contexts (as that would be a sillyclaim). Rather it is to say that identity may merely be an effect of othercomplexities that cannot be understood only by meta-narratives of mul-ticultural identity politics.

Let me provide a brief example to draw this out some more. In India,a common phenomenon or sight in many cities is that of bastis (in somecities they are called jhopar pattis; the term basti here is a Bengali termand in different states there may be different terms for such dwellings).Bastis are dwellings—shacks, dilapidated rooms, improvised shelters—where the poor population of cities live. These are sites of significantpoverty. The residents may be those who seek employment as regularmaids in middle and upper middle class households, prostitutes, rick-shaw pullers, hawkers, and noninstitutionalized vendors (who movearound the city each day with their vending vehicle selling snacks andother fast food). While most major metropolitan cities have such bastis—usually spread out over different locations of town—the cities simulta-neously dazzle with high rises and fast freeways. Thus, there tends to beclearly marked spatial disjunctures along lines of gross poverty and, if


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not always affluence, then certainly a level of material comfort. To mapthis kind of inequality along lines of identity is not enough and evenineffective for the inequality is not centrally produced by identity(although it clearly produces a classed identity). To understand thecauses of this inequality, one cannot just resort to some kind of a logicof multiculturalism or cultural diversity or cultural difference—sincecultural difference is not the central issue here or what has primarily ledto such oppressions.

To understand this inequality, one may find it fruitful to address thecomplex structural relations between the local, national, and global thatsignificantly occurred around the time of Indian independence, and con-tinues today under the guise of globalization and “structural adjustments.”Around the time of independence, the classes without education were theones most hard hit and pushed down into extreme poverty. After indepen-dence, Nehruvian industrialization and secularization—while in and ofitself had several beneficial outcomes (the most advocating a vision ofmodernity and the nation that was not based on western modernity) – didnot and could not penetrate many local poor contexts in which religionand faith in God was still a central force through which those masses sawtheir “belonging” in society. The gradual bartering of the nation-state toglobal finance that began under the period of Rajiv Gandhi in the mid 80sand has intensified today in alarming proportions—under the label of“economic reforms”—opened the doors for global finance to flow in.Poverty levels went down on the one hand; affluence grew, and a middleclass that existed even until the mid 80s began shrinking. It is against sucha landscape—whose sketch above is admittedly thin in the interest ofspace—that this social inequality of poverty needs to be placed. Identitypolitics cannot even begin to capture the problem (or resolve it). A com-plex understanding of interconnected historical, geopolitical, and eco-nomic relations has to be brought to bear upon any attempts to theorizethis “problem.”

All this is to say that we need to re-examine our unquestioned faith in“cultural difference” as a seemingly universal (ethical) framework andpolitics for envisioning a better democracy and engaging in minority poli-tics in all contexts.7 In fact, we may even want to consider how far ouravailable vocabularies of ethnicity and cultural difference that inform theintellectual impulses of interdisciplinary work such as feminist, cultural,ethnic studies, etc. are adequate in mapping the global flows that are evenremaking the U.S. and its communicative politics in our current times.Aihwa Ong (2004) recently and trenchantly questioned our unreflexivefaith in the analytical category “culture” (and cultural difference) as ameans for understanding and theorizing contemporary social politics inthe U.S. She writes that



[g]iven that analytical categories of culture have been insufficientlyproblematized, claims about cultural difference of minorities seem tosuggest that ‘culture’ has remained the same despite experiences ofdislocation, generational fractures, and upward mobility over time inthe American nation. Furthermore, calls by minority groups for a uni-lateral claim of cultural citizenship seem informed by the view that cul-tural difference is only a bottom up construction, and somehow free ofregulation from above. That naivete can end up supporting dominantideologies that rank individuals on the basis of culture, race, and eth-nicity thereby facilitating the cultural or ethno-racial inscriptions ofindividual achievements and failures. (pp. 5–6) (italics added)

For Ong “culture” is not necessarily “the automatic or always the mostimportant analytical domain in which to understand how citizenship isconstituted. Rather what matters is identifying the various domains inwhich these categories—race, ethnicity, gender, and other culturalforms—are problematized, and become absorbed and recast by socialtechnologies of the government “ (p. 6) which clearly impact culture butare not reducible to it. In fact, the concept culture today has been stretchedso far and thin in our theoretical vocabularies and critical analyses (every-thing becomes culture) that we often do not ask (and are consequentlyunable to theorize) whether there is any politics that is not cultural poli-tics or whether every resistance is cultural resistance?

As Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1992) have suggested, makingeverything culture or reducing every politics to cultural politics is prob-lematic because it results in an unwitting dilution of the project of culturalstudies (everything now can seemingly be studied through the vocabularyand lens of cultural studies). Additionally, there may be other forms andstructures of power that exceed the impulses of cultural studies, or thepolitics of culture. Indeed, the frequent reification, hyperexpansion, anduniversalization of culture and cultural politics as a map for everything isultimately not too useful for it prevents us from grasping other machina-tions of power in the social beyond culture.

It is important to point out though that Ong is not saying that culture—ethnicity, race, etc.—does not matter. Far from it. Rather, what she is sug-gesting is that it is just as important to study the macro-structures of gov-ernmentality in neoliberalism through which these categories are beingreworked and utilized. This is not identity politics, nor is it just culture,but something much more complex (although identity and culture are cer-tainly a part—but just a part—of this complexity). Indeed, it is importantto recognize that ethnicity and cultural difference today often constituteregimes upon and through which international labor markets are consti-tuted, a neo-colonial culture of global consumerism is enabled (for


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instance, the global marketing and distribution of international music, atransnational “professional” class is being produced and secured (e.g., ininformation technology), and high-powered NGO’s (and their officials)are spread, and recruited from, all over the world in the name of “develop-ment” and “regional experts.” Thus, ethnicity in and of itself does notoffer any moral and political guarantees.

In fact, in globalization, we are witnessing a bifurcation between“desirable” ethnics (in the U.S. they would be the “green card” ethnics orguest workers on diplomatic visas who are privileged in various globalregimes of power and information systems) and “undesirable” ones. Thisis precisely why also in globalization, because immigration policies ofseveral nations such as the U.S. are becoming more complex (openingborders for some while closing for others), it is simplistic to just blithelyand homogeneously declare contemporary U.S. (or other dominant west-ern nations’) immigration practices as being unidimensionally raciallyexclusive. Today “race” and “difference” are needed and carefully filteredin terms of which “difference” “we” need in order to communicate our“cosmopolitanism” and attract foreign investors, knowledge providers,and cyber-workers, and which we need to block. That is, difference itselfis being fractured, splintered, and constantly reworked to serve the needsof global capital. The “ethics of alterity,” as Spivak notes, is today beingdisplaced and “overwritten as a politics of identity” and [difference](2003, p. 116).

Think of Microsoft giant Bill Gates’ anxiety after 9–11 when borderswere being closed so rapidly. Think also of the anxieties that emerged inmany universities about the decline in international students (and theirfunds) in programs such as engineering, business, and the sciences, andhence the inability to generate the revenue needed for these programs. Forexample, a recent editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer (December 27,2004) described international students as an “import industry worth $13billion to the American economy each year.” The report expressed con-cerns that post 9–11 this “industry’ was “showing signs of weakness, andit should be a matter of national concern” that “the imports dropped forthe first time in three decades.” Similarly, another editorial in a Floridanewspaper, The Sun-Sentinel (September 3, 2003) noted that foreign stu-dents and their dependents contributed to more than $500 million to Florida’seconomy before 9–11 which would now be affected by the regulation ofstudent visas. The report additionally observed that foreign studentstake back American ideals to their homes and “help create U.S. goodwill”in the world. Both these examples provide evidence of how in thepublic imagination today, cultural difference functions as a vehiclethrough which complex (and unequal) American-centric flows of globalfinance and culture are redistributed and reorganized.



Indeed, globalization ironically cannot function without cultural differ-ence. If the cultural logic of imperialism before the Second World Wardays was the suppression of difference, the cultural logic of neoliberalism(as the new face of imperialism in the 21st century) is the encouragementand production of difference. So “difference” in and of itself does notguarantee any “charismatic closure” (to borrow Tony Bennett’s [1993]words). Rather, what is at issue are the complex and multiple reinscrip-tions and rearticulations of ethnicities with often divergent outcomes thatare occurring in late capitalism through various technologies of govern-mentality in neoliberal globalization. This is one reason why postcolonialtheory—instead of just multiculturalism—is useful to rethink “race” inthe current global conjuncture for postcolonial scholarship is concernedwith larger global structures of colonialisms (past and present), the histor-ical configurations of those structures, and how they inform and enablevarious micro and macro politics of race, citizenship, and belonging inour times.

Third, it should be remarked that the buzz about interdisciplinarity pri-marily tends to be an American academic phenomenon. One does not wit-ness much obsession with interdisciplinarity in many postcolonial ThirdWorld academic landscapes—a point that has important implications.Knowledge production in several postcolonial nations—and I am thinkingin particular of India, the landscape an most familiar with by accident ofbirth—has had to be interdisciplinary for a long time. My undergraduatemajor, for instance, was in English literature. But while we learned all wecould about various aspects of English literature under eight subdivisionseach of which took a year’s worth of coursework, we also had to bedeeply familiar with British history, philosophy, politics, psychology, etc.Unlike in the U.S., we never studied these as “different” disciplines or as“minors”; the understanding was that to have an in-depth knowledge ofBritish literature, one needs to understand in great detail the numeroussocial contexts through which it travelled and through which it was pro-duced, what was going in different time periods, and what the philoso-phies, economics, politics, etc. were. Depth of knowledge, instead ofdivision and specialization of knowledge, was seen as important. Further,we also had to be familiar with developing and parallel trends in Indianand several Asian literatures; again the logic being that an engagementwith the wider social context is necessary, and that literature is a productof a particular temporality and spatiality and it is best understood relation-ally—in relation to other literatures in other places and times. In otherwords, education itself was centered on a globally relational approach.

It is easier to stick to rigid disciplinary boundaries and retain a nation-centered inward looking “purity” when one is not, or has not been histori-cally colonized; when what one saw of the world, and how one saw it,


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was the accepted basis of knowledge. No subversion, no meandering, nohide-and-seek, no escaping boundaries is needed to make sense of theworld to map one’s complex location in the world. The history of the col-onized is a history in which, as scholars such as Gauri Viswanathan(1989) have pointed out, institutionalized university-based educationitself had been geared towards the production of “civil servants” to servethe colonial “civil society.” Thus to find an anti-colonial voice was to pro-duce, create, and resurrect knowledge—often noninstitutionalized knowl-edge—that was not “disciplined,” and not about rigid norms of citationsvalidated by a group of experts.8

For instance, during the nationalist revolution in India, Bengali nation-alists and intellectuals such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Raja RamMohan Roy, Vidyasagar were all committed to education. They recog-nized that education was central to achieving a nationalist subjectivity inthe then colonized India, and in particular Bengal. But it was a model ofeducation that was not based on rigid disciplinary organizations of knowl-edge. It was more free flowing, had a moral and ethical purpose, and wasavowedly political in its goal. Social betterment and fighting inequalitywere the goals. Knowledge was not an instrument in some colonialmachinery. Thus, anti-colonial nationalist resistance often manifesteditself through models and contents of education that attempted to subvertthe colonial structures of knowledge—structures organized by rigidnation-centric disciplinary models of European modernity.

Today, as a result of that colonial history through which postcolonialIndia (as well as many other Asian nations) was forcibly and violentlybrought into the framework of European modernity, many of the disci-plines of the West are also duplicated in university structures in postcolo-nial nations. And while more recently, under globalization, we witnessgreater “specialization” of knowledge in the proliferation of high-classbusiness programs and information technology schools in many Asiancontexts, the disciplinary boundaries, however—for instance, betweensocial sciences and humanities—are not always so rigid, and there stilltends to be significant cross-fertilization across disciplines. In fact, eventhe label interdisciplinary is not obsessed over in many Asian knowledgestructures, for underneath the label hovers the binary logic of disciplinesversus interdisciplines (read: nation versus border-crossings). Underneaththe label also hovers an unmarked distinction between the specialist/professional and the public intellectual, a distinction that for the mostpart tends to be a signature of the professionalization of the Americanacademy. This is a distinction that one does not find in many Asian (andeven many European) contexts in which the scholar (especially in thehumanities and social sciences) is also always, for the most part, a publicintellectual or, at least, there is certainly that long legacy and history



(although under neo-liberalism and the gradual privatization of manyAsian public spheres—which is resulting in the privatizing of educationin many contexts as in the proliferation of technical and vocationalschools—one worries that this may be dwindling).

This is not to say that there is no engagement with interdisciplinarity inmany Asian contexts. There is, but I believe that it has been playing out dif-ferently where the challenge (and value) of interdisciplinarity is simulta-neously seen as a challenge of crossing and connecting across, through, andagainst, geographical borders. For instance, one of the most significant“interdisciplinary” intellectual formations in Asia in recent years has beenthe “Inter-Asia Cultural Studies” group co-inaugurated by Kuan-HsinChen, a communication scholar. The Inter-Asia cultural studies group, in itseditorial and inaugural statement, situates itself as a project of a “transbor-der collective” that is concerned with the issue of theorizing, understanding,and reconstructing a “critical inter-Asia subjectivity” (http://www.inter-asia.org/journal/about_us/statement.htm). The goal of this formation is to forgeintellectual and political links “across” and in the various “inters” of linesconnecting and disconnecting various regions of Asia. Stuart Hall (1998)describes the contemporary Asian context of cultural and critical work (incontrast to the American context of cultural studies) as operating on “theground of an enormously active and dynamic political space, which isbreaking out, contesting and shifting everything around” (p. 396).

This is a very different scenario than what we often find in the Americanacademic context, and in particular our discipline. In the above scenariothe interdisciplinary is also intergeography or interspatial. In our Americancontext—and in particular our field—on the other hand, the fact that theissue of interdisciplinarity (far from being even able to move to a levelwhere it can be a debate about spatial and geographical dis/connections ofknowledge) generates so much anxiety (and hostility), and the fact that itcontinues to position many of us doing interdisciplinary work in a situa-tion of constantly having to “defend” it in relation to formalized disci-pline-oriented research, reveals how we are still squarely situated within,and circumscribed by, the logic of the nation.

TOWARDS A TRANSNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY

In a millennial issue of the premier social science journal Public Culture,distinguished social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai ([2000], p. 1) com-ments on the anxieties of the global for the U.S. academy. He states:

Globalization is currently a source of anxiety in the U.S academicworld. And the sources of this anxiety are many. Social scientistsworry about whether markets and deregulation produce greater wealth


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at the price of inequality. Political scientists worry that their fieldmight vanish along with their favorite object, the nation state, if glo-balization truly creates a ‘world without borders.’ Cultural theorists …worry that inspite of its conformity with everything they already knewabout capital, there may be some embarrassing new possibilities forequity hidden in its workings. Historians, ever worried about the prob-lem of the new, realize that globalization may not be a member of thefamiliar archive of large scale historical shifts. And everyone in theacademy is anxious to avoid seeming to be a mere publicist of thegigantic corporate machineries that celebrate globalization. Productdifferentiation is as important for (and within) the academy as it is forthe corporation academics love to hate.

Appadurai’s statement provides a useful starting point for my argumentsin this section. Appadurai points to so many things that at once beleaguerthe academic scenario in the U.S. when globalization becomes the centerpiece of discussion, and its inevitability and horrific productions of newinequities worldwide are recognized or at least glimpsed at in some half-hearted (and sometimes knee-jerk) way, amongst scholars.

This scenario in Appadurai’s essay speaks to multiple anxieties thatpermeate our intellectual subconscious in contemporary times: a suddensense of the inadequacy of our research vocabularies for mapping global-ity; a shadowy recognition that, at least, in the social sciences, the socialinequalities that we have paid attention to might just have been embar-rassingly parochial; a sudden half-awakening that the corporate logic of“product differentiation” also operates in the academy under the guise ofdisciplinary differentiations, and that the (U.S.) nation-state has centrallyremained a logic in our knowledge machineries so that now when thenation itself is being remade through contra-dictions of the global it some-how feels like “the center [i.e., our disciplinary legacies] cannot hold.”And the more we feel this, the more we find ourselves under pressure toretreat into the comfort of our disciplinary holes to recreate the “center” inorder to justify the legacies of our disciplinary vocabularies.

In a nutshell, the anxiety that Appadurai is speaking to is one of recog-nizing (even if that recognition is sometimes one of resistance or denial)that to be a scholar in these times is to recognize ourselves as global sub-jects complexly situated in various conflicting desires of globality that areeddying and swirling in, through, against, and across the nation-space ofthe U.S. For communication scholars, this is especially important becausethe very object of our scholarship—communication—is a central terrainupon which global inequities are being constituted (for example, informa-tion, technology, education, media, and culture, to name a few). Andwhen the object of our scholarship itself is so centrally inflected by,



implicated in, and productive of, global regimes of power, our engage-ment with that object requires a rethinking of ourselves—and agendas—as scholars and intellectuals. The anxiety of the global that Appadurairefers to cannot, however, result in a reactionary intellectual protection-ism or insularity. Rather, the anxiety must be productive—if only to rec-ognize how silences and sutures of the global underwrite and enable ourresearch practices and intellectual imaginations—for behind that anxietylies the untold stories of global despairs and the unseen faces of globalitythat never quite become global and yet are always with us.

Despite the corporate hype about globalization in the U.S., this, indeed,tends to be a task incredibly hard for most of us in America who areunable to think and see globality beyond the aesthetics of cosmopolitan-ism, beyond militarism and “international terrorism,” beyond the “wiredworld” of internets and listservs, beyond the arrogant benevolence ofinternational “development,” beyond the illusory enchantment of a globalvillage, to the opaque despair of a global pillage that is going on in thename of terrorism, development, intellectual patenting, information,biopiracy, population control, pharmaceutical and oil spills, forced con-traception, toxic dumping, free markets, “human rights,” democracy, andmuch more. It is in the aporias and slippages of these phenomena that thehegemonic American national subject resides (and hides); it is in and overthe contradictions of these global phenomena that the phallic Americannarrative of exceptionalism is writ large. This is the salient location thatwe—residents, citizens, and even scholars—occupy (and are implicatedin) as global subjects residing in the U.S./ North as opposed to the South.

As I write this, images of horrific prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraibprison are being splashed across television screens and we are witnessingglimpses of the real American national subject—not the subject of free-dom, “human rights” and civility through which the national fantasy ofAmericanness is upheld, but of violence and oppression, that has alwaysbeen overwritten and concealed by the phantasmatic American of “free-dom” and “justice.” And at the same time that we are witnessing thisgross moment of contradiction in which the American subject, momen-tarily rupturing the fantasy narrative of exceptionalism, is being slowlyand embarrassingly glimpsed at, we are also seeing a hurried managementand denial of this subjectivity through arguments such as “the handfulwill be brought to justice and we want the world to see that,” or “this isnot American” or “our higher moral ground has been compromised bywayward prisoner guards.” The phantasmatic American is being rescuedby a denial of the global American always residing, and centrally present,in the dark and violent disjunctures and conjunctures of internationalism.

To confront such realities is to question the unmarked American andNorth Atlantic centric bounds of our intellectual imaginations. It is to


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begin to see, for instance, that the notion “rights” may take on such com-plexities when thrown onto an international scale that it cannot just be acentralization of the logics, vocabularies, and frameworks of U.S. civility.It is to recognize, for instance, that the term “minority” may take on suchnuances and valences when thrown onto the global stage, that it cannotjust be a privileging of American models of minority politics. Indeed, it isultimately to recognize that our regimes of knowledge in the U.S., espe-cially in today’s world, are “always already” implicated in various globalflows of violence and justice. Whether (and how) we choose to lookbeyond the U.S. (or not), our choices are already implicated in othergeographies and histories that we cannot or care not to see. We may not“hear” the subaltern speak in “other worlds,” but let us at least admit thatshe exists as do we—on her back.

There is a brilliant ending to one of the most powerful essays ever writ-ten by postcolonial feminist critic Gayatri Spivak (1993) on the subaltern.The essay is a reading of Marxist feminist Bengali writer and activistMahasweta Devi’s short story “Douluti: the bountiful.” Douluti, a subal-tern woman, is a bonded female community prostitute in a rural commu-nity in Bengal in colonial India. Douluti, literally in Bengali, means ofwealth, and in the narrative of the story her position as prostitute signifies“traffic in wealth” (p. 95) through the sexually exploited female body. Atthe end of the story, she is found dead, lying on a large clay map of Indiain the rural school courtyard. In the morning, the village school masterMohan—who was going to teach his students about India via this map inthe courtyard—finds her body spread on it, lying dead. The body becomesthe aporia on the map. Mohan, confounded by this scene, finds himselfunable to teach the nation to his students at this point, for the bonded sub-altern woman’s aporic and super-exploited body spread on the nationalmap ruptures the official story of the nation he was going to tell.Mahasweta Devi ends with the haunting question: “What will Mohan donow? Douluti is all over India” (p. 94). Spivak, in her characteristic bril-liance, pushes this haunting through the nation into the global by asking“What will Mohan do now? Douluti is all over the globe“(p. 95) (empha-sis mine).

In this one elegant sweep, she calls attention to intersection of knowl-edge, pedagogy, violence, gender, nation, imperialism, the global, and theunseen centrality of the subaltern informing, underwriting, overwriting,and constituting this intersection. The only way Mohan can make sense ofthe contradiction of the dead subaltern woman’s body, now so visiblysprawled on the phantasmatic map of India, is to rethink the national nar-rative he was going to tell his students, and produce (if he can at all)another knowledge, another desire, engage in a different pedagogy, a dif-ferent imagination, a different protocol of reading and producing the



nation for the young students—the future of the nation, and the globe. Weare all Mohans—knowledge providers and producers—and we need torethink our maps for Douluti is all over the globe.

So what then should be the intellectual responsibilities and ethics guid-ing interdisciplinary work in communication studies in the current globalmoment? What should be the goals and performance of interdisciplinar-ity? In the interest of space let me advance a few points.

The Politics of Space

First, a transnational interdisciplinarity that attempts to probe the faultlines, and call attention to the conjunctures and disjunctures, of globaliza-tion and the hegemonies and inequities they produce, must focus on a pol-itics of space—on complex and yet often unmapped spatial connectionsand disconnections through which global despairs are produced (Gupta &Ferguson, 1998b; Grossberg, 1993a; Massey, 1994; Sassen, 1998). Insteadof focusing on a topic or object of study as seemingly fixed in, and a prod-uct of, a particular place, in our complex global scenario of un/predictablealignments, one tries, instead, to map the lines of connections and dis-connections. This is important because it enables us to see that an objectof knowledge in any given place may very well be linked to objects inother places on the other side of the international division of labor thatat a given time may apparently have little connection to the former.Doreen Massey (1994) has called such a perspective “a global sense ofplace” (p. 146).

Thus, for instance, how might the brutal massacre of hundreds of Mus-lims in the Western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 by Hindus be linked tothe outsourcing of jobs from the U.S. into India, the flow of globalfinance into India, and the overall growing Americanization of the nation.To understand the plight of Muslims and the resurgence of anti-Muslimsentiments in India, it is not adequate merely to see this as a singularinstance of ethnic massacre or cultural difference. This “instance” ofgrowing anti-Moslem sentiments in India is occurring in a larger neo-liberal climate in which the outsourcing of jobs (primarily from America)and the infiltration of global multinational corporations is producing ananxiety about declining Hindu traditions. This anxiety is often expressedthrough a need to hold onto some essence of Hinduism and its ideals thatfundamentalists fear are being eroded by the increasing Americanization ofthe country. For instance, in 2003, on Valentine’s Day, Hindu fundamentalistgroups such as Shiv Sena raided card shops, burned cards, and protestedValentine’s Day dances in hotels claiming that “Valentine’s day is noth-ing but a western onslaught on India’s culture to attract youth for com-mercial purposes” (news.bbc.co.ik/1/hi/world/south_asia/2749667.stm).


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Further, the government frequently mobilizes and fans the flames of thisanxiety as a way to deflect attention from its growing alliances with mul-tinational corporations. Hindu fundamentalism thus ironically becomes apolitical instrument that works not in opposition to cultural and economicglobalization, but one that enables it. Thus, a research project that studiesthe recent massacre of Muslims in the state of Gujrat would be at risk toreproduce an orientalist gesture unless it also attended to a global sense ofplace that addresses how the contemporary Muslim body functions as asite of contra/diction through which the tensions between the culturallogic of Hindu fundamentalism (Hindutva) and the economic logic ofneoliberalism are playing out. Methodologically, this means recognizingthe complex imbrication of the U.S. economy (and its reliance on off-shore markets), the Indian economy, the growing American culture inIndia, Hindu fundamentalism, and the history (past and present) of Mus-lims in India as producing a complex nexus in which the current plight ofMuslims is being reproduced and rearticulated. In other words, we wouldfall short if we were to just map this plight along the age old binaristicaxis of “difference”—that is, Hindu versus Muslim. Rather, we need tosee how this scenario might be part of what Amitava Kumar (2003) calls a“wider context” (p. xix)

The larger goal for the researcher recognizing the “always already”transnationality of any research study or object is to develop a criticalpractice and imagination that struggles (however incompletely) torespond to, and link together, the many intertwining political, cultural,and economic relations of globalization and their impact on a “place” orobject of study. What the scope of such relations should be—that is, howmany complexities and linkages the researcher should bring to bear uponher/his object of study—is an open issue (that would be determined partlyby the scope of, and questions guiding, a study). However, the more link-ages of the global in its articulation of the local and national (and viceversa) that one can situate one’s object of study in, the richer will be her/his ability to theorize the geopolitical depths of any “trans” in a transna-tional interdisciplinary project.

Geographies, Research, and (In)accessibilities of the Global

Second, a transnational interdisciplinarity must pay attention to the geog-raphies out of which interdisciplinarity is being performed. This is notmerely a plea for a mechanistic repetition of the scholar’s social andpersonal location—a trend so tiringly, and often unnecessarily, present inmuch of critical and cultural studies. Rather, it calls for a recognition thatthe geographies out of which we engage in interdisciplinarity may allowus to go only that far, they may allow us to see only that far, but that does



not mean though that we should not try to stretch as much as we can to seeas far as we can, even if that “far” may just be the sweatshop a few milesaway that we were not aware was there. Bruce Robbins (2003, p. 302)writes: “what about the experiences of people so far away that you willnever write about them.” The implications of Robbin’s statement are 1)that you do not even know they exist and/or if they do under what condi-tions, and 2) that your geography is so disconnected from theirs that youcannot travel into their boundaries, for travel is not merely a matter of dis-tance but also one of accessibility of certain populations and geographies.Thus writes Robbins:

a writer and intellectual who moves into a village of peasants in theFrench Alps must worry about his relationship to the people of the vil-lage. But shouldn’t he also worry about his relationship to people wholive in different mountains so far away that the question of relation-ship need never come up?

In other words, I am suggesting that transnational interdisciplinarity isvery much tied to, although not fixed by, the politics of the geographyfrom within which we perform it. From America, one sees, accesses,traverses, imagines, and theorizes, the transnational differently; fromBangladesh through another trajectory, another imagination, anotherdesire, another knowledge regime, and so on. In fact, it is worth notingthat one dominant description of globalization that is in circulation—theglobal flows and movements of people—is much more a product of awestern/northern public and intellectual imagination. From another partof the world, globalization may not seem centrally about the movementsof people but their unthinkable restriction and suppression.

To return to Robbin’s point, a transnational research impulse that triesto connect across and against borders must recognize that there are popu-lations, geographies, and knowledges quite outside of the purview of thetransnational, quite outside of the dominant regimes of power in global-ization that may remain untranslatable and inaccessible by our vocabular-ies as we attempt to map the global connections and disconnections ofknowledge and power. Such populations—usually subalterns—are simplyoutside of the equation of the global. These days, we too often blithelyand loosely declare that everything is touched by globalization, everyoneis becoming global, and so on. But that is not always true.9 Thus, the san-tals and dalits in India, for instance, are not global; they are not evennational perhaps (which is not the same as saying that their existence doesnot inform the nation). The logics through which they imagine theirbelonging in their particular society may not, and is often not, the logic ofthe nation or the citizen. For them, it matters little whether the “nation” is


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the central actor or the “global” is the central actor (not that they can evenbe separated). In their subterranean subaltern lives and societies, their logicof the social and belonging may be tribalism, religion and God, or just localcommunity-oriented “exchange” economics of handicrafts and arts. AsSpivak (2000, 2003) has suggested in her discussions of the “new subal-tern” globalization in the name of development, population control, rural-ity, health, environmental justice, etc. may today use the subaltern’s unseenexistence as “data” but that is not real accessibility; rather, the more suchrural disempowered populations end up as statistics in global registers ofresearch and development, the more inaccessible and untranslatable theybecome.10 Thus an interdisciplinarity that crosses geographical bordersmust recognize that, as Spivak (2003) suggests, for every crossing theremay be an impermeability that cannot be penetrated, and while we may beable to “cross” laterally, we are often not able to simultaneously engage ina vertical downward movement while connecting laterally across, through,and against geographical lines. This recognition is important to keep alivean awareness of the invisibilities of the global that always inform our intel-lectual imaginations, desires, and vocabularies in the North.

The issue, however, is how do we address this invisibility in practice?What methodological responsibilities would it entail? I want to brieflysuggest three methodological moves that may enable us to work throughthese issues: first, an engagement with history; second, a re-engagementwith ethnography; and third, an increased access to grassroots narrativesin order to counter official global and national narratives that define anyparticular “place.”

The discipline of communication studies (in the U.S.) needs a strongersense of history. This is historyless with a capital H and more with smallh. In much of critical scholarship in communication studies—dominatedespecially by the textual paradigm—there has been a significant disregardfor history. In rhetorical scholarship, for instance, Celeste Condit (1998),has lamented “the increasing dehistoricization of critical rhetoric”(p. 169) although this is true of communication studies in general.11

Indeed, communication studies has not been a very history-consciousdiscipline and, consequently, not very geopolitically conscious either.Historicizing (and I want to emphasize it with a small “h”) becomes evermore important in globalization if we are to resist mapping the worldthrough the globalized lenses of America. Without a sense of histor(ies)—multiple, conflictual, alternative, and those still unfolding—we would beprone to (and often do) lift concepts and theories such as those of “differ-ence” from our American geographies and map/match them onto othercontexts and geographies, while erasing histor(ies) in the process.

To say that we need a better sense of history is not to encourage adesire for a mere recording of details and facts about the “past.” Rather, it



is to access lived/material histories—of pasts and presents—includingsuppressed relations, narratives, memories, and desires of peoples, ideas,and objects.12 It is also to be well-versed in the dominant histories aboutour objects, so as to be able to see the slippages, leakages, anxieties, andtensions between official histor(ies) and the minority histories, for suchslippages may lead us into the aporias, the excesses, and the contra/dictions of our intellectual imaginations as we map “other worlds” and“other desires.” As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) has emphasized, the goalis to get to the “other side[s]“ of dominant histor(ies) so as to access“thought about diverse ways of being human, the infinite incommensura-bilities through which we struggle—perennially, precariously, butunavoidably—to ‘world the earth’ in order to live within our differentsense of ontic belonging” (p. 254). The issue then, as Meaghan Morris(1998) has also stressed in a different context, is not whether our scholar-ship can make “room” for history and historical contexts; but rather “whatit [our engagement with history] can do“ (p. 7). That is, what is it that wewill use history to do, how are we going to engage it in order to enablewhat kinds of shifts and ruptures in our intellectual imaginations anddesires? How will we use history, access history, in order to “undo” His-tory (capital H)?

Methodologically, this is not an easy task. Minimally, it requires ahuge time commitment, huge amounts of unlearning (of our available the-oretical currencies), and relearning (something that does not go well withthe American academic logic of publish or perish). But despite these insti-tutional constraints, it is necessary to recognize, and insist on, the impor-tance of bringing historical, material, and geopolitical depth to ourinterdisciplinary projects for without that kind of critical depth, our schol-arship today runs the risk of reinforcing a facile “cut ‘n’ paste” cosmopo-litical ideology that is increasingly becoming the cultural order of the day.

Let me return to the example of bastis in India that I alluded to earlierto flesh this out some more. I used this example to argue that this situationof inequality cannot be mapped through the framework of cultural differ-ence/identity and models of minority politics that make sense in the West.Theorizing this inequality would require a deep understanding of thelarger history of India, including histor(ies) of economic displacementfollowing Indian independence, the rise of a dominant upper middle class,and the new forms of displacements and replacements that are occurringdue to flows of global finance and culture, and the gradual privatization ofsociety under neoliberalism.

For instance, while many major metropolitan cities today witness aproliferation of bastis under economic liberalization and privatization ofculture—as more and more people from the lower economic strata ofsociety are being displaced into them—the “official” narrative of the


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nation continues to echo hollow sentiments such as “we will continue ourcommitment to the poorest of the poor.” At the same time that such senti-ments are expressed, eviction is on the rise and “squatter settlements”(another name for bastis) are pushed further and further into the fringes ofthe city to make room for high rises, gated apartment complexes, technol-ogy parks, and flyovers (freeways) etc. Such evictions that have occurredin alarming ways in cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi areoften also initiated by global environmentalists who push the governmentwho, for the fear of losing votes, is often afraid to initiate such initiativeson its own. Attempts to “clean up” cities and make the landscape attrac-tive to foreign investors and returning NRI’s (non-resident Indians) isoften the goal and charge of global environmentalists working on cityprojects.

Understanding the plight of bastis in this current conjuncture wouldmean a significant engagement with the interconnected history and con-text(s) that led to economic liberalization since the late 1980s, how that isconnected to, and different from the relatively closed-door economic pol-icies of post-independence India (which itself was a historical reaction toBritish colonialism), how the flow of capital from overseas diasporic andreturning Indians (and the cultural imaginaries that inform that flow) isresulting in a greater privatization of space (for example, posh high risesare often built with the money of overseas Indians who buy apartmentsfor holiday travel, leisure, retirement, or their aged dependent parents),how and why India has emerged as a major global technology backyard,and how World Bank-type environmentalists remain aligned with thegovernment to stage a new and clean Indian modernity. In other words, itis important to consider how the context of bastis may manifest the con-tradictions and tensions of the numerous unfolding narratives and rela-tions of neoliberalism (that are themselves post-colonial reconfigurationsof earlier historical relations) in the rewriting of a new privatized space ofcontemporary Indian modernity.

This kind of a contextualization that takes into account numerouslinked relations makes ethnography an important research method in glo-balization. There is now a growing recognition amongst scholars ofthe importance of engaging in (critical) ethnography in globalization inwhich our very notion of “the field” or “site” is complicated (for example,Appadurai, 1991; Gupta & Ferguson, 1998a; Ong, 1999, 2004; Vila, 2003among others). Such an ethnography that is able to link multiple relationsin order to study an “object” or “site” is one that would be, to use GeorgeMarcus’ concept “multisited” (cited in Vila, 2003, p. xxiii). GeorgeMarcus discusses the importance of a “multi-sited” ethnography thatdescribes the “connections and relationships among sites previouslythought incommensurate” (in Vila, 2003, p. xxiii).



Thus, to study the bastis as a site of inequality in contemporary Indiamay require us to also study the cultural imaginations and politics of othersites—for example, the increasingly privatized upper middle class (whathopes and desires constitute their lives? how do they imagine themselvesas “modern” national subjects?), the new expanding spaces of neoliberal-ism (such as malls, gated communities, theme parks, water parks, sprawl-ing health clubs all of which require expansive lands and spaces), andoverseas diasporic Indians who often want to remake India through theirown visions and imaginations from afar and channel money and resourcesinto the nation for such a purpose. Such a multi-sited ethnographicimpulse would better enable us to map the nexus of seemingly discon-nected relations and sites through which a new “modern” imaginary isemerging in India and how the current displacement of bastis into theever-shifting fringes of the city is the dark outcome of that.

Finally, a transnational interdisciplinarity that attempts to identify theunseen and suppressed relations of the global, as they inform a particular“place,” would ideally benefit from engaging the works, materials, andnarratives of numerous local alternative grassroots networks. In statingthis, I want to emphasize that it is not a call for engaging in the now fash-ionable “post-national” desire for theorizing “globalization from below”or advocating a global grassroots activism that we find in some recentscholarship (for example, Appadurai, 2000; Hardt & Negri, 2000).While the politics behind the move to theorize global activism frombelow might be understandable, the move however is somewhat troublingnot only for the idealism that often seems to inform desires to theorize“globalization from below” (for example, what organizational shapewould “globalization from below” take?)—but also for the potentialimplicit in such moves for grassroots interests of weaker nations in theeast/south to be elided by grassroots work in more developed nations.Additionally, calls for theorizing and envisioning “globalization frombelow” too often emerge from the liberal and leftist spheres (includingthe academy) of the north/west. That is, there already seems to be aparticular kind of cosmopolitan imagination, desire, and agency at workhere that enables such a conceptualization. For my purpose, I simply wantto assert the importance of accessing local/regional grassroot narrativesand struggles against the impact of neoliberalism in particular sites indifferent modernities (that may constitute our object of study) irrespectiveof whether they are engaged in grand visions of global cross-borderorganizing.

In India, there is now a growing (although still limited) grassrootseffort against the effects of privatization, especially in terms of theirimpact on slum/pavement dwellers and their right of abode in the city.In the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), one such group is the


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Chhinunamul Sramajibi Adhikar Samiti (CSAS) (Organization for theRights of Uprooted Laboring People) that attempts to struggle againstdemolitions and forced evictions being brought about by the privatizationof city spaces. For instance, the visit of British Prime Minister John Majorin 1997 had resulted in an unprecedented removal of homeless pavementdwellers and hawkers—a common sight in Kolkata—by the Left govern-ment of the State (that thus far had usually guarded, however incom-pletely, the “rights” of the homeless) in order to portray a city orderly,clean, and fit for British investment and collaborations. CSAS is activelyinvolved in mobilizing peoples and local governments at the grassrootslevel. While such grassroots organizations are clearly not outside of thejurisdiction of national power regimes, understanding their narratives andstruggles against the privatization of city spaces and the displacements ofpoverty stricken populations from the visible topography of the city, givesus a better sense of the (im)mobile and disposable lives of homeless peo-ple and slum dwellers whose bodies must be constantly re/moved in orderto attract global finance, culture, and flows of technology, especially asparts of Greater Kolkata (the “new town”) become transformed into effi-cient technology parks.

What I have outlined above as some possible means to address theproblematics of accessing the unseen and seemingly disconnected rela-tions of the transnational is a daunting and challenging task. I have nogrand formula for what sweeping movements need to occur in ourresearch communities in communication studies in the U.S. as we increas-ingly conduct our scholarship—whether recognized or not—against andin relation to the violent and constantly shifting relations of neoliberalism.All I know, and want to insist on, is that the institutional structures of theU.S. academy make it difficult, if not impossible, for many to conducthistorically and geopolitically situated deep scholarship. In saying this,I do not mean to minimize some excellent critical scholarship that hasbeen, and continues to be, done in communication studies in the U.S.academy and I have learned much from such work. Rather, I want toinvite a recognition of the fact that today some sophisticated and geopolit-ically grounded critical and cultural studies projects are also beingproduced in academic institutions outside of America and the NorthAtlantic axis (whose vocabularies rarely travel into communicationsresearch—especially within the National Communication Association(NCA) circles—in the U.S.). Part of this ability to produce such deepscholarship has to do with the fact that the institutional logics of many ofthese places are significantly different from the machinic logics of theU.S. academy (depth instead of breadth tends to be valued more) thusenabling the kind of geopolitically and historically grounded work thatI am arguing for here. At one level, the issue to recognize here, then, is



also the extent to which some of the everyday values of the U.S. nationare internalized in our academic cultures and communities—for example,an emphasis on quantification, i.e., a high number of publications that canbe measured as an index of one’s scholarly value (thus encouragingbreadth instead of depth), or an unapologetic national(ist) insularity (thusencouraging an evasion of history and geopolitics).

The Challenge of Intellectual Translation in Globality

In recent years, an emerging, although still scant, area of inquiry in criti-cal global studies has been translation (Abbas & Erni, 2005; Chakrabarty,1998; Liu, 1999; Spivak, 1993, 2001 among others). Translation isincreasingly becoming an important area of inquiry precisely becausethere is a critical recognition amongst many scholars that “we can nolonger talk about translation as if it were a purely linguistic or literarymatter”; rather we need to pay attention to how in trajectories of globalexchange and relations, meanings and cultures circulate, how they trans-late (or not), and what larger geopolitical and economic structures informthese dynamics (Liu, 1999, p. 1). Intellectual practices have always beenimbedded in the politics of translation, so to that extent, the connectionbetween translation and intellectual practices is not new. For instance,given the larger geopolitics of knowledge production the “third world”has always had to bear the burden of speaking to the West and situateitself within western frameworks of knowledge for legitimacy (but thereverse has not been true). Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) has done a brilliantjob of elaborating this in relation to the field of history where he haspointed out how Western modernit(ies) and the protocols of history writ-ing in the West have been able to produce knowledge without feeling anyneed to touch upon the frameworks of the non-west, but scholars in andfrom the non-west have never been able to afford this “asymmetric igno-rance” (p. 28) without appearing outdated or old-fashioned.

But as we move from an old “three world” configuration to the messi-ness of an unequal “global culture” where the lines between the “third”and “first” do not hold in ways they used to, and where global flows (aswell as stasis) of peoples, ideas, capital, and culture are imbricated in thestruggle of productions of various modernities, this situation becomescomplicated. In fact, I would argue that in our current time, the verybattle over modernity is centrally imbricated in a politics of translation.Notions such as “rights,” “equality,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “justice”—which we generally tend to be committed to in critical interdisciplinaryscholarship—become ever more complicated as they undergo a process ofmultiple translations across multiple contexts. Our frameworks for sensi-tively and reflexively comprehending such notions become inadequate in


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today’s world unless we are able to translate them across geographies andtemporalities, and such a translation would simultaneously require a trans-lation of our own selves and our intellectual imaginations and assumptions.Further, such a translational impulse must be nonhegemonic for we mustremember that today translation also functions as a hegemonic instrumentof global capitalist formations that actively chase and seek out cultures of“difference” to sell products. So in talking of translation, I am talking of asubversive and nonhegemonic ethos of translation.13

For instance, the notion of “human rights”—that is so written by awestern normative framework—is predicated on a “collective subject”whose existence must be recognized at an epistemic and/or institutionallevel by the nation-state or global civil society (Cheah, 1999). But whathappens when that is not the case, when there are groups fighting for their“rights” and “freedom” and yet we are not able to translate it as such, forwe do not recognize or legitimize them as a collective subject. The Tali-ban and the Al Qaeda (constructed more as guerilla groups in westernimaginations)—representing what they saw were the dissenting forces inthe Middle East against U.S. imperialism—were certainly fighting fortheir “rights” and “freedom.” They saw themselves as engaging in somekind of a freedom movement based on particular assumptions about“civility” that are outside of North Atlantic time. Not only was there per-haps a different vision and version of modernity informing the politicalgoals of that group, they were clearly operating on a framework of“rights” that is difficult for us to translate for there is no organized subjectwith political recognition from a dominant level of state or global civilsociety at work here. To understand what resulted in a phenomenon like9–11 then is to necessarily get caught in politics of translation—to rethinkconcepts such as rights, freedom movement, political collectivity, com-munity, and so on. To say this is not to condone the violence of 9–11 butto understand it through other imaginaries and other desires so as to makebetter sense of it.

This is not a liberal argument for pluralism or relativism. Rather, it is arecognition that in our current times, when the “global” and the “postco-lonial” constantly and violently bump up against each other in the circula-tion of meanings and relations (and never in equal ways or with anypredictable outcomes) translation (of other worlds, other dreams, otherhopes, and other desires) becomes an ethical responsibility—a responsi-bility that must remain simultaneously attentive to the untranslatabilitiesof the global as its translatabilities. Lee and LiPuma (2002) note that“developing a critical perspective on [global] circulation will requiremoving beyond disciplinary boundaries and placing it in a conceptualspace that encompasses some of the most difficult and troubling issues incontemporary cultural and philosophical analyses (p. 192).” In my view,



these would be issues such as, but not only, reflexivity, belonging, ethics,rights, democracy, freedom, community, collectivity, and morality—issues that continue to be the center-piece of most humanities and socialscience research.

To this end, scholars working on critical global and post-colonial stud-ies have recognized the importance of “transnational literacy” (Spivak,2001, p. 15) as an urgent imperative of our times in order to understandand translate the affects, effects, sense and sensibilities of living, being,becoming, and belonging that inform other modernities and other tempo-ralities (where the other is not just far away but simultaneously inter-twined in, and interrupting, our own temporalities and modernities). At anintellectual and scholarly level to follow this imperative would be to ask,for instance, what recodings and resignifications of our theories occur inother temporalities and modernities? What works of our theories and whatdoes not when we rethink our theories against the politics of the global?Why for instance does the dominant “postcolonial” vocabulary of theAmerican academy begin to “fail” and exhibit a dire need for revampingwhen mapping a situation like Hong Kong, which after 1997 is a uniquepost-colonial space that moved from being under one colonial power toanother, and that is ironically more “western” and “advanced” than thecurrent power regime to which it is has been annexed or “returned”(China)?14 In what ways are maps of America written into our theoriesand how do we remap those maps so as to see the lines of other maps on,over, under, against, and across them?

A subversive ethos of translation complicates the entire process ofstudying cultural politics and cultures. It raises larger questions such aswhat is being translated into what,15 who is always forced into a perpetualmode of translation (and who has the power to resist being translated), atleast translation that is connected to some kind of epistemological vio-lence), what are the circuits of economy that enable translation, and, mostimportant, where do our translational impulses end up—do they functionto reinforce the larger geopolitics of knowledge, or do they attempt toreverse the flow of such politics? Instead of reinforcing a center/margindialectic, a subversive ethos of translation remains ethically aware of thehistorical and geopolitical interconnectedness of languages, concepts, andtheories. The goal is to allow, as much as possible, intellectual concepts,theories, and languages, that arose in western or other geopolitically dom-inant modernities that have acquired a global circulation, to come intocollision (and this is central) with cultural maps, relations, and politics ofcultures and nations outside of western modernit(ies)/ geographies. Inother words, the goal, ironically, is to “fail”; that is, fail to find direct cul-tural equivalences for our theories and concepts in “other worlds” for it isin that failure that we specifically and consciously enter a translational


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mode including the translation of our experiential worlds (for example,our experience of dominance, marginality, desire, intimacy, notions ofprivate/public, and even our experience of “feelings”—a topic on whichwe need more work).

In the interest of space, a small example may suffice here. One of themost influential “key words” circulating in the Anglo/Euro pathways ofcultural and critical studies is hybridity. The basic logic upon which thisconcept has come into being (although now it has been pulled in differentdirections and subject to different theoretical debates) is that with (Anglo)colonial modernit(ies), cultural borderlands were produced, thus produc-ing the colonized as a hybrid subject (for example, Anzaldua, 1987;Bhabha, 1994). What is often not addressed is that discussions of hybrid-ity, for the most part, in the post-colonial critical literature, takes Anglo/Euro modernity as the rough starting point from which to engage in dis-cussions of hybridity. And the hybrid subject, as some have rightlylamented, is too often coded as a politically and culturally disruptive sub-ject (i.e., a progressive identity) (Grossberg, 1993a; Ong, 1999, 2004;Shome, 2003, among others). The trajectory in post-colonial theorizationsof hybridity often looks like this: Anglo modernity—colonialism—hybridity—culturally/politically disruptive or subversive.

And yet, for instance, a 5000-year-old country like India, that has seennumerous invasions (for example, Aryans, the Huns, Sakas, Pathans,Moghuls, and later Europeans) had to open itself up to, and absorb,numerous cultural forces and transnational flows long before the adventof western modernity and western colonialism. This is evidenced in cui-sine, arts, textiles, clothing, literature, architecture etc. (and this is wherethe Hindutva movement remains facile in that it is able to argue for Hindufundamentalism only by engaging in a deliberate historical blindedness).Thus, the moment of hybridity was not the moment of (Anglo/European)colonial modernity. While with British colonialism and today globaliza-tion, new forms, dialectics, and dynamics of hybridity may have beenproduced, the logic of hybridity has, for the most part, underwritten thehistory of India. Radhakrishnan (1996) for instance, suggests that anaspect of the “postcolonial predicament” is that hybridity is “written intothe postcolonial experience and that there is a relationship of historicalcontinuity. . . between colonialism and nationalism” (p. 159). Indeed, cul-tural hybridity is precisely the signature through which the nation form inIndia has been imagined for a while now—the famous (conformist) slo-gan of “unity in diversity” that every school kid has had to recite at somepoint in her/his schooling.

Such imaginations of hybridity have also played out in popular culture,the most notable being the famous Hindi song in a 1950s Bollywoodfilm: “mera joota hai japani, phir bhi dil hai hindustani.” In Imaginary



Homelands, Salman Rushdie, writing nostalgically about the hybrid Bom-bay of his childhood, translates the song in the following way: “O myshoes are Japanese/These trousers English, if you please/On my head, redRussian hat/My heart’s Indian for all that (1991, p.11).” In other words,hybridity is already subsumed into and guarded by the official and popu-lar imagination of the nation. Using the category of hybridity, in theIndian context, as a means through which to assert oppositionality thendoes not get us too far. To recognize such issues is to confront theuntranslatability of the Indian context in relation to normalized assump-tions of hybridity that frequently circulate in (western) critical scholarshipin which hybridity too often is associated with rupture. And such recogni-tion can come about when we engage in a deep understanding of the his-tor(ies) [and geographies], outside of British colonialism, through whichthe Indian nation has been violently made, unmade, and remade.

Again, I recognize full well the kind of time, unlearning, and relearningthat such deep-seated historically conscious work requires. But still, Iwant to argue for its importance. Even if we can partially begin to movein this direction—despite our institutional constraints—we would alreadybe engaging in serious transnational interdisciplinary work that allows ourNorth Atlantic centric theoretical categories to be thrown into crisis byother times and other spaces. All this is to say, in conclusion, that in con-ditions of globalization, it is imperative to rethink our methodologicalpractices and intellectual imaginations in order to see how and if theycross over into the various unseens, unknowns, and unthoughts of globality.Simply put, the goal is to rethink our research frameworks including inter-disciplinary ones that we so easily think represents a greater flexibility ofknowledge, and see if we can hear in them the collisions and collusions,as well as the sounds and silences, of national maneuverings, geopoliticalviolences, diverse yet intertwined histories, and complex spatialities.

NOTES

1. See, for instance, Disciplinarity and Dissent edited by Nelson and Gaonkar (1996);Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003), among others. There has been, aswell, a plethora of conferences on this subject, for instance, “Flexible Knowl-edges: Interdisciplinarity, Globalization, and the Future of the University” heldat Indiana University in 2001 is only one example. In our field, see also Gross-berg (1993b, 1996a) for disciplinary politics of communication—more in relationto cultural studies.

2. Please note that I am suggesting this in relation to much of cultural and criticalstudies in communication in the United States academy. Cultural studies in fields suchas anthropology, geography, etc. have recently witnessed more engagements withthe transnational. Further, in the field of communication studies within the U.S.,there are also clearly some exceptions (and exceptions are just that—exceptions).


32 R. Shome

Important cultural studies work in the U.S. in our field—particularly within theNational Communication Association (NCA) and the International Communica-tion Association (ICA)—as Larry Grossberg (1993a, 1996b), Miller, Govil, N.,McMurria, J., & Maxwell, R. (2001), Miller & Lawrence (2001), Miller,Lawrence, G., McKay, I., & Rowe, D. (2001), Michael Curtin (2002, 2003)among others, have clearly engaged with important questions regarding the cul-tural politics of the global (and there is now also a growing group of youngerscholars interested in such topics). As I make this point, I am talking of generaland representative tendencies within interdisciplinary communication scholar-ship—particularly within NCA and ICA—in the U.S. academy, and not thehandful of exceptions that exist.

3. When I point to the “nation-centered-ness” of much of interdisciplinary work incommunication studies in the following sections, I am talking not just of thenation in terms of territoriality—but more the American and North Atlantic cen-tric logics that inform our intellectual imaginations and vocabularies in the U.S.

4. The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Group is clearly not the only site that has offeredsuch interrogations; the works of Latin American and African cultural studiesalso played an important role in this. Indeed, there is now a growing conversationabout what the globalization of cultural studies means (See also, Abbas & Erni,2005; Chen, 1998). Further, important journals such as Positions, Traces, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Public Culture, among others, regularly publish work thatattempts to subvert the Anglo-centrism of cultural studies. In addition, the factthat Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, India, Africa, Latin America, have emergedas major sites for new kinds of cultural studies work that attempts to break awayfrom the vocabularies of the British, American, or Australian schools, is alsoimportant to note here.

5. For a fuller discussion of this argument in relation to communication studies(and especially NCA circles) see my (in press) “Challenges of internationalwomen of color in higher education in the United States: The complicated rightsof belonging in globalization,” In O. Swartz (Ed.), Communication and social jus-tice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, in press.

6. For instance, Radhika Mohanram (1999), in her critique of Chandra Mohanty’s(1991) seminal but now dated essay “Under western eyes,” has shown how in thecontext of New Zealand, multiculturalism is seen as a danger by disempoweredaboriginal indigeneous groups who much prefer and hold onto biculturalism—partnership sharing between Maori and Parekha—so as to prevent their originalrights from being usurped by the entry of Asians, often in state-sanctioned hege-monic locations, into the cultural equation.

7. See also Dube, 2002; Grossberg, 1993a; Ong, 2004; Shome, 2003.8. See here also Appadurai’s (2000) discussion of the politics of citation in Social

Science research. Further, I am not suggesting that a “pure” knowledgeuntouched by power is possible. All I am referring to is knowledge that was notinstitutionalized in British colonial India, and that often circulated in variousalternative spheres—coffee houses, local neighborhood educational forums,street theater, poetry, novel, folk songs, and more. These were sites throughwhich a particular nationalist pedagogy was secured and enabled in resistance todominant modes of education in British controlled universities. Additionally, this



is not an argument against theory building (which I recognize requires citationsand references to other theories). Rather, it is about recognizing how the appa-ratus of citation through which “research” is recognized itself is implicated inlarger geopolitics. Imagine a research paper submitted for publication in com-munication studies journals in which almost every “reference” is to someonefrom an/other world whose works may not have entered mainstream circuitsand politics of publication in the West. In fact, it is important to consider howour citation pages at the end of published articles in communication studiesmight reflect particular mappings, scriptings, and reinforcements of the (U.S.)nation and its regimes of knowledge.

9. In fact, in my reading, one of the most interesting and problematic implicationsof Hardt and Negri’s (2000) theory of globalization in the Empire is that it endsup erasing the question of subalternity or does not offer any cogent argumentsfor rethinking subalternity in globalization. In suggesting that there is no outsideof the supranational entity or monolith they call Empire, they erase our abilityto theorize the possibility of the subaltern who always exists outside of the struc-tures of the nation and the global. The moment the subaltern acquires entry orrecognition in regimes of power—even if articulated into the framework of the“multitude,” the subaltern ceases to be subaltern (which is why there is a differ-ence between “minority” and “subaltern”).

10. See here Spivak’s recent theorizations of the problematics of the “new subal-tern” in globalization. Her arguments have been elaborated in various placesbut Spivak (2000, 2003) provide a coherent discussion of this problematic.

11. While Condit (1999) rightly expresses concerns about the significant absence ofhistory in rhetoric scholarship (and also cultural studies) I respectfully parthowever, with some of her description of cultural studies and the framing of thehistory question in relation to that description. The engagement with historythat is being advocated in my argument has to do with critically engaging minorand oppositional histories in order to engage in a rethinking of historicity inglobalization.

12. The issue of how to write “minor” history has, for a while, now been an impor-tant topic in cultural/postcolonial studies, especially as manifested in the worksof South Asian and Latin American Subaltern Studies group, as well as somerecent works such as Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). Given thelarger goals of this essay, and writing as a nonhistorian, theorizing in depth themethodological dilemmas of history writing (that have been elaborated else-where) is outside the scope of this essay. My aim here is simply to assert thecentrality and importance of “explicitly” engaging historical contexts (whichwould include suppressed presents and pasts) in any research method in the cur-rent global moment. I put “explicitly” within quotes because I believe that thegeneral disregard for history in our field itself is a historical move (i.e., the desireto evade a critical engagement with history and geopolitics is already situated inparticular historical and geopolitical desires).

13. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer for this point.14. For a good theorization of such significantly different post-colonial politics and

logics of Hong Kong, see Abbas (1997).15. I thank the anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this point.


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Documents

Interdisciplinary Research and Globalization, Communication Review, December 2006