Overcoming the National Paradigm through Transcultural Media Studies

Hamburg.
The main ECREA 2010 conference starts with a keynote by Kevin Robins, whose focus is on transcultural communication. In this, ‘transcultural’ is a very specific term, and different from transnational, international, intercultural, and other similar terms: this is not about an interaction of one supposedly distinct entity (for example, of one nation with another, or of ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’) with another, but about a more complex traversing of boundaries that more closely describes the interchanges and crossovers that actually do happen. Recent research, especially in Europe, has been pushing especially in this direction, not least also to deal with the complexity of a changing Europe.

The key difficulty with this is that it has been connecting with agendas beyond communication research – sociological and anthropological migration research, for example. Crucial to such transcultural research in Europe is that Europe itself has changed – it has become larger and more complex, and is facing the challenges of global migration. Germany, for example, is currently experiencing some very acrimonious debates about migration, and especially some ugly right-wing islamophobic dog-whistling about migration from Muslim countries.

We now have a new dynamic, in which people who live in Europe (including migrants) have multiple affiliations towards various cultural contexts, and this challenges the nation state as a place of belonging. The pre-eminence and centrality of the national order is in decline; the notion of primary loyalty to one place is now misleading, and has little relevance to migrants in the contemporary world.

In this transcultural agenda, communications and media are a crucial component; transculturality has been made possible by developments in both cheap global transport and multi-channel global communication. We all now have a potentially larger experience than we had before – it has shifted from the diminishing national experience to a much wider, freely shifting transcultural media experience.

Transcultural (communications) research has been able to see what’s happening – it has tracked those changes, though not completely analysed them. This is important in and to media research, as mainstream media research has not fully seen it; mainstream media and communication research either remains shaped predominantly by the national paradigm, or exists as merely international communication studies, ignoring transcultural aspects.

What we must now recognise is that the ‘imagined community’ model of media reproducing a cultural, national community no longer applies particularly well; we must move beyond a methodological nationalism (a grounding of methodology in nationally-focussed research interests), and reconceptualise the societies and peoples we research. How do we find ways to talk about transcultural groups and peoples without using the nation state as a a frame of reference; how do we de-nationalise media and communication studies?

The national mentality and frame is deeply embedded in us, of course; nationalism, the national perspective, is in our syntax and grammar, in how we observe the world. Even within transcultural media studies, in fact, the national paradigm has been difficult to overcome; it is very powerful. National stereotypes persist, even here; the divide between ‘mainstream’ and ‘other’ cultures still influences the analysis.

Such methodological nationalism still inserts itself even into critical approaches, then; researchers must begin to think beyond the national paradigm, must think transculturally. The language of methodological nationalism – of imagined communities, of unproblematised national bonds upheld by diasporic communities even at long distance, comes easy, even if in truth the members of these dispersed and distant communities don’t simply maintain a national identity that is identical to that of people in their ‘countries of origin’, but altered and and affected by their personal experience. The reality is far more complex than our established language will allow for.

Within the term ‘diaspora’, for example, there are a host of predetermined assumptions about people’s identities, relationships to their ethnic background, and/or patterns of media use; such terms are diminishing rather than enabling, ultimately. How do we talk about these people as people, rather than as a diasporic community, then? How do we challenge these seemingly straightforward and simple words, which inherently channel our observations in specific directions? How do we allow for people who have no stable, easily described identity, but are more complex than that? We must be extremely reflexive about the terminology we use in transcultural research.

And after all, the patent reality is that every society lives by the transcultural, has always been transcultural; but this has been disavowed by the predominant national discourse.