Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (review)

28o China Review International: Vol. 6, No. i, Spring 1999 4.This is according to Linda Chao and Raymond H. Myers, "China's Consumer Revolution: The 1990s and Beyond," Journal ofContemporary China 7, no. 18 (1998): 351-368. 5.See Teffrey R. Taylor, "Rural Employment Trends and the Legacy ofSurplus Labour, 1978-86," China Quarterly 115 (1988): 736-766. 6.Zhonghui Wang, "Township Public Finance and Its Impact on the Financial Burden of Rural Enterprises and Peasants in Mainland China," Issues and Studies 31, no. 8 (1995): 103-121. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, editors. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Asia-Pacific: Culture, PoJitics, and Society. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1996. vi, 399 pp. Paperback, isbn 0-8223-1712-5. This collection of fifteen essays is about cultural production during late twentieth -century global capitalism in the Asia-Pacific region. The organizing theme is the "transnational imaginary," defined as processes "by which national spaces/ identities ofpolitical allegiance and economic regulation are being undone and imagined communities ofmodernity are being reshaped at die macropolitical (global) and micropolitical (local) levels of everyday existence" (p. 6). While this theme is already staked out in studies oftransnational culture and globalization, the focus on the Asia-Pacific is noteworthy, although two essays concern Chinarelated contexts and agents. I will first describe die book's main concerns, then give an overview of the essays, and finally evaluate its possible relevance to readers of this journal. It is to the editors' credit that all ofthe essays in this diverse collection clearly address issues of "global and local." Rather then simply see globalization as the overriding oflocal cultures and identities by world systemic forces, the essays emphasize the diversity oflocal interactions with processes of global capitalism. While global capitalism constrains local interests and identity, local agents also maneuver within it to certain ends, constituting new patterns of interests, domination, and resistance in locales. The Asia-Pacific focus manifests itself in several ways. One is the formation ofidentities and legitimacy within the flows of global capitalism and power asymmetries within the Asia-Pacific region. Another© 1999 by University js jlow Asia-Pacific imagery and discourse as a geographically defined space has ' " come into being, the interests served by this image and discourse, and the mechanisms by which it is spread. Reviews 281 The collection's introduction and several ofthe essays criticize conceptions of transnational culture as flows and mixes devoid ofpower asymmetries. The whipping boy is Homi Bhabha's concept of"postcolonial" culture as "hybridization."1 In their introduction, the editors write: "The ongoing process ofdisruption and manipulation by global discourses and technologies is all too uncritically being rearticulated as a process of translating the transnational [sic] structuration of nation, self, and community into 'transitional,' in-between [sic] spaces ofnegotiated language, borderland being, and bicultural ambivalence" (p. 2). The editors shift attention away from such sanitized concepts oftransnational culture to "give more power to local heterogeneity and locally situated political struggles within the world-system model" (p. 6). The book is divided into three sections, the first being "Globalizations." The essays by Arif Dirlik and Mike Featherstone, by examining how "global" and "local " constitute each other, provide the conceptual background for subsequent essays. Masao Miyoshi echoes the introductory essay to argue that such faddish terms as "multiculturalism" and "postcoloniality," by suggesting that problems of racial discrimination and colonialism are already history, deflect scholars from the current phase ofcolonialism proceeding via transnational corporations. The next three essays focus on globalizing processes in the film industry. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto describes die global process ofAmericanization as the interaction of images ofAmerica with other local images to help constitute other national identities. Hamid Naficy examines images ofphobia and liminality in the films of Turkish and Iranian exiles in Europe and the United States to make a claim for a new transnational genre that transcends the marginalized classification of these filmmakers as "third-world" and "ethnic." Ella Shohat and Robert Stam look at the various ways in which the global media are implicated in and help constitute power asymmetries and patterns of domination. The second section, "Local Conjunctions," contains three essays, including the book's two ethnographic pieces, that examine...