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  • Introduction: New Media Methodologies in the Global South
  • John Nimis (bio)

This collection of essays was assembled through a research workshop entitled “New Media and Mass/Popular Culture in the Global South,” funded through a Mellon grant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Humanities from 2012–2014. The workshop focused on parts of the world that are often considered “peripheral” in dominant narratives of globalization and post-modernity—regions often referred to as either “third world” or “postcolonial”—but that imagine and represent themselves, through modern cultural forms, as part of a larger global community and political economy. Our goals were to look at connections (historical and commercial) and parallels (aesthetic and political) in order to develop a vocabulary for talking comparatively about the Global South without that comparison passing through the Global North.

The foundational idea for the workshop was that technologies for communication and dissemination of texts have advanced to the point that it is no longer meaningful or useful to speak of a provincial, primitive Global South that is cut off from the world. There has long existed a cosmopolitan elite in/from the South that circulates physically, deals directly with European and American foreigners and their “world,” and experiences first-hand the looming figure of the Global North and its prejudices: power inequalities, racial or class discrimination, and ideological dissonances. However, for a majority of the world’s population, their experience of a larger world is refracted through complex narratives—such as films, music videos, and television series—many of which are produced for an audience on the opposite side of the world, but almost all of which are available anywhere through new media. This means that people in the Global South have access to a multitude of images and texts that give them a vivid sense of their own locale as “Other” to the North. However, both reading/viewing practices and the creative works of writers, film-makers, and other artists produce their own world-views, which are shaped by the “global” cultures they encounter, but not defined by them.

We insist that global structures and forces do not simply radiate from the purported “centers” of metropolitan Europe and North America, but rather that various sites in the Global South have always been and continue to be engaged in the human project. To say that the Global North and Global South are equal partners in the shaping of cultural expressions would efface a history [End Page 1] of violence and subjugation, but casting the Global South as only a victim, as excluded entirely, as anything but equally human would be to reproduce the logic that enabled that history of violence and subjugation. This special issue of The Global South, like the UW-Madison Mellon workshop, constitutes an attempt to veer away from the deep ruts in academic thinking when it comes to the Global South by modeling comparative research along South-South lines.

Comparison produces a specific kind of theoretical knowledge, positing unforeseen affinities and continuities that nuance our idea of the “universal” and bringing to light questions about the relationships between history and aesthetics that might not present themselves when working “inside” a single discipline or cultural context. When comparing concurrent and directly related forms or regions, one notices unexpected dissonances. Likewise, when putting two apparently different contexts into dialogue, unforeseen affinities and resonances appear. For these reasons, this collection pairs essays according to the questions they raise together rather than thematic, regional, or disciplinary coherence.

One of the solidarities upon which the workshop was founded was the interdisciplinary nature of each participant’s research, driven in each case by their specific region of focus. The first pair of essays by Wendy Willems and Darien Lamen addresses questions of disciplinarity and scope under the title Theorizing Global Flows from Within and Without. One implicit assumption that drives the research emanating from the workshop is that even when cultural analysis focuses on the “local,” it must also account for “global” structures and forces. I put each of these terms in quotes because they are often treated as well-defined opposites. The neologism “glocal” has gained some currency in recent years, but our interest...

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