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61 3 Transnational Economies of Representation and the Labor of the Traveling Subaltern O N E O F T H E central features of contemporary globalization has been the transnational circulation of cultural products. Various forms of cultural representation (film, media images, literature, television programs) now move rapidly across borders. These forms of cultural circulation are no longer reducible to clear-cut geopolitical forms of movement. That is, the production and circulation of films do not move in a uniform fashion from what was once called the “East” or “Third World” to the “West.” While global film and television programming is still dominated by U.S. industries, this dominance has been challenged by the rise of national programming and complex transnational cultural flows that are not limited to simple linear paths originating in the United States or Europe.1 Cultural industries and corporations (such as the media channel Al Jazeera and the “Bollywood” industry in India) that have emerged in non-Western contexts now have significant global reach.2 These shifting patterns of cultural circulation have been extended by the expansion of diasporic communities within the United States and Europe. Diasporic communities produce various cultural formations that travel back to and are consumed in their places of origin . Once again, this trajectory is not reducible to a linear movement from West to East. Meanwhile, writers, filmmakers, and other producers also increasingly target both their own national audiences and diasporic communities in the United States and Europe.3 Furthermore, cultural production itself has become globalized with the rise of transnational joint ventures in the making of films, the publication of literature, and the production of news. The intensity of such cross-border movement has simply accelerated with the spread of Internet technological access. In the face of such rapid changes spurred by globalization, there has been an expansion of work on transnational cultural production from cultural, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theorists.4 Early feminist scholarship on transnational cultural production centered on the problem of representing difference. The question of difference posed a critical dilemma for feminists 62 Transnational Economies of Representation interested in engaging in transnational research. This dilemma turned on a paradoxical problem that arises with the politics of representation of various forms of difference. On the one hand, transnational feminism arose in part in response to calls to broaden the subject of feminism and to move away from the depiction of feminism through dominant forms of Western feminism . Feminists writing in the 1980s and 1990s interrogated the category “woman” and provided the impetus for the inclusion of differences such as race, class, sexuality, and nation in arenas such as university curricula, academic anthologies, and research agendas.5 The task of feminist representation from this perspective was to combat the exclusion of difference. On the other hand, feminist theorists simultaneously began to argue that “difference ” itself was being commodified in problematic ways. The problem with representation in this sense was with the nature of inclusion itself. Feminist scholars writing within the field of postcolonial studies in particular argued that the representation of difference was in effect reproducing colonial relations of power. In her classic essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Gayatri Spivak argued that knowledge about the subaltern woman was entrenched in relationships of power in ways that made it impossible to recuperate her subjectivity or represent her voice. Thus, she argued, research and writing that sought to depict the subaltern as a subject that spoke in effect cohered “with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever.”6 While Spivak would later present more nuanced versions of her views, her conception of epistemic violence has had a lasting impact on transnational feminist research and theory.7 Her challenge to any form of cross-cultural or comparative understanding of non-Western women provoked broader questions about the relationship between power and representation that feminist writers continue to address.8 The rise of diasporic forms of cultural production has complicated but not necessarily displaced such questions regarding the commodification and deployment of difference and authenticity. Gayatri Gopinath, for instance , has shown how diasporic South Asian films such as Monsoon Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham rest on a “splitting of queerness and feminism ” that makes them palatable to liberal feminist and non–South Asian audiences.9 The films, as Gopinath illustrates, deploy representations of queer sexuality in ways that reinforce heteronormative ideals of family...

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