Communicating globalization in Bombay cinema: Everyday life,imagination and the persistence of the local

Abstract

Bollywood films increasingly portray the life-worlds of India's urban middle class and their transnational connections. Characters in the Hindi-language films use English phrases, cell phones and computers, celebrate Valentine's Day and are seen to frequent exercise clubs and shopping malls. The non-resident Indian, or NRI, symbol of the diaspora, is now a fixture in these films, often the hero and portrayed as part of the familial world and social circle of the urban middle classes. This, combined with the way a large portion of the films depict settings outside India, in Switzerland, Mauritius, the UK and North America, have led critics to question the Indian-ness of the films. This article examines the deterritorialized narrative of Bollywood film for its communication of globalization and transnationalism. It argues that Bombay films address broader debates in the study of transnationalism, such as the significance of the local in a postnational world. The films offer insights into the production of locality by communicating a sense of place as feeling rather than representations based solely on geography or territory, so making a case for a topography of affect as meaningful for a phenomenology of globalization.     

Vernacularization on the ground: local uses of global women's rights in Peru,China, India and the United States

The articles published in this special journal issue examine how global ideas about women's rights actually get used in four contexts – China, India, Peru and the United States. Our findings result from collaborative research conducted by teams in each country. We call the process of appropriation and local adoption of globally generated ideas and strategies vernacularization. In each country, vernacularization differed depending on the contents of the global women's rights packages at play, the work of vernacularizers and the different social positions they occupy, how human rights ideas are framed, the channels and technologies of transmission, and the local geographies of history and culture within which circulation and vernacularization take place. We find that vernacularization is a widespread practice that takes different forms in different kinds of organizations and in different cultural and historical contexts. Ongoing tensions between global and national rights ideas are quite common. Finally, our work brings to light two dilemmas in the way human rights are appropriated and used – a resonance dilemma and an advocacy dilemma – both arising from the disparity between human rights as law and human rights as a social movement.     

Charles Sheeler's imprecise precisionism

Abstract

In this article I address the significance of a series of images of New York skyscrapers fundamental to the work of American modernist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler (1883–1965). The article examines three works – a photograph, a drawing and a painting – produced between 1919–23 of the same scene: the rear of the Park Row Building, Manhattan. I argue that these images introduce imprecisions that disrupt the notion of Sheeler as the pre-eminent Precisionist artist. Following aspects of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory, I suggest that Sheeler's works adopt the language of rationalization whilst remaining critical of it. As such, the more positive conceptions of Sheeler's skyscraper works are juxtaposed against the actuality of the imprecision in the works, a dialectical move that unveils a negative critique of the rationalized culture of American modernity.     

The Price of 'Free' Trade: NAFTA and the Economies of Border Crossing in George Rabasa's The Floating Kingdom and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Abstract

Under contemporary US immigration policy, the US-Mexico border has become a new 'American Frontier', a 'Tortilla Curtain' that marks the edges of nation and of national knowledge. As a result of such US policies and the increased cultural and political tensions in the area that result from them, the border region has more clearly emerged imaginatively and culturally as, in Gloria Anzaldúa's terms, a 'third country'. This paper analyses that 'third country' and its relationship to an arbitrarily imposed and emphatically enforced political and cultural border in the work of the Chicano writer George Rabasa and the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Both Rabasa and Silko actively map a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures into the physical border region itself, engaging with the complex relationships between culture and nature, community and place. Both also emphasise an increasingly transgressive and transnational perspective. In this context, both writers highlight and expose the indeterminacy, fragility and permeability of borders of all kinds.     

Strangers to and Producers of Their Own Culture: American Popular Culture and Turkish Young People

Abstract

American popular culture is virtually everywhere, including Turkey. Turkey is a close ally of the United States and American cultural products have long been present in Turkey. How does the presence of American popular culture in Turkey affect young people? Employing a series of focus groups comprised of Turkish university students, we explored the meanings they attach to American popular culture and the place it has in their lives. What emerged was a portrait of Turkish young people constructing themselves and their imaginations from a multiplicity of traditions, including American, into an ever changing, shifting whole. The Turkish young people in this study seem to exemplify this as they blend their lives, not always easily or smoothly, around Turkish, American, European and numerous other cultures.     

The Paradoxical Unity of Chicago and Modern Boy

Abstract

This essay investigates how the interconnected nature of popular culture provides apt illustrations to reveal the ambivalent nature of modernity. I argue that the notion of modernity and popular culture emerged together in the early twentieth century in both the cities of Gyeongsung (old name of Seoul, Korea) and Chicago when technology and mass consumer culture were promoted over the world. Also, I examine how popular culture represents a complex of mutually-interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and its institutions in various ways as the image of modernity continues to build in the contemporary era. For this argument, I comparatively consider two movies released in 2002 and 2008 that exemplify the complexities of modernity in Chicago and Gyeongsung of the 1920s and 30s: Chicago and Modern Boy. Ultimately, this essay pays attention to how popular culture devotes itself to other images or narratives instead of referring to the real world and its output revisits the contemporary or past times in other places, being a means to produce and reproduce the accumulated images of the modern which shapes ceaseless simulacra of modernity over complexities of modernity.     

A Note on the Protomental System and “Groupishness”: Bion's Basic Assumptions Revisited

In identifying the unconscious basicassumption behavior of groups, Bion made asignificant discovery. Although he toyed with explainingthis behavior as instinctive, he ultimately postulatedthat it was a postnatal defense. However, there is astrong case for the biogenetic explanation. Thissharpens our understanding of some group andorganizational processes that have been hithertodescribed in terms of psychoanalytic concepts. It may also haveimplications for management of, and interventions in,groups and larger systems.     

Predicting Intentions to Report Administrative and Disciplinary Infractions: Applying the Reasoned Action Model

The present study focuses on the reporting ofadministrative and disciplinary irregularities. Thereasoned action model (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980) isapplied to predict officers' intentions to report illegal or irregular activities in the IsraeliDefense Forces. The findings show that although themodel's two predictors (attitude toward reporting andsubjective norm) significantly predicted intention to report, the effect of subjective norm wasmuch stronger than the effect of the attitude component.In spite of the military's strong formal system andalthough social forces have great potential to impose the reporting norm on an organization'smembers, actual reporting does not meet expectations.The results are discussed in light of the organizationalculture that develops as the combat unit struggles to survive in an extremely turbulentenvironment.     

“Come, Join Our Family”: Discipline and Integration in Corporate Organizational Culture

This article critically examines primaryprocesses and effects of the so-called neworganizational culture that is organized on theprinciples and practices of Total Quality Management(and its variations) and increasingly practiced incorporate organizations in the 1990s. The paperspecifically analyzes the effects of the organizationalcultural practices of family and"team" on the employee and discusses their role incorporate discipline, integration, and control. Data aredrawn from field research conducted in a largemultinational corporation and the analyses andinterpretive propositions are informed by a critical socialpsychoanalytic perspective. The paper disputes theconventional view that the practices of the "newculture" and its purported reform of thehierarchical, specialized, conflict-ridden workplaces oftraditional industrial organizationsempower employees and providemeaningful relationships in the workplace.It is argued, on the contrary, that these new designer culturalpractices serve as processes of regulation, discipline,and control of employee subject selves.