imagining the global Imagining the Global transnational media and popular culture beyond east and west Fabienne Darling- Wolf University of Michigan Press ann arbor Copyright © by Fabienne Darling- Wolf 2015 Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by- nc- nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2018 2017 2016 2015 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/nmw.12748915.0001.001 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Darling- Wolf, Fabienne. Imagining the global : transnational media and popular culture beyond East and West / Fabienne Darling- Wolf. pages cm. — (New media world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 472- 07243- 9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 472- 05243- 1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 472- 12079- 6 (e- book) 1. Mass media and culture. 2. Mass media and globalization. 3. Mass media— Social aspects— United States. 4. Mass media— Social aspects— France. 5. Mass media— Social aspects— Japan. I. Title. P94.6.D365 2014 302.23— dc23 2014020615 Artist Statement: The art I designed for the cover of this book is part of a series of works titled Signs of Our Times. This series of original paintings draws from visual elements—graffiti and other street art, signs, posters— collected in my travels in North America, Europe, and Japan to create phenomenological collages of contemporary urban life. Rather than focusing on my own engagement with landscapes in different parts of the world, this particular collage, however, ref- erences key elements of the book’s journey through reality television, news coverage of disaster, global magazines, French rap, and Japanese animation. Taken as a whole, the image illustrates the hybrid and polysemic nature of global culture. John Darling- Wolf Acknowledgments Many people supported me in various ways in the process of researching and writing this book. At Temple University, I am grateful to all of my colleagues who provided the intellectual and moral support that made this project pos- sible. In particular, I thank Carolyn Kitch for her continuing encouragement over the years, for her assistance in developing a book proposal, and, more generally, for serving as the most amazing (albeit frustratingly unattainable) role model. I am deeply indebted to Andrew Mendelson for his willingness to give me the flexibility to conduct research abroad in his capacity as chair of the Journalism Department and for his help and support as a friend. I thank Nancy Morris and Patrick Murphy for their willingness to read the manu- script, for their insightful comments, and for cheering me on when I faltered. Also crucial was Temple University’s financial support for my fieldwork pro- vided through two summer research grants and a sabbatical leave. At the University of Pennsylvania, I thank Marwan Kraidy for being a con- stant inspiration, for our numerous productive chats, for sharing his knowl- edge of academic publishing, and for his feedback on various drafts of the manuscript. I thank the Annenberg School for Communication for inviting me to present at the “Real Worlds: Global Perspectives on the Politics of Real- ity Television” conference. I also thank series editor Joseph Turow for helping me write a stronger and clearer book that people might actually want to read. My graduate students in the Media and Communication doctoral program were the source of many provocative conversations and revisions to the text. The reviewers’ comments and suggestions provided another invaluable guide to the numerous rounds of revisions. I am deeply thankful that they were will- ing to find the time in their busy schedule to read the manuscript and provide a fresh perspective on the text. Some of the materials included in chapter 1 appeared in Marwan Kraidy and Katherine Senders’ edited collection The Poli- tics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2011). The inspiration for chapter 2 came from an article I published in Journalism Studies 9, no.3 (2008) titled “Holier- than- Thou: News of Racial Tensions in a Trans- national Con- text.” Chapter 4 builds on reflections I started to develop in “Getting over Our vi • Acknowledgments ‘Illusion d’optique’: From Globalization to Mondialisation (through French rap)” (Communication Theory 18, no.2 [2008]). Perhaps most importantly, this research would not have been possible without the help of my informants in France, Japan, and the United States, who generously gave their time and opened their homes to me. I am particu- larly grateful to those informants in Japan who have kept me in touch with the rapid developments in Japanese popular culture throughout the years and who often helped me secure the basic material support and information nec- essary to do my work when I first entered their lives as a graduate student. Words cannot describe their generosity or how grateful I am for their con- tinuing involvement. I have chosen to refer to them throughout the book as “informants” rather than “participants” or “co-researchers” not to minimize their incredible contribution to my work but, on the contrary, to highlight how I am disproportionately benefiting from their willingness to share their knowledge. I am particularly indebted to my interpreter and research assis- tant Yasumi Okame who has been with me since the beginning even when I had very little to offer as compensation for her incredibly hard work. I also want to thank all the friends and neighbors on the “400 block” who have sup- ported my research in Philadelphia. The fact that my mentor Hanno Hardt will not get to read this book simply breaks my heart, but I am glad I had a chance to discuss the project with him the last time we were together in Slovenia. He will always be present in my writing even though he is no longer with us. I thank his wife Vida for her con- tinuing support and hospitality in the summers. Finally, my husband John and daughters Hana and Mei were instrumen- tal in bringing this project to completion. I am grateful for their willingness to accompany me in the field and to put up with my writing- induced absent- mindedness. I thank Hana and Mei for the role they have played in keeping me connected with Japanese animation and French television programming and for helping me keep things in perspective by bringing daily joy to my life. I thank John for serving as a patient sounding board for my ideas, for his un- wavering moral support, and for designing the book’s magnificent cover im- age. I dedicate this work to them with all my love. Contents Introduction: A Translocal Approach to Imagining the Global 1 1 Un- American Idols: How the Global/National/Local Intersect 22 2 Holier- than- Thou: Representing the “Other” and Vindicating Ourselves in International News 36 3 Talking about non- no: (Re)fashioning Race and Gender in Global Magazines 60 4 Disjuncture and Difference from the Banlieue to the Ganba: Embracing Hip- hop as a Global Genre 77 5 What West Is It? Anime and Manga according to Candy and Goldorak 101 6 Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Global Audiences 124 7 Lessons from a Translocal Approach— or, Reflections on Contemporary Glocamalgamation 142 Conclusion: Getting over Our “Illusion d’optique” 153 Notes 157 Bibliography 165 Index 185 Introduction: A Translocal Approach to Imagining the Global Winnie the Pooh, Snow White, Batman, Pikachu, Zorro, Spiderman, two flamenco dancers, and a kimono- clad Japanese girl shading herself with a waxed umbrella walked along with a collection of cowboys, Indian girls in saris, Venetian beauties, knights, Native Americans, ninjas, and musketeers (all d’Artagnans), toward the small center square. The beat of the Brazilian percussion band that had followed the procession’s journey through the hills from the neighboring village suddenly stopped as a man advanced toward the straw figure set atop a woodpile. The Carmentran (a friendly looking scarecrow dressed in old jeans and a lumberjack shirt) was to be set on fire to symbolize the end of winter— a local Southern French tradition on this carnival day. The short vignette above, drawn from my experience in a small French com- munity, illustrates the extent to which elements of “the global” have come to permeate individuals’ daily lives. As space- and time- defying communication technologies facilitate virtual mixing on an increasingly global scale, this kind of hybrid engagement with a wide array of globalized cultural forms has be- come commonplace. The fact that the culture we experience as “local” (or even, in this case, “traditional”) is inescapably embedded in broader global processes is increasingly difficult to ignore. Globalization theorists identify this “collective awareness of growing global interconnectedness” (Pieterse, 2009, p. 16, emphasis in original) as a defining element of our contemporary condition. They point to the fact that globalization is marked by a new role for the imagination in social life as individuals simultaneously envision “the global” and negotiate their own locality through their engagement with flows of cultural products, images, and information increasingly disconnected from their place of origin (Castells, 2000; Giddens, 1990; Tomlinson, 1999). “The global,” in other words, is a space that is envisioned and imagined rather than directly experienced (Appadurai, 1990, 1996, 2001). It is a space built upon the 2 • imagining the global spread of increasingly culturally mixed, or hybridized, mediated texts embed- ded in increasingly complex processes of transcultural exchange that result in the development of a “plurality of imagined worlds” (Appadurai, 1996, p.