In this most recent era of transnational movements of labor, commodity, capital, and information, distinctions among cultures and conditions of exile, diaspora, nationality, ethnicity, and race are both elusive and in need of elucidation. That need is particularly strong when such cultures and conditions are articulated in and through mass media. Studies of globalization and transnational media corporations in communications and media studies have rarely examined the continuing legacies of colonialism and imperialism. In turn, studies of postcoloniality, whose strongest disciplinary connections have been to literature, history, and anthropology, have been noticeably reluctant to address the realm of mass-mediated culture. Yet postcoloniality is routinely animated by the political economy and representational practices of mass-media technologies. Consider how the following mass mediated representations weave a tangled web of postcolonial relations. On the one hand, the nuclear bomb-toting terrorists of the “Crimson Jihad” in the recent blockbuster movie True Lies represent “peoples of the ‘Middle East’ ” by violently condensing Armenians, Turks, Lebanese, and Azeris along with, for example, Palestinians, Libyans, and Iranians. On the other hand, Armenian and Azeri war tactics in Karabakh are partly driven by international media coverage while that same war is consumed through mass media in Long Island and Los Angeles. To complicate the picture even further, Los Angeles-based institutions of mass media are driven by that city’s surplus labor pool of working-class immigrants from the “South.”
“Making Sense”