Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 135
cultural goods as passive and unreflecting, and it represents cultural influence as
moving in a single direction – from the centre to the periphery. This, Tomlinson
(1997: 182) persuasively argues, misconceives the nature of cultural flows, which can
more profitably be understood in dialectic terms as an interplay between external
influence and local cultural forms, often producing mutation and hybridity.
Tomlinson’s (1997: 183) example of a hybrid form that has entered global popular
culture is hip hop, not a Black American form as is commonly assumed but actually
a ‘hybrid mix of Afro-American and Caribbean musical cultures’.
This leads us to the further point that the notions of core and periphery, integral
to the cultural imperialism thesis, are increasingly problematic in a contemporary
world of migration and diasporas. The periphery, if by that that one means Asian,
African and Latin American populations and cultures, has already irrupted into
the core, as demographic statistics on Los Angeles, London or, for that matter,
Leicester show 9 (see Chapter 3). The cultural consequences are complex and variable,
ranging from the mundane commodification of ‘ethnic’ foods, clothing and artefacts
visible to any casual observer of the urban British scene to more profound effects on
Western cultural and national identities. For Tomlinson (1997: 185), the increased
multiculturalism of European and North American societies in concert with
declining Western self-confidence in cultural matters means that one needs to reach
out for a more complex analytic framework than one in which a cohesive West
imposes its cultural forms on a weak periphery.
Lending weight to this analysis is the increasingly common depiction of globalisation
(Tomlinson 1997, Giddens 1999) as a ‘decentred process’. That is, although
there are blatant disparities of wealth and power between nations, with the United
States, Japan and Europe having vastly more influence in world affairs than, say, the
poorer states of Africa, it is difficult to argue that globalisation is under the control
of any one set of countries or corporations.
Indeed, under globalisation complex patterns of advantage and disadvantage have
emerged within and between countries, cutting across old dualities of North and
South or core and periphery. Thus, the growing economic prosperity of formerly
less developed countries such as China or South Korea, itself reflecting shifts in the
balance of economic power, can be causally linked in complex ways to the economic
decline, of, say, parts of the North-East of England, whose products have ceased to
be competitive in world markets. 10 And through the same dense web of economic
interconnections global capitalism also creates strange juxtapositions of pockets
of affluence alongside, and adjacent to, pockets of poverty in the same society: a
Hackney or Tower Hamlets, say, in close proximity to the finance houses of the City
of London.
The general point emerging here is that there is no longer a monolithic cohesive
core capable of dominating a weak periphery. The core-periphery model underpinning
the cultural imperialism thesis cannot capture the complexities of the flows
of cultural influence that characterise globalisation, and so a more nuanced account
emphasising the interplay of the global and local is needed.
Our conclusion, then, is that although global media corporations (e.g. Time