Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The global postmodern 209
local are inextricably intertwined, in turn leading to the modernized reinvigoration
of a culture that continues to be labelled and widely experienced as ‘Cantonese’. In
other words, what counts as ‘local’ and therefore ‘authentic’ is not a fixed content,
but subject to change and modification as a result of the domestication of
imported cultural goods (154–5).
Globalization may be making the world smaller, generating new forms of cultural
hybridity, but it is also bringing into collision and conflict different ways of making the
world mean. While some people may celebrate the opening up of new global ‘routes’,
other people may resist globalization in the name of local ‘roots’. Resistance in the
form of a reassertion of the local against the flow of the global can be seen in the
increase in religious fundamentalism (Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism) and
the re-emergence of nationalism, most recently in the former Soviet Union and the former
Yugoslavia. A more benign example of the insistence on ‘roots’ is the explosive
growth in family history research in Europe and America. In all of these examples,
globalization may be driving the search for ‘roots’ in a more secure past in the hope of
stabilizing identities in the present.
Globalization is a complex process, producing contradictory effects, in changing
relations of culture and power. One way to understand the processes of globalization
is in terms of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. From the perspective of the post-Marxist
cultural studies appropriation of hegemony theory, cultures are neither something
‘authentic’ (spontaneously emerging from ‘below’), nor something which is simply
imposed from ‘above’, but a ‘compromise equilibrium’ (Gramsci, 1971: 161) between
the two; a contradictory mix of forces from both ‘below’ and ‘above’; both ‘commercial’
and ‘authentic’; both ‘local’ and ‘global’; marked by both ‘resistance’ and ‘incorporation’,
involving both ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. Globalization can also be seen in this
way. As Hall (1991) observes:
what we usually call the global, far from being something which, in a systematic
fashion, rolls over everything, creating similarity, in fact works through particularity,
negotiates particular spaces, particular ethnicities, works through mobilizing
particular identities and so on. So there is always a dialectic, between the local and
the global (62).
Hegemony is a complex and contradictory process; it is not the same as injecting
people with ‘false consciousness’. It is certainly not explained by the adoption of the
assumption that ‘hegemony is prepackaged in Los Angeles, shipped out to the global
village, and unwrapped in innocent minds’ (Liebes and Katz, 1993: xi). A better way of
understanding the processes of globalization is one that takes seriously, not just the
power of global forces, but also those of the local. This is not to deny power but to insist
that a politics in which ‘local’ people are seen as mute and passive victims of processes
they can never hope to understand, a politics which denies agency to the vast majority,
or at best only recognizes certain activities as signs of agency, is a politics which can
exist without causing too much trouble to the prevailing structures of global power.