Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Reasearch position paper 6radio, a Romani television station, Romani programmes on mainstream television,Romani periodicals, Romani columns in mainstream publications, NGOs dealingwith Romani media issues, Romani Internet websites, Romani wire service,Romani list serves.The national policy environment not only frames the processes of gaining licensesto operate a station but can also have implications for actual content, what may ormay not be broadcast. One controversial decision was the British IndependentTelevision Commission’s closure of the Kurdish television channel MED-TV forits supposedly “political” content; it has subsequently reopened as Medya TV(Hassanpour, 1998).Theoretical approachesWhile the contemporary theoretical literature is full of evocative tropes andmetaphors of dispersion and its psycho-cultural effects which include notions ofhome and homelands; place and displacement, re-placement; feelings of longing/belonging;tensions between roots/routes, there exists little in the way of clearmodels or categories to think through this material.Appadurai’s well-known “ethnoscape” acknowledges the sense of a diaspora asspread across numerous national territorial boundaries, yet connected togetherthrough sophisticated media, producing “diasporic public spheres (…) in whichmigration and mass mediation co-constitute a new sense of the global as modernand the modern as global” (Appadurai 1996: 10). A diaspora is not static, and cruciallymay be scattered across a number of different national territorial boundaries.Sreberny (2000) has suggested the diasporic gaze may thus be differentiated fromthe exilic gaze, looking back toward the old homeland in nostalgia, or the ethnicgaze, looking inward to the new host environment with longing: the diasporic gaze“scopes the global”, looking all around for its sense of fragmented community.Dayan also stresses the dynamic nature of the diasporic imagination: “diasporasare incarnations of existing discourses, interpretants of such discourses, echoes oranticipations of historical projects. (…) Their maintenance (…) involves a constantactivity of reinvention.” (Dayan, 1998: 110). One issue that is repeatedlyalluded to is a putative tension for migrants between competing loyalties to oldhomes and to new ones, to different “national imaginaries”. Yet that is increasinglyseen as a stale and unfruitful mode of analysis. As Hargreaves (forthcoming)has suggested, migrants are “not engaged in a zero sum game. It is quite possibleto feel a heightened sense of interest in one society without this necessarily implyingloss of involvement in another.”Robins and Aksoy (2000) are rightly critical of media analysis that is built on stalerepetition of ideas of a single national culture, including that entering theEuropean cultural space, for example as a single “Turkish” culture. Rather theypropose a view that embraces change and the sense of a more porous dynamic culturalenvironment that embraces a cosmopolitan project instead of the nationalproject. This echoes a much wider and growing interest in cosmopolitanism, for159