Imagining the Global Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West

Abstract

This book explores these questions through an examination of the transnational forces at work in the relationship between three sites (listed in alphabetical order throughout the book): France, Japan, and the United States. These sites were chosen in response to global media scholars Marwan Kraidy and Patrick Murphy's call for a "multisited, translocal approach" to global communication studies "working comparatively between and within various locals" (2008, pp. 346, 351, emphasis in orginal; see also Shohat, 2002, p. 78). A number of other scholars have pointed to the need to move beyond the recognition that "globalization means radically different things to different people in different places" (Sorge, 2005, p. 8) to explore what we can learn from these differences. A translocal approach focuses on the concrete conditions under which various local/national environments relate to each other in a globalized world.While working comparatively, a translocal perspective moves beyond a traditional comparative approach by putting the emphasis on the multifaceted relations, connections, and dynamics between the sites rather than on each site individually. It focuses, as media scholar Terhi Rantanen puts it, "on places rather than place" (2005, p. 12, emphasis in original). It draws from the works of scholars, particularly within the British Cultural Studies tradition, who have proposed to trace the trajectories of modern cultural practice through a