Critical Intercultural Communication Studies – serie

This book investigates the experiences of a Chinese and Taiwanese community on the U.S.-Mexico border from a critical communication perspective. Based on ethnographic material from El Paso/Juárez, the book critically explores the processes of identity-crafting in accordance with the global geopolitical landscape. By examining the everyday communications within a group of transnational travelers and dwellers in between boundaries, the book illustrates how cultural practices and identities are strategically accomplished through communication. In tracing the forces behind these transnational movements and understanding the multiple worlds of travelers and dwellers, Culturing Interface brings to light the previously unheard voices of the Chinese people on the U.S.-Mexico border.

This volume occasions a dialogue between major authors in the field who engage in a conversation on cosmopolitanism and provinciality from a communication ethics perspective. There is no consensus on what constitutes communication ethics, cosmopolitanism, or provinciality: the task is more modest and diverse and began with contributors being asked what the bias of their work suggests or offers for understanding the theme Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality. Rather than responding authoritatively, each essay acknowledges the contributor’s own work. This book offers no answers, but invites a conversation that is more akin to a beginning, a joining, an admission that there is more than «me», «us», or «my kind» of people, theory, or wisdom. The book will be an excellent resource for instructors and for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in communication.

Uniting communication and postcolonial studies, this volume historically situates seminal essays in the field alongside new essays that aim to answer the question: «How, if at all, might communication scholars extend, or even renew, the postcolonial dialogue?» Beginning with the premise that in the field of communication studies, postcolonial theory has declined in the wake of globalization, the primary goal of this collection is to provide space for a variety of scholars – who often do not share the same impressions of the contemporary moment – to provoke discussion and debate geared toward understanding the strengths and limitations between these two interdisciplinary fields of study. In so doing, the collection highlights themes, trends, and conflicts that appear in the scholarship produced with postcolonial communication studies.

Intercultural Communication as a Clash of Civilizations argues that Al-Jazeera is not an agent of globalization, as is widely argued, but a tool used by the Qatari government to advance its political as well as Islamist goals. This book also maps the Western tendency to reject the network outright despite Al-Jazeera’s billion-dollar investments designed to gain entrance into Western markets; it shows empirically that this rejection is similarly rooted in religious, cultural and national motives. This book asserts that the main outcome of Al-Jazeera’s activities is the promotion of religious and cultural conflicts. The network persistently portrays global events through the prism of conflicting religious and cultural values – propelling a clash of civilizations as per Samuel P. Huntington’s well-known thesis.

The stories that are told about the death of Osama bin Laden are interculturally significant as a reminder of the many culturally contested junctures, fissures, and ruptures that circulate in the «true» stories that are told about Operation Neptune’s Spear. This book’s critical intercultural approach investigates what U.S. and international audiences were saying about other cultures while they wrote and talked about the bin Laden raid.The book explains why so many elite and public cultural communities have a vested interest in telling the story of «what happened» during the famous raid. The authors argue that these mediated debates have become inextricably entangled in political, military, cultural, and legal rhetorics of «American exceptionalism», where various U.S. and international audiences defend or attack particular interpretations of the raid and comment on the unique values and characteristics of America’s Way of War. This important book gives readers a sense of what these exceptionalist rhetorics look like when they circulate in different cultural and military contexts.

This book is an edited collection of case studies of contemporary issues in culture and communication around the world. Framed around a dialectical approach to intercultural communication, this collection offers a useful framework for thinking about contemporary research in this area. It offers in-depth cultural information about a broad range of specific cases in different places around the world. It is an ideal book to use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in culture and communication, global communication and intercultural communication courses. Scholars interested in contemporary work in intercultural communication will find this collection essential in mapping the state of the art in this area.

Collective remembering is an important way that communities name and make sense of the past. Places and stories about the past influence how communities remember the past, how they try to preserve it, or in some cases how they try to erase it. The research in this book offers key insights into how places and memories intersect with intercultural conflicts, oppressions, and struggles by which communities make sense of, deal with, and reconcile the past. The authors in this book examine fascinating stories from important sites—such as international commemorations of Korean “Comfort Women,” a film representation of the Stonewall Riots, and remembrances of the post-communist state in Albania. By utilizing various critical and cultural studies and ethnographic and narrative-based methods, each chapter examines cultural memory in intercultural encounters, everyday experiences, and identity performances that evoke collective memories of colonial pasts, immigration processes, and memories of places and spaces that are shaped by power structures and clashing ideologies. This book is essential reading for understanding the links between space/place and cultural memory, memories of nationally, and places constituted by markers of ethnicity, race, and sexuality. These readings are especially useful in courses in intercultural communication, cultural studies, international studies, and peace and conflict studies.

This book challenges white and Western feminist approaches to embodied politics, or the use of the body in everyday enactments of resistance, while mapping transgressive performances of femininities by the funkeiras, marginalized women and transfeminine people of color artists in Brazilian favela funk. Often studied from a white feminist perspective, embodied politics reflects debates about agency and structural change that are generally applicable to white women in the West. Concurrently, studies of femininity tend to universalize experiences of gender oppression encountered by white women to women across the globe. In this work, the author offers a transnational perspective on the performative force of embodied politics as a possible means to disrupt white, classist heteropatriarchal structures that oppress particularly poor women and transfeminine people of color in Brazil. This project has a threefold goal: first, it challenges the theoretical shortcomings of white feminist approaches to embodied politics, providing instead a transfeminista take on the concept. Secondly, this project aims to shed light on how traditional methodological approaches have hindered nuanced understandings of women and people of color and their performances. Third and finally, by challenging and re-envisioning the potential of embodied politics from a transnational perspective, the text intends to contribute to the field of critical intercultural communication’s growing but still limited research around bodies and performance, especially of those who are marginalized in global contexts.