Post by Nicky Falkof, University of the Witwatersrand

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

In 2013, after 17 years of living elsewhere in South Africa and the world, I moved back to Johannesburg, the city of my childhood and adolescence, to take up a research fellowship. The place I returned to was almost unrecognisable. The oppressive late apartheid city I left has mushroomed into a pulsing metropolis, sprouting malls, migrants, security apparatus, gated communities, galleries, transport hubs and informal settlements, swelling northwards to embrace nearby towns, mutating faster that I can keep track of.

But while Johannesburg has changed in important ways, it remains in some respects oddly familiar beneath its glossy, globalised marketing. The economic and social differential between suburbs–formerly legislated as white only areas–and townships–dense, poor extra-urban zones with minimal infrastructure where black people were shifted by the apartheid government–remains extreme, despite the growing racial integration of the wealthy middle class.

Dwellers in the Johannesburg suburbs continue to be powerfully invested in the literal and imaginary boundaries of their neighbourhoods. These often charming, tree-lined streets contain little or no public space. Bodies that do not belong–in particular black male working-class bodies that are not performing physical labour–can find themselves tailed and moved on by private security companies, or characterised as criminals and plastered on community Facebook groups.

One of the clearest sites for locating the changes-that-aren’t-really-changes in suburban Johannesburg is the garden cottage, a relatively new invention. Most freestanding homes, particularly in the older northern suburbs, have one or more small outbuildings in their back yards. Many of these were shoddily constructed, with tiny windows, minimal light, raw brickwork, a steel sink and hot plate for cooking, furnished with cast-offs from the main house, perhaps with an outdoor toilet in a separate structure. This was the “maid’s room”: the place where the family’s live-in domestic worker ate, slept, cooked, washed and sometimes hid lovers, children and friends, in defiance of the so-called influx control that made it illegal for “surplus” black people to be in the cities without pass books signed by white employers.

An unreconstructed maid’s room, now used for storage, in the suburb of Melville. Photos: Aguil Lual Blunt

In the years since the end of apartheid the shape of domestic labour in Johannesburg has changed. Middle- and even working-class people of all races employ domestic workers, many of whom are immigrants from elsewhere in southern Africa, although few of these women (and occasionally men–the Malawian “houseboy” is one of Joburg’s more discomforting contemporary status symbols) live on site. This shift in the spatial and economic politics of domestic employment has freed up the space out the back and many homeowners have turned these former sites of labour exploitation into income-generating assets. Rebuilt, extended, cleaned up, furnished and often quite literally whitewashed, Johannesburg’s garden cottages are now rented out via agents and other networks.

A survey of advertisements on the popular Gumtree website reveals that these spaces are described as private, clean, safe, charming and quiet. None of these attributes would have been associated with the maid’s room which, no matter how much care its inhabitant took with it, was structurally unsuited to pleasant living. Cottage tenants are often invited to use the garden or swimming pool, once arenas of privileged whites-only leisure. The extension of access to these areas of suburban pride suggests that the person renting a cottage is discursively imagined as having equal, or close to equal, status to the homeowner, unlike the domestic worker in the cottage’s previous life, whose entry into the swimming pool would have broken a powerful social taboo. Black workers were permitted to clean the most intimate areas of white lives but were concurrently considered too dirty to use the same plates, crockery or social space.

In the middle class imaginary of 21st century Joburg, then, the garden cottage is a democratised space where people who do not own property in the suburbs can enjoy an enviable lifestyle in these quiet, leafy and (comparatively) secure environs. But this romantic idea is not borne out by the realities.

A garden cottage in Brixton, renovated and rented out on Air BnB. Photos: Zen Marie

A closer look at cottage advertising reveals a slight but unmistakable suggestion that only certain types of people are welcome in these spaces. Requests for South African passports and other documentation show an endemic mistrust of people from elsewhere in Africa that manifests violently in poorer areas of the country. Owners ask for people of “sober habits” and mention proximity to schools, religious and leisure spaces, implying that the tenants they seek are people like them, from the same communities, with the same interests, ethnic and/or economic backgrounds. Those who are allowed to live in the suburbs are expected to know the relevant codes of behaviour. Excess sound and excess people are not permitted here. Modes of township life, characterised by permeability rather than borders, communality rather than privacy, noise rather than silence, are not permissible in the suburbs, where high walls and individual property are the order of the day.

Interviews with cottage tenants compound this impression. Black people tell stories of suspicious owners who inspect their guests, set awkward rules and make them feel unwelcome in shared spaces, or of advertisers who refuse to allow them to view properties. White people talk of being interpellated into unwanted modes of kinship and the assumption that they must be the same as their homeowning landlords simply on the basis of race and class. In all these cases the apparently democratised space of the garden cottage remains subject to the classificatory urges that characterised the biopolitics of apartheid society. The boundaries of the suburb are socially policed and rules about belonging and alien-ness are retained in the 21st century city.

The dichotomy and similarity between maid’s room and garden cottage show some of the ways in which post-apartheid Johannesburg has changed, and some in which it hasn’t. Consistently contested and negotiated, these often uncomfortable spaces are a metonym of the city’s racist past and the ways in which its present, despite entry into global and continental flows of capital, culture and people, is layered on top of that painfully persistent history of separation and inequity.

[For the full article, see Nicky Falkof, “‘Out the back: Race and reinvention in Johannesburg’s garden cottages,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/05/1367877915581856.abstract]

Post by D. Elizabeth Cohen, Gyeongju University

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

In the five years that I have been living in South Korea, I have noticed an amazing amount of variety in attitudes and practices regarding the inclusion of the “foreigners” – of which I am one – increasingly sharing the country. One thing is for sure: Korea’s is not a monolithic society. In my article that appeared in the September 2014 issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies, I wrote about the gap that occurred between the originally envisioned Digital Media City (DMC) and what actually resulted. DMC is a creative industries ICT (information and communication technology) cluster, originally planned as a creative cluster to foster the creative economy in Korea through an open environment and free exchange between locals and internationals. In my article I noted that while DMC is successful by many standards, this free exchange has not occurred and pointed to the lack of English signage at DMC as an indicator.

As a second generation American growing up in a home with two languages – one used by the adults to keep secrets from “the kids” – I am sensitive to the power of language both to exclude and to include. What I noticed at DMC – among other proper and prestigious Korean institutions – most with international aspirations and world-class pretensions – is a lack of bilingualism and the inclusion that would result. I simultaneously observed in down-to-earth organizational settings more representative of Korea’s usual homey kind heartedness, an attempt to accommodate “the other” through the use of English. Two examples: a yoga class I attended that was my life line while in Seoul, and a cultural symposium dedicated to the topic of Korea’s “comfort women.” Some forward-thinking sectors of Korean society “get” the importance of bilingualism for inclusion, and other more traditional thinkers really don’t – even, surprisingly, in the reverse (that is, the need to provide translation to make English environments more inclusive of Koreans).

I concluded in my article that because DMC’s planning occurred at an unusual time in Korea’s history – influenced by IMF mandates in the late 1990s – this accounts at least partially for the implementation disconnect. Something else I might have pointed out is that creating internationalization through an engineered creative cluster is far from a paint-by-the-numbers affair. The plan might have been half-baked from the outset, less the fault of the South Korean planners than the MIT consultants on whom they relied.

But while DMC has only fulfilled its envisioned internationalization role in a limited way, I like to think that internationalization in South Korea is slowly evolving in smaller, more humble settings – like my classroom – using popular culture artifacts! What never could have been predicted at the time of DMC’s planning would be the emergence of YouTube and its tremendous power for globalization and internationalization*. I now make extensive use of YouTube’s resources in my Literacy and Internationalization university classes in the heritage city, at which I now teach after leaving the Communication department at my former well regarded Seoul university.

Digital media from YouTube is a form of globalization that young Koreans wholeheartedly embrace. There is a huge gap in Korea between young and old – a subject for another blog piece – and young Koreans are in general more welcoming of internationals. But overall, young people reject the English learning imposed upon them by their elders, perhaps reflecting a mistrust of the instrumental motives of improving the Korean economy through the ability to provide a cadre of faceless but impeccable English speakers.

In contrast, watching quality 20^th century Western media on YouTube adds value to the individual lives of Korean young people – not just for their artistry and entertainment value but also for the communication of ethics and democratic values. This media offer students a personal reason to want to learn English. A true fan, I get a big kick out of watching my students’ reactions as I share gems such as Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from the Wizard of Oz, Earth Wind and Fire tunes and performances, and archive-grade A-Train music videos. It is a privilege to equip aspiring design, musical and dramatic artists with stellar resources from which they can draw inspiration and improve their craft. It’s a do-it-yourself museum, and I’m the curator! Students get excited by these materials, and it motivates them to communicate. Where once they were shy, they now want to share their opinions – and they’ll do it in English if necessary.

Sharing these videos provides me with personal gratifications as well. As a child of the 1960s who once dismissed Dusty Springfield in favor of bigger ticket performers like The Beatles and Rolling Stones, my students’ admiration for her rendition of “Look of Love” caused me to give her and her body of work a second look that was enriching. And in watching and discussing gems from YouTube with my students, I get to be a Mom for the second time having the pleasure of witnessing the world once again through the eyes of my one-semester-only offspring.

While viewing YouTube videos in a classroom is mostly a one-way cultural exchange, and doesn’t fulfill the two-way free exchange aspirations of the architects of DMC, it is a step in the right direction of the evolving process of internationalization that does not seem to happen easily anywhere in the world. Why should it be different in South Korea?

The popular culture resources now available on YouTube are Western ambassadors that can bring great value to others around the world. Such media can be used for many educational and cultural purposes – not only to promote English literacy abroad – but within American shores as well. They are an inestimable treasure that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

* There is a connection between DMC and YouTube; some commercial content creators for YouTube are in residence at DMC where they develop and distribute digital content

[For the full article, see D. Elizabeth Cohen, “Seoul’s Digital Media City: A History and 2012 Status Report on a South Korean Digital Arts and Entertainment ICT Cluster,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/17/6/557.abstract]

Correspondence: DrDElizabethcohen@cognition-ignition.com

Post by Yiu-wai Chu, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, had been a British colony for 156 years before sovereignty over the territory was handed to China in 1997. Shortly after reversion to its “motherland,” it was expected that Hong Kong people would have a stronger sense of belonging to their home city. The surprisingly stellar rise of China in the new millennium, however, has resulted in many impacts on Hong Kong. Hong Kong people have worried about forced integrations, in particular during the post-free-tour period, when countless Mainlanders crossed the border to purchase different commodities, ranging from luxury goods to baby formula.

The Hong Kong SAR government launched BrandHK, a global communications platform, in 2001 to focus international attention on Hong Kong’s drive to become “Asia’s World City.” In March 2010, a “Faces of Hong Kong” campaign was inaugurated via the BrandHK platform as a new marketing and communications strategy to promote the city and enhance the sense of belonging of Hong Kong people. The strategy of the overhauled campaign endeavored to highlight the “human” side of Hong Kong, thus its main thrust was focused on a series of promotional videos that featured different Hong Kong citizens. While the series of promotional videos feature both celebrities and common folk, familiar faces, such as international film star Chow Yun-Fat, have stolen the limelight. Although Chow Yun-Fat has achieved global success in his film career, he is well-known for being local as well. Praised by local media as “The Son of Hong Kong,” Chow Yun-Fat is famous for living an ordinary local life, despite his enormous success. As such, Chow Yun-Fat was the choice to promote Hong Kong to the world, as this campaign focuses on locals.“Faces of Hong Kong” tactfully used Kowloon City, Chow Yun-Fat’s favourite neighbourhood, as the main setting. In the video there were lots of signatures local stores where Chow has been hanging out for several decades. “Over the years, other parts of Hong Kong have changed a lot, but Kowloon City is a place that still feels the same. Much of what I remember from my childhood is still here. The way of life, the atmosphere, the friendliness of the neighbourhood. It’s the same for me now as it was back in the sixties.” Chow’s voice-over in the video might sound sweet to many years, but my “re-search” of Kowloon City told a different story. If the feeling of being at home is based on “security, familiarity, community and a sense of possibility,” which are actually the underlying themes of the “Faces of Hong Kong” promotional videos, the case of Kowloon City exposes a harsh reality that insists on showing a different picture: these key feelings have no place in the redeveloped district.

Photo 1: Kowloon City wet market; across the street once stood the famous local restaurant Dragon Palace.

Photo 2: New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store on the left; across the street once stood the district’s largest department store, International, boasting a history of more than 50 years.

My pedestrian inquiry started with Kowloon City’s public wet market, Chow Yun-Fat’s favourite. Just across the road from the market stood a well-known local restaurant called Dragon Palace, but it was closed in 2012 and was subsequently torn down to make way for new luxury apartments (Photo 1). Unfortunately, this was not an isolated event. On the other side of the public market, the same developer demolished another old residential building to make way for its real estate project entitled “Billionaire Avant.” One block away from the public market stands three famous local stores: New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store (Photo 2), Hoover Cake Shop (Photo 3) and Kung Wo Soya Bean Factory (Photo 4). In the “Faces of Hong Kong” video, Chow Yun-Fat tastes delicious egg tarts at Hoover and consumes thirst-quenching soya bean milk at Kung Wo. These are undoubtedly landmark stores with a long history. However, on the same street many old buildings have already been swallowed up by developers. In the promotional video, Chow Yun-Fat works excitedly with the staff of New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store. The store is still there but the building just across the road, once housing the district’s largest “international” department store and boasting a history of more than fifty years, was pulled down not long after the video was released. Urban redevelopment is not uncommon in metropolis regions such as Hong Kong; however, what is most troubling is that the retailers of the new buildings are often completely different from their predecessors. As profit is the raison d’être of property developers, it is not surprising that the street stores in the luxurious redeveloped buildings target chain-store renters who can afford higher rates (Photo 5). It is a shame that the recent changes in Kowloon City, which might become a “generic district” in the near future, has told a story opposite to a local sense of belonging.

Photo 3: Hoover Cake Shop on the left; a new luxury apartment project across the street.

Photo 4: Kung Wo Soya Bean Factory on the right; a new luxury apartment project across the street.

Photo 5: A new building with street shops occupied by chain stores.

While “Faces of Hong Kong” highlights the stories of Hong Kong people from all walks of life, they are simply used to illuminate the values of “Asia’s World City,” which desperately brands Hong Kong as a generic global city. Generic cities that embrace neoliberal capitalism are very similar in nature. It is difficult if not impossible to have a strong sense of belonging if the “homes” in these cities are all equals. The problem is that both China and the West would like Hong Kong to further develop into a generic commercial city. The fluid, vibrant, and hybridized everyday life practices, a vital source of multiplicity in Hong Kong over the past fifty years, have been under threat in the past decade or so. Hong Kong citizens recently expressed that it is ever more important to safeguard core local values. Apart from values, sadly, local space cannot remain unfazed as well. Urban redevelopment has been sped up by not only rampant capitalism but also integration with the Mainland, the free tours from which, for instance, profoundly alters the ecology of the local market. The example of Kowloon City has shown that “to belong” has already become a luxury for many Hong Kong people.

[For the full article, see Yiu-Wai Chu, “‘Faces of Hong Kong’: My City? My Home?,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/25/1367877915572186.abstract]

All photos taken by the author on 23 October 2013.

Post by Jonathan Bignell, University of Reading

This is the ninth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

The aspect of Michele Hilmes’ work that has most affected me is her brilliant historical analysis of the related but distinct broadcasting traditions of Britain and the USA in Network Nations (2011). She has documented and evaluated their long-standing links, but also shown how each has defined itself by repudiating the other. The lesson that I have learned from Michele is that when we look closely at the detail of history, there are always more complex and more interesting things to discover. This post is just a brief example of such a discovery. What looks like a British show imitating an American format turns out to be a US production made abroad. Its conventionally transatlantic casting includes a Lithuanian playing an ex-patriate Minnesotan, and alongside the “swinging London” of the mid-1960s we see the decaying Victorian houses of the inner city.

My former colleague Billy Smart kindly gave me Network’s DVD release of the action series Strange Report (1969-70) recently. At first glance, it looks like a rather less successful example of the British action shows that flourished in the 1960s and briefly succeeded across the Atlantic too (as discussed in my 2010 Media History article). British series like The Saint (1962-69), The Avengers (1961-69), and The Champions (1968-69) adopted versions of US industrial organization to make programmes that would be saleable to US networks, by shooting on colour film, on location (British drama was still mainly shot on video in the studio), and with an upbeat “mod” aesthetic.

Strange Report seems initially to conform to the format. Each week a retired British Home Office criminologist, Adam Strange (played by Anthony Quayle), solves sensitive cases in which government departments cannot become publicly involved. Strange is aided by a young US Rhodes scholar, Hamlyn Gynt (Kaz Garas), and Strange’s next-door neighbour, the vivacious model-cum-artist Evelyn (Anneke Wills).

But rather than representing international modernity, Strange Report remains surprisingly bound to its London setting. The series was filmed from July 1968 to March 1969 on location in London and at Pinewood Studios outside the city. To solve cases, the methodical and avuncular Strange uses his personal laboratory at his house in the run-down Paddington district, and his cerebral approach is complemented by Gynt’s physical vigour and Evelyn’s familiarity with London’s trendy bohemian culture. The British Film Institute’s excellent online guide, screenonline, notes that: “Locating the show in a recognisably contemporary London allowed the programme to display a degree of realism and authenticity unusual for its genre.” One episode is an investigation of violent student demonstrations (shortly after the revolutionary events of May 1968 in Paris), while another is about immigration and racism (in 1967 the British Member of Parliament, Enoch Powell, infamously predicted “rivers of blood” after immigration from Britain’s former empire increased). Stylish action-adventure series rarely addressed such concerns. Although the middle-class, middle-aged Strange tamed these issues by the end of each episode, the disparate quasi-family of protagonists seem closely engaged in their milieu.

Two of the featured actors were British: Quayle trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was a member of the respected Old Vic theatre company from 1932. After army service in World War II he was a leading actor and director at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which would later become the Royal Shakespeare Company. He featured in the British war films Ice Cold in Alex (1958) and The Guns of Navarone (1961), as well as the epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Aneke Wills featured in a TV adaptation of British children’s novel The Railway Children in 1957, and in Doctor Who from 1966-67 as companion to Doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. These were iconic English actors in significant British film and television roles. But Kaz Garas who played Strange’s youthful American sidekick was born in Lithuania, not the USA, though he based his career there.

The most interesting aspect of this transnational programme is that its executive producer was Norman Felton, best known as the creator and producer of US network series Dr. Kildare (1961-66), The Lieutenant (1963-64), and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68). Felton was a transatlantic figure himself; he was born in London, but his family migrated to the US in 1929. His parents returned but Felton stayed in the USA, won a playwriting fellowship to the University of Iowa, and worked in theatre, then radio at NBC. In the 1950s he worked in TV in New York, writing and directing for live anthology dramas like Alcoa Hour (1955-57), Goodyear Playhouse (1955-57), and Studio One (1948-58), and by end of the decade he was executive producer of Playhouse 90 (1956-60). He became MGM’s director of television, and formed the company that made Strange Report, Arena Productions, in 1961.

Felton was in London during production in 1969, and the British ITV network broadcast Strange Report that year. The intention was that production partner NBC would screen it in the USA and that a second, US-set series would be made in which the characters would relocate across the Atlantic. In January 1971, NBC got around to screening Strange Report on Fridays from 10:00 to 11:00 p.m. EST until September, but the second series was never made, apparently because Quayle and Wills did not want to travel. The strange story of Strange Report complicates the history of British drama and its relationships with the American market, offshore co-production involving the US networks, and the innovative collaborations between British and American personnel in the 1960s. And this is just the short version of the story….

Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo: Jeff Miller ©UW-Madison University Communications

Post by Michael Curtin, University of California Santa Barbara

This is the eighth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Jonathan Gray’s post about mentorship and collegiality eloquently captures the collective sentiment of this online festschrift in honor of Michele Hilmes. Having worked closely with her as a faculty colleague, I can vouch for Jonathan’s account of her sterling leadership and professionalism. I want to comment briefly on the latter before offering some observations about Michele’s intellectual contributions to our field.

University professors can be pretty self-absorbed and, in a way, they have to be in order to run the gauntlet of tenure review and endure the stark loneliness of academic authorship. You have to believe deeply in yourself and your intellectual vision in order to simply persist as a scholarly researcher. The danger is that one can spend a bit too much time alone and attach a bit too much significance to one’s own vision. In the collective life of a department this becomes most evident when faculty members and graduate students begin to personalize the differences that inevitably arise in the course of departmental affairs. What’s truly remarkable about Michele is that she knows how to get the work done without personalizing the differences. Instead, she’s focused, clear-headed, articulate, and even-handed. Consequently, she can pull folks together and get things done under even the most challenging circumstances. Moreover, she does it in a confident but unassuming way that simply exudes professionalism. So, “best colleague ever?” Yes, without a doubt, and I might add, a role model for the profession.

Equally inspiring is the fact that Michele’s investment in the general welfare of the department hasn’t detracted from her scholarly accomplishments. She has, for example, published truly pathbreaking historical monographs over the course of her career. Hollywood and Broadcasting was one of the first media histories to direct our attention to the synergies between radio and cinema during the 1930s. Previous research had generally considered these media separately (indeed entire departments and programs were built around the differences), overlooking the important interconnections that shaped the evolution of American popular culture. Moreover, the book anticipated the groundswell of interest that arose regarding media “synergies” during the conglomeration wave of the 1990s. Hollywood and Broadcasting became a touchstone for many conversations on this important topic.

Michele’s second book, Radio Voices, was the first critical and cultural history of radio broadcasting in America, comprehensively addressing issues that had previously been under-appreciated, such as class, ethnicity, gender, geography, and national identity. She extended this scholarship into the television and new media eras with her landmark textbook, Only Connect, which is without a doubt the best cultural history of US electronic media that is currently available for classroom use. During my days as a graduate student, Erik Barnouw’s Tube of Plenty was the standard point of reference for media historians and instructors, a status it enjoyed for decades because it was both comprehensive and comprehensible. As any book publisher will tell you, there’s something to be said for understated eloquence. Barnouw and Hilmes: that’s pretty heady company.

Michele’s most recent monograph, Network Nations, was the first history to carefully compare the development of British and American radio broadcasting, exploring the many tensions and interconnections between the two. As is well known, the British public service and the American commercial systems became the two most influential templates for the development of electronic media around the world. Network Nations shows that although the two took decidedly separate paths, they were self-consciously constituted through their respective differences. That is, British media evolved partially in response to national conditions and partially in response to its imagined other, the commercial cacophony of the American airwaves. Likewise, the US networks strove to distinguish themselves from the elite and measured qualities of British radio while claiming to serve the desires of the listeners first. As Hilmes explains, the ongoing dialogue between executives, creative talent, and policy makers played a foundational role in the constitution of electronic media on both sides of the Atlantic and it resonated further afield, establishing the fundamental parameters of media polices  forged in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Europe. Network Nations has become an invaluable resource for research and teaching about media globalization.

So, think about it for a moment: three monographs (each a landmark), many anthologies, departmental leadership, superb teaching and mentorship, and as my festschrift collaborators have so eloquently affirmed, a profound influence on the development of radio and sound studies. Not bad. Days well spent… and many more to come. Congratulations and thank you, Michele.

One of the aspects of hiring in the UK and Ireland that is quite different to the US is the way that all finalists are brought in at the same time – they may meet each other at shared information sessions, go to dinner with faculty together or run into each other at the hotel where they are all staying. For most American academics this scenario strikes us as discomfiting but it carries a huge benefit to the hiring committee for it concentrates its work and enables members to get an immediate comparative perspective on candidates.  It isn’t nearly as awkward as might be imagined and in fact as a candidate myself in the past I have enjoyed the process of meeting some of the other finalists, learning more about their work and having an opportunity to chat I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

This way of interviewing also standardizes the hiring process and it is important to know if you interview for a job in the UK or Irish system that the job description is operationalized into precise categories and both shortlisting and the ranking of finalists is carried out on a numerical basis.  (This is one reason to scrutinize a job description very closely and to be sure that the case you are making for yourself responds directly and clearly to it).  In principle, the selection of an appointee should be a straightforward matter of finding the person with the highest score, though of course a lot of discussion accompanies this process.

The interviewing process in the UK and Ireland will strike many American applicants as highly codified and streamlined.  Less documentation is required in general; letters of reference may be slightly less important to the process than would be the case in the US and they are normally only taken up for finalists. Shortlisting is usually done quickly and arrangements for interview carried out with dispatch. Finalists’ obligations may seem minimal in comparison to the US as you will be expected to give a short research talk (for senior posts this often entails sketching your “vision” for the department) and then to appear for a formal interview.  It is possible that you will spend less than two hours in total with the members of the search committee.  One “plus” of this way of working is that you don’t start to sound like a broken record to yourself, avoiding the situation of meeting individually with faculty over a few days and explaining over and over what you do and how you go about it.

There may be a surprisingly high level of involvement in the search by faculty members who have little to no connection with media studies.  In my own institution we are obligated to give a slot on the search committee from someone outside of our college. At my previous institution the chair of the search committee was a senior faculty member from some other part of the university who I never met again although I was offered the post, accepted it and went on to work there for six years. It is not uncommon to ask colleagues from other institutions to serve on the panel; in Ireland full professorial appointments regularly entail one or more members of the hiring committee being brought in from other countries.

Institutional hospitality is generally greatly reduced in comparison to the US, with candidates often making their own travel and even accommodation arrangements and spending no “informal” time with those involved in the hiring process. About a decade ago I interviewed for a post at a well-known East Coast liberal arts college.  When I arrived in icy midwinter around eleven o’clock at night, the search committee chair collected me at the airport and although of course not openly stated, my interview really began in a dark car during an hour’s drive from the airport to campus.  By contrast, when I interviewed for my current post I had no contact of any kind with any members of the department – all of my communication went through HR. There was no meal for candidates and no “walk-through” of facilities; the five finalists for the job were simply given a campus map and told where and when to appear.

For all the differences in how hiring is carried out, it is unfortunately the case that the UK and Ireland share with the US many of the same intensifications of neoliberal institutional environments and attendant austerity regimes.  Interview slots are precious and monies to bring candidates to campus are growing scarcer. Relocation money (if any) is likely to reflect a set of negotiations between a department chair and a dean. Limited term posts are becoming the norm and so candidates face a tough set of choices when contemplating international relocation for a job that may last just a few years.  Traditional “perks” like start-up packages are almost unknown now.

That is not to say that there aren’t many rich rewards that come with working overseas nor is it to suggest that the ability to adjust to functioning in a very different system isn’t in many ways now a requirement for all kinds of successful twenty-first century workers.  My own career has certainly benefited from such experiences and adjustments. I think the media studies academy can only be enriched by a more internationalist mindset and way of working.

I haven’t mentioned yet how rapidly decisions are made in the UK and Ireland where customarily the search committee makes an offer by the end of the day and you can expect to be asked to supply a phone number at the end of the interview at which you can be immediately reached. Finally if you are offered the job you may be surprised at how quick an answer is expected of you. Arrangements are usually pinned down within days, a little longer at most.

I wish the very best of luck to all who are making applications.

I’m teaching Othering right now in my Media and National Identity class, and so once more Amazing Race is in my mind. Functionally, next to no other primetime shows spend as much time outside the United States, thereby making Amazing Race one of the most prominent, widely seen sites on American television for the depiction of foreign countries and peoples. And thus its representation of the world stands to “weigh” a lot more than, for instance, CSI: New York’s depiction of New York City, given the vast number of televisual depictions of the Big Apple.

What I find so frustrating about the show is not simply that it ends up Othering again and again, but that it’s a format that could allow for such interesting challenges to ideas of Othering, and that occasionally does so. It’s like a B student who writes occasionally brilliant sentences, and hence who you know could do better if s/he really applied him/herself, yet who isn’t trying hard enough.

A key problem with televisual representations of other countries and their peoples is precisely that other countries and their people are so actively represented, by which I mean the writers and directors have very certain ideas of who they want on camera. Think of Survivor here, as perhaps the only other show on primetime American television that films overseas. The locals have been evacuated from the filming site, and are only encountered as a “reward,” and as accompaniment to the nice meal that serves as centerpiece for the reward (screaming out for bell hooks’ “Eating the Other”!). They are usually chosen for their stunning primitiveness, grass-skirts, ability to dance with a smile for the cast, and/or perhaps to impart ancient tribal lore.

By contrast, Amazing Race holds great promise as a site for encountering the world. The format sees teams racing through towns, cities, and countryside and encountering random individuals who have not been selected by the directors (cabbie luck in particular playing a key role in who wins or loses). Especially when we’re in cities and places that the crew simply cannot stage manage, we therefore see an eclectic mix of foreigners. Their comments are of course heavily edited, and selectively translated, but they hold more power to speak for themselves, and to represent themselves. This may take place through quotidian acts like giving directions, refusing a team member’s requests to buy something in a challenge, or so forth, but it frees them from the need to appear solely as “reward,” and as dancing, cooking primitives.

Yet the Amazing Race still falls back into tired, old set pieces. Phil’s mat serves as an especially contentious site, somewhere for smiling, costumed locals to sit and wait for hours for the pleasure of welcoming Americans to their country. Phil’s allowed to look pissed off at having his time wasted, but they just sit there and smile. Oddly, we don’t even see Phil talk to them (I’m not looking for a Benetton ad, but are they that odious?). And once they’ve said “welcome,” it’s time to shut up and let Phil speak again, as their agency is so severely restricted.

Then there are the tasks, many of which spectacularly reduce a nation to two predominant activities (“Beg or Boogie”!), and that hire a cast of colorful locals to be their very best cover-of-the-tour-book stereotypes. When the race went to Kenya, we had Masai warriors leaping up and down, in Russia it was babushkas planting potatoes (more on them in a second, though), and so forth.

I’m also constantly both fascinated and depressed by the battle of looking, and of the imperial gaze, that goes on in many episodes. On one hand, the show often conforms to a “Heart of Darkness”-esque rendering of foreigners as painted onto a backdrop, mere props to draw the attention back to the American subjects, who constantly speak of and for the locals. See Chinua Achebe’s famous broadside attack on Conrad for more details on how insidious this kind of Othering is. On the other hand, the photographers often treat us to images of the foreigners staring at the American racers, and occasionally offer us delicious soundbytes of them criticizing them (as when, in a recent season, a group of babushkas engaged in wonderfully wry commentary on the racers’ plowing techniques and general physique). We’re also shown egregiously bad behavior from some racers, and the editing usually chastises the offending, offensive team. It might be easy to see this as a reminder that we’re looked at as much as the foreigners are, and at times it encourages us to look with the locals’ eyes, not the racers’. Yet there is no problematization of our own looking and gaze as viewers. The suggestion is a classically white liberal feel-good one that some travelers are bad, but that we’re not – our own motivations for watching, and investment in or at least culpability with the exoticization and spectacularization of difference, are never really questioned.

Despite all my criticism, though, I keep watching. The simple fact is that the show is doing more than most are to at least engage with the world at large. Us non-Americans don’t come out of this process looking all that good, and I’d love to reform the program in many ways (Sorry, Phil, but you’re not needed: let’s replace you with locals who can say more. How about international racing teams? And please, please, let’s do something about the challenges). But there’s potential, which is met at times. There are no tribal elimination scenes and fauxthentic team names. The soundtrack is rarely a lost recording session from Peter Gabriel. Nobody’s in jail at the hands of a brutal foreign government. The countries are more than just an amalgam of their lovely wildlife and pitiable slums. And none of them are being bombed or supposedly plotting the downfall of the USA en masse. In the radically culturally chauvinist landscape of American television, that alone puts Amazing Race in a rare position.

True. I’ve explained until I’m spent what is happening, how it happened, the government’s response, the historical context, poverty, hopelessness: everything but a definitive why. This is partly because all of that contextualization is already the why, and short answers don’t work. But also partly because there is no singular why. Real life doesn’t always have a proper narrative, at least while it’s in the process of composing itself.

But ‘real life’ rears its annoying head as I prepare to teach my intro film class. Real life requires I temporarily put aside troubling thoughts of my family in Alexandria and Cairo. It doesn’t work: I think of the darkness and moral corruption within Egypt as I put together my notes on film noir. Tahrir Square becomes dimly lit and punctuated with melancholy. It becomes the urban nightmare populated not by Humphrey Bogart but by his anonymous Egyptian doppelgangers. Egyptians, like those troubled subjects of bleak 1940s films, yearn for an innocent past before the ravages of experience stole their innocence. For Americans it was the brutality of WWII. For Egyptians, how could anything be the same after their government unleashed the full brutality of the police on them for the crime of asking for their rights?

But the protests go on another week, and my job doesn’t stop because I’m busy worrying about Egypt. Film noir shifts to horror, which is even more appropriate. I think of the pain of Egypt as I watch televised images of bodies being eaten up by the state in its various forms; as if the state were Count Dracula in need of blood to carry on. In class I show clips of zombies, vampires, killers, and the insane and tell the students about film theory. “Psychologically speaking, we can view cinematic horror as a mouthpiece for the socially repressed…”

I see in my mind’s eye images of Egyptians protesting. Images of Egyptians being run over by police vans, shot by security forces, beaten with sticks, tear gassed, smashed in the face. “Blood!” screams Anthony Perkins as I show a clip from Psycho (1960), feigning surprise at the murder ‘his mother’ has committed; just as Hosni Mubarak feigns surprise at the blood his forces have spilled in Egypt’s dusty streets.

The return of the repressed. You beat people when they ask for their rights, yet someday they will return. You laugh at people when they demand an education, yet they will return. And just like horror movies, I can’t take my eyes away (though I sometimes cover them with my hands). As I watch these images spilling across my various screens: iPad, laptop, television, telephone, I find myself caught up in their aesthetic essences. Watching these horrific images is compelling.

Here I am trying to talk about Egypt and why this is all happening, but all I find myself talking about are movies and TV. Horror, film noir… But of course this is the answer. This is the why that I can’t really fully represent to my friend.

Benedict Anderson talked famously about “Imagined Communities” in which print capitalism allowed Europeans for the first time to see themselves addressed as national groupings. People from Manchester could open up a newspaper and have pretty good idea of what the folks down in London were thinking about at that exact same moment.

Satellite television, Twitter, Star Academy, Jersey Shore, Lost, iPhones, ESPN… these things blow Anderson’s Imagined Communities out of the water. And even more, they don’t function in a national context, but a transnational context. The imagined communities have been replaced with imagined worlds.

I’m not the only one watching Humphrey Bogart movies. I’m not the only one watching the Big Lebowski. So are Egyptians. And Sudanese. And everyone. The borders that limited imagination have been erased, and by things as seemingly inconsequential as a soccer game broadcast from London, a British comedy, or an Al Jazeera broadcast of the revolution in Tunisia.

Just as we can put ourselves in the worn sandals of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, so too can Egyptians and Tunisians and Saudi Arabians and Chinese. They, too, are capable of imagining themselves challenging Cesar for justice. They, too, can imagine a world different than this awful one that we live in, the brutal one of tyrants whose reality is now not the only game in town. That is the why.

UTV, one of India’s leading media & entertainment companies since the early 1990s, launched Bindass TV in September 2007, followed by the launch of its integrated web portal bindass.com in July 2009. As described in the “About Us” section of the channel’s website, Bindass is “a celebration of being young in India.  Waxing eloquence on what it calls “Brand Bindass!,” the website goes on to claim that “Bindass is about being Fun, Frank, Fearless and valuing Freedom in all its forms.”

Bindass is, of course, not the first youth entertainment channel in India to make such exaggerated claims about its brand identity for the sake of self-promotion. MTV, Channel [V] and many other wannabe youth channels have inundated the satellite and cable lineup in Indian television for almost two decades now with upbeat messages about their ability to represent the virtues of youthfulness, freedom, rebellion and revolution.  What sets Bindass apart, according to its promoters, is that “it is India’s first 360 degree entertainment venture across television channels, mobile channels, web, gaming, merchandising, retail & nation wide ground events.”

Claiming that it is not just another TV channel, the website promotes Bindass as “a platform for like minded people to come together on tv, the web, mobile and at cafes.” Although its target audiences are in the commercially lucrative demographic category of youth (15-34 years), the channel also seeks to attract “the young at heart” proclaiming “Bindass is all about the attitude.”

The globalization of traditionally national television industries and cultures, along with the digital convergence of broadcasting, cable, satellites, cell phones and the internet, has transformed the televisual landscape dramatically in recent decades.  Much has been written about how audiences are experiencing an increasingly deterritorialized televisual culture by imagining the world as a stable landscape build around a dynamic set of disjunctive but overlapping global flows that Arjun Appadurai has theorized in terms of mediascapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, and finanscapes. But little attention has been paid to the ways in which network executives around the world are working to re-territorialize the disjunctive flows of globalization, particularly since television flow is still a planned phenomenon as described by Raymond Williams.  Here I am referring to new programming and scheduling strategies like simulcasting, multicasting and webcasting being used by global networks to provide audiences with a seamless experience of  television not only in relation to commercial interruptions but in also in relation to the overlapping and disjunctive flows of globalization.

For instance, when a major American broadcasting network like ABC, NBC or CBS simulcasts English programming in Spanish it is a strategic attempt to re-territorialize the global flows of migrant and immigrant ethnoscapes and bilingual mediascapes into the planned flow of television in the United States.  Similarly, when major state-sponsored networks like CCTV in China or Doordarshan in India expand their services to reach diasporic audiences on satellite and cable channels around the world, it is a clear recognition of the growing influence of  transnational ethnoscapes and technoscapes in the globalization of their national cultures.  When a new media network like Bindass TV claims to provide a “360 degrees experience” by seamlessly migrating from cable television to a digitally-convergent platform of   TV+ cinema+ internet+ cellphones+ gaming+, it is yet another example of the reterritorializing strategies used by media networks to incorporate disjunctive global flows of youth culture into the planned flow of television culture.

Within literally a day of its debut, Sach ka Saamna (Facing the Truth), the Indian version of the reality show Moment of Truth, was already in the news. The show’s first participant Smita Mathai, an epitome of middle-class respectability, had failed the “sach ki agnipariksha” (“the ultimate test of truth”) when she denied that she entertained thoughts of extra-marital liaisons. According to the polygraph test, she was lying. As Mathai, with an incredulous look, vehemently protested, “Rubbish!” and insisted, “No, this is not true,” her husband seemed to be in shock – his “nice Indian wife,” who had put up with his alcoholism, had not only admitted on national television that she had wanted to kill him, but also that she would sleep with another man if he never found out. [Though the show is mostly in Hindi, questions are repeated in English and Mathai’s responses were mostly in English too.]

In the succeeding weeks, more shockers followed – a respected 60-something television actor admitted that he had an illegitimate child; a newly-married husband acknowledged that he would have an affair if his wife never found out; a young Muslim woman admitted that she had been intimate with other men after her engagement; yet another “nice Indian wife” confessed her extra-marital affair – for Indian television viewers, unaccustomed to Oprah-esque confessional talk shows, Sach ka Saamna represented a problematic novelty.

As parliamentarians debated over the cultural threat posed by the show and whether it violated the constitution, psychologists pondered over its “long term effects,” news channels discussed if reality TV “promoted voyeurism” in Indian society, and the High Court debated whether Indian culture was strong enough to withstand the onslaught, viewers gleefully tuned in to watch contestants face their moment of truth and squirm uncomfortably in their seats. For the News Corp.-owned Star Plus, Sach ka Saamna promised to bring back its glory days. After nine years as the numero uno in the Hindi GEC (General Entertainment Channel) segment, Star had lost its stronghold to the new entrant Viacom-owned Colors and old rival Zee TV. Moreover, with its slew of mother-in-law & daughter-in-law sagas, the channel had become branded as a ‘regressive’ network. Sach ka Saamna was Star’s attempt to reposition itself, particularly in response to the changing television audience demographic. As Star’s Executive Vice-President, Marketing and Communications, Anupam Vasudev remarked, “Today, the larger group of the Indian audience has got younger. Audiences have moved away from demanding regressive content to content that evokes an open belief system.”

However, in spite the high TRPs (Television Rating Points) and Star’s contention that the show was modeled on Gandhian principle of truth and honesty – Satyamev Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs), Sach ka Saamna had to make an early exit only after two months of its debut. The government slapped a show-cause notice on the channel for “offending good taste and decency, (showing what is) not suitable for unrestricted public exhibition, and for obscenity in words.” Moreover, the show seemed to be attracting attention and headlines for all the wrong reasons – a woman committed suicide after watching the season finale and husbands became obsessed with replaying the truth-or-dare game with their wives, often with disastrous consequences. Though the channel honchos are hopeful about Sach ka Saamna‘s return, actor Rajeev Khandelwal, who had received favorable reviews as the host, has already distanced himself from the controversial show. However, knowing Indian television’s current penchant for format and reality shows, Sach ka Saamna, in spite of all the controversy, might just make a comeback.

Like it, or hate it, reality television seems to have the Indian television viewer hooked.