Personal Reflections on Diaspora and US National Promotion

I am a Washington DC transplant. I was taken from the cornfields, white steeple churches and covered bridges of New England and placed into the capital of the United States of America. In the days before my departure I thought to myself, “This is the face of our nation; where everything that it is to be truly ‘American’ is represented to the fullest extent, right?”

The answer is both completely wrong and correct. I have indeed encountered what makes Washington DC the face of our nation, but my interpretations of American nationalism and local culture were completely off. We are, in the truest sense of the phrase, a melting pot. Whether it be the architecture of Chinatown; the Latin, Korean, Japanese and African eating establishments right outside my door or my roommate who speaks Mandarin to his friends back home on Skype, I cannot escape how global this national capital truly is.

I would like to employ the work of Karim H. Karim’s “Reviewing the ‘National’ in ‘International Communication Through the Lens of Diaspora” to provide some context to my personal findings.

Karim claims ethnically diverse and multi-national citizens are now being celebrated by many countries via national promotion. One example that comes to mind is South Africa, which prides itself on being the “Rainbow Nation”. It follows through on that notion by having 11 national languages, a plethora of political parties and other inklings of diversity.

But do multi-nationals, transnationals or diasporics (pick your favorite term) living in Washington DC or the US at large even feel like Americans? Looking at this topic from a communications and media standpoint, it would seem doubtful.

With the advent of worldwide technological innovations (Facebook, Skype, mobile phones, etc) that enable diasporic populations to remain tied to their native countries, there is less of a need to assimilate into “American culture”. I want to resist using this terminology, because what can we really define as American culture when there are so many subsets, many of them growing numbers of citizens who identify as multi-nationals?

This gets to a central argument of Karim and other readings from Manuel Castells and Silvio Waisbord – how is the validity of the nation-state changing in the modern day? I believe the US is the case study for how this may pan out. The external communications and information system of the US (Voice of America, etc) has depicted US life and foreign policy to the outside world for a number of years, ultimately being supported by the Smith Mundt Act of 1948. However, one stipulation of this law is that these government broadcasts and programs are not to be distributed domestically, therefore no one in the US is able to have access to how the country is being portrayed abroad by the government. The original reason for this caveat was to protect US citizens from potentially Communist-related material that may be leaked into the State Department’s programming.

Global conditions and the US population have definitely changed since this period, as Matt Armstrong of World Politics Review has pointed out in his contest of the Smith Mundt Act. Many multi-nationals living in the US are choosing to remain connected with the media in their own countries and are ignoring the events taking place in the nation in which they reside. In order to remedy this situation, the US could amend the Smith Mundt Act and allow its own citizens to be exposed to what many foreign countries hear regarding the nation.

This could very well resonate with diasporic populations that have grown accustomed to media sources like VOA and bolster nationalistic feelings within the US. On the current path, it seems there is an increasingly isolationist movement of diasporic populations, and as these populations grow, the more disillusioned the US will become with its own sense of nationalism.

Fine Line Between Nationalism and Ethnocentrism

September 11^th has obviously been on everyone’s mind over the last week. An issue that keeps coming to mind is ethnocentrism vs. nationalism. How do you differentiate between these two terms that can often be used very vaguely? In Dr. Gary Weaver’s address to the 2005 Ayoma Symposium on International Communication, he talks about the field of International Communications when he was in school for his PhD in International Relations. His major issue was the way domestic and foreign affairs were kept completely separate. They were treated as two separate entities with little or no overlap. Part of the reason for that was that we had not in modern times fought a war on our own soil. We had lost plenty of lives in war, but these men and women didn’t die on American land. That made it easier to keep up this illusion that war was completely a part of foreign domain and domestic issues were a whole different ball game.

Dr. Weaver also speaks about the birth of International Development and International Communications programs and how they were based on the ideals of ethnocentrism. These programs often took the stance that development meant becoming more Americanized. Obviously we have, for a large part, overcome ethnocentrism in these academic programs. But is ethnocentrism still a large part of our culture?

Though this is by no means academic, there was an unsourced quote going around facebook this weekend:

At this moment more than 100 times the amount of people who died on 9/11 are starving in Somalia. In Syria countless thousands are being tortured behind closed doors. In North Korea, Israel, Zimbabwe, and all across the world, people's freedom and dignity as human beings are constantly stomped upon by those with might. While today we should solemnly remember the 9/11 victims, tomorrow we should turn our attention to the multitudes who are still in need.

This quote implies that the U.S. is still ethnocentric as a country and as a culture. But it got me thinking… yes, there are more people dying worldwide from a huge and terrible array of tragedies. But 9/11, from an American viewpoint, was our tragedy. It happened in our backyard and it was mostly our fellow countrymen who were killed. Isn’t it natural that a country feels its own losses more than those happening halfway across the world? But in this increasingly global world, I’m not sure how these definitive borders stand up anymore. How does a country balance what happens within its own borders with what is happening in other places? It goes back to Weaver’s comments on the separatism between domestic and foreign affairs. What is nationalism and what is ethnocentrism? I’ve proposed a lot of questions, none of which I have the answers for.

But I have to believe there is a way that we can have national pride but also be more globally aware. I think other countries actually set some beautiful examples of this over the weekend. A CNN article reported on events worldwide that commemorated the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. In Sydney, firefighters climbed 80 flights of stairs in Sydney Tower to remember the climb that 9/11’s first responders did. In Paris a remembrance ceremony was held and a French mother interviewed said “she felt the need to be there to support the United States.” She remembered a headline from Le Monde from ten years ago that read “We are all Americans.”

My favorite story is another one CNN reported. It’s of a young Kenyan warrior who was in New York ten years ago and felt like he needed to do something. In his tribe’s tradition, a cow is meant to provide comfort and is the most valuable thing one can have. So his tribe managed to give the U.S. a herd of cows. Because of all kinds of problems, the cows could not be brought to the U.S. so this tribe is now caring for a herd of “America’s cows.” They all have Twin Towers brands on their ears.

I feel like these stories show national pride, but they are about reaching out to another country and to the global community. I see them as good examples of taking nationalism to a place where you can’t even compare it to ethnocentrism.

                                                                                                                                   

9/11 and the Case for Inter-Nationalism

We know media has nation-building characteristics. As our readings from “The Information Revolution and World Politics,” “The Historical Context of International Communication” and “The Emergence of Technical Networks” have discussed, the introduction of a communication technology to a group will assist in beginning to build a sense of connectivity. These connections can be facilitated through similar language, affiliation, cultural background, a common authority or other contributing factors.

However, with the advancement of technology in the modern day, where groups can form beyond international borders under the umbrellas of similar interest or experience (i.e. Internet forums, Facebook groups, blogs) the question arises: can there be inter-nation building through international media?

I would like to preface this notion by clearly defining how I plan to use the term internationalism. This term is often referenced as more of an antithesis of nationalism where there is cooperation between nations for their common good. I would like to bend this definition to include nations that may perhaps devote as much or more attention to the interests of another nation rather than their own.

The recent 10-year anniversary of the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States could stand as an example of this internationalism. Upon a quick search of some of the more commonly known international news sites (Xinhua News, Times of India, The Australian, Guardian, Le Monde, BBC, Al Jazeera), all noted the anniversary of the attacks as the top story on their page, some even running multi-story packages on the subject. Given what we have learned from our readings, is it possible that these regions of the world are consuming from their respective outlets and thereby assigning priority to events in the US over their home countries?

Certainly the annual remembrance of the attacks bolster nationalism within the US in the form of symbols of patriotism, reaching out to one another, charity, etc, but are citizens of these other nations feeling the same enthusiasm toward the US because they are exposed to the same media coverage?

There are some caveats to this case. First, the US media landscape has historically dominated internationally, as our readings from Elizabeth Hanson and Daya Thussu noted. According to these readings, the US was the frontrunner in wireless telegraphy/radio broadcasting, telephone communication, television broadcasting and the advent of the Internet, all of which are now utilized internationally. This created a media landscape that was heavily US-dependent, then US-centered as regional media developed. Also, the attacks took place at the World Trade Center in New York City, a location and area that is perhaps not best described in the context of just the US, but as an international center in itself.

I would be intrigued to research whether this is only an observation with the US or if this could be applied to other groups of countries. For example, do smaller Asian countries such as Bhutan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal rely heavily upon media from India in their respective news outlets and thereby exhibit nation-building characteristics for India as well as their own nation?

This is yet to be examined in depth, but I thought to raise this particular question in light of our discussion on international communication power and influence and the timely example of the 9/11 attacks. I’d welcome any thoughts on the subject.