| We live in a paradoxical age which can be best described by a paradoxical phrase: "glocalization"--an at-once-global-local world. The world we live in, as Homi Bhabha suggests, is a site of vulgar hybridity where traditional boundaries of difference become the transgressive centers of identity, and the conventional centers of identity become the new boundaries of difference. The vulgar hybridity of glocalization is well evinced in the transgressive intrusions of satellite television in nations across Asia in the 1990s; and more specifically in the context of my dissertation, in the modern nation-state of India.; Even a cursory look at the changing television environment in India reveals that the rise of the Hong Kong-based STAR TV network since 1991, has transgressed the sovereignty of the Indian nation-state in unparalleled ways. With the explosive growth of satellite television in the 1990s, the sovereign authority of the Indian national network, Doordarshan, has never been so threatened. Yet, here is the central contradiction of the national network in India: In its four decades of existence, Doordarshan has never been so vibrant either. In the first half of the 1990s, Doordarshan has grown phenomenally to counter the threat of its global and local competition in India. The increased geographical reach of the national network, its sophisticated technological innovations, its newer programming strategies, its phenomenal economic boom supported by rising advertising revenues, and the enthusiastic response of audiences to its nationalistic programs based on traditional folklore and religious epics, all empirically validate the vigor and vitality of national television and nationalist visions in India.; In this context, the central problematic of global/national/local networks that I address is as follows: How can we explain the simultaneous consolidation and rupture of national television--and the nationalist visions it sustains--in terms of the seemingly contradictory movements toward globalization and localization? Following some poststructuralist and postcolonial critics, I argue that television must be seen as a complex empirico-transcendental site/sight representing both the empirical realities of nationalism and its transcendental visions of sovereignty in the transgressive discourse of glocalization. |
