Cunningham S, ‘ Popular media

as public ‘sphericules’ for

diasporic communities’,
International Journal of Cultural
Studies, 2001; 4; 131
• Cunningham looks at Diasporic media as
a specific form of public communication
• Two key questions at the core of the
debate on Public sphere are focused on (i)
the progressive nature of civil society and
changes in the ways in which it functions
• (ii) on whether media supports or inhibits
public communication
• Scholarship has systematically shown that
Western Public Sphere is compromised by
encroachment of commercial media and
communicative strategies
• In many societies, media is the only
vehicle that constitutes the Public Sphere
• Hartley (1999) has provided an alternative
schema that does not rely on the
private/public spheres dichotomy
• Instead he suggests the public sphere is
enclosed within the larger mediasphere
itself encompassed by the semiosphere
(sphere that is constituted by systems of
signifying practices, Arts in general for
instance)
• Minoritarian Public Sphere is one which is
not nationally bound but consists of very
specific spaces of self- and community-
making and identity practices (Husband,
1998)
• In diasporic media, commercial realm
figures in a positive light
• Mc Guigan (1998)- In the case of diasporic
media, public communication has an
‘affective’ dimension
• Important to look at the role of
entertainment in a debate dominated by
informational activity
• Analysis of entertainment content of
popular media allows for an understanding
of formulation and reproduction of popular
communication
• Gitlin (1998)- Contemporary Public
sphere- An increasingly complex, poly-
ethnic communications-saturated series of
societies around the world
• Instead of the concept of Public sphere,
Cunningham favours the concept of ‘public
sphericules’ which brings attention to the
idea that public communication goes
beyond the boundaries of the nation state-
what he calls ‘global narrowcasting of
polity and culture’
• Diasporic sphericules dynamically contend
with Western models of public
communication
• Subaltern counterpublics, following Nancy
Fraser have mushroomed around the
world, feminist public sphere, public
sphere around environmental and human
rights issues, around’ taste cultures’-gay
cultures etc.
• Hartley and McKee(2000) talk about ‘civil
societies without borders, without state,
institutions and citizens’
• Citizenship is based on culture and identity
and voluntary belonging as opposed to
model based on rights and obligations
derived from the State
• One of the key issues about diasporic
sphericules is to do with the degree of
control over meanings created about and
within sphericule and by who this control is
exercised
• We find in ethno-specific global mediatised
communications microcosmic elements
that also figure in the basic model of the
PS
• Generalized debates about globalization,
commercialization and the fate of public
communication are taken up with a
different slant in ethno-specific sphericules
• They are social fragments that do not have
the critical mass within which are
articulated ethno-specific identities from
many nations
• Cunningham also uses the term
‘narrowcast cultural spaces’ such as
Karaoke , Vietnamese variety music video
and Bollywood film
• Texts may be aesthetically transgressive
or politically progressive but what
concerns scholars is the use they are put
to by communities
• The sphericules may represent diasporic
cultures as locked up in a time warp with
the idea of a fetichized homeland or as
assimilated to dominant host cultures
• Texts may be aesthetically transgressive
or politically progressive but what
concerns scholars is the use they are put
to by communities
• The sphericules may represent diasporic
cultures as locked up in a time warp with
the idea of a fetichized homeland or as
assimilated to dominant host cultures
• They are constituted like classic PS by
elements of civil society
• They intersect with State apparatus at
various points on issues of immigration
law or multiculturalism policy, control of
homeland regimes for e.g.,
• Instead of seeing fragmentation of PS as
negative, vibrancy of PS arises from variety of
voices which contend for recognition and
influence within a micropolity which can lead to
renewal from generation to generation
• There is routinized piracy, which leads to what
Cunningham calls a ‘shadow system’, very
unlike cultures of global corporate culture even if
they are transnational
• Communities are constituted through the
media and bring along new configurations
of entertainment and information dualism
• Ethno-specific sphericule stages
difference and dissension in ways that the
community can manage by itself
• Where voices other than official but
constitutive of communitarian sentiment
can speak
• Blurring of information and entertainment
creates a tabloidized sphericule in a
positive sense
• The ‘Habitus’ (acc. to Bourdieu acquired
patterns of thought, behavior, and taste ) is a
continuum between information and popular
culture
• Vietnamese music video produced in Australia is
an example of ‘affective’ dimension of public
communication
• Maintenance of homeland tradition and heritage
in more dominant Western cultural forms
• Both Vietnamese overseas and
Vietnamese regime accuse each other of
having lost authenticity
• Vietnamese diasporic media, unlike
Bollywood, is constituted by a small series
of communities that flourish outside the
purview of the State and major
communitarian vectors of subvention and
trade
• Cuts across several axes of difference and
is widely available in homeland
• Heterogeneity is required to maximize
audience
• Media and film culture- Bollywood is a site
staging inter-communal discussion
between mainland Indians and Fiji Indians