Cultural Boundaries, Identity and Communication in Latin America

Philip Schlesinger and Nancy Morris

Collective identity is at the heart of debates in contemporary cultural theory. Although the reshaping of cultural identity by processes of communication is increasingly discussed around the world, and European and North American scholars are widely read and analysed, the work of their counterparts elsewhere does not command the attention it merits. Latin America is a case in point: its rich intellectual production on questions of media and identity has been largely overlooked outside the region.

Helge Rønning

Language is one of the keys to socio-cultural identity in Mozambique, as the following article reveals. It relates directly to questions of nationhood, politics, literacy and development and the problems are even more profound when matters of self-expression, unity and community are taken into consideration. A certain amount of compromise may be necessary if Mozambique is to establish and retain its own identity in the changing scenario of Southern Africa.

Renato Ortiz

National and cultural identities can be conceived as symbolic constructions, argues Renato Ortiz in the following article. He demonstrates that the classic principles of integration, territoriality and centrality that have been held to characterise the nation - and to offer the bases for national identity - have in significant measure been displaced by processes of globalisation.

Philip Lee

Film is a mass medium in which the distinction between reality and fiction, from the point of view of the audience, can become temporarily blurred. This does not mean that film becomes 'virtual reality'; rather that the spectator crosses the border unawares and imbues film unconsciously with perceptions and identifications that ignore any obstacle to them becoming 'real'. According to Jean Leirens, the film spectacle creates a 'vacuum which dreams readily fill'.1

Charles Arthur

Haiti's journalists are now enjoying a freedom from the intimidation and repression that for 40 years were the norm. During the Duvalier family dictatorship, and the military regimes that followed, beatings and assassinations were the omnipresent threats facing any sector of the media that dared to challenge the status quo. According to the following report, since the UN intervention and the return to democratic government in 1994, the situation has improved significantly

Jorge A. González

The following paper is divided into three sections. The first sketches a panorama of the conditions of construction of knowledge, not 'about' but from the perspective of culture. The second is a self-critical presentation of the author's work on what he terms 'Cultural Fronts'. Lastly, some of the characteristics and effects of the cultural fronts project are presented, which is currently being developed in Mexico and, through recently-initiated collaborations, in other parts of Latin America.

by Marjorie Ferguson

This article offers a short account of historical differences in the evolution of American and Canadian national identities, noting that both countries present textbook cases of the familiar theoretical concepts of constructed identities, invented traditions and imagined communities. It then takes a brief look at cross-border cultural politics, policy and media trade practicies, before finally examining aspects of the economic and political relations between Quebec and the Rest of Canada in the context of the 1995 Referendum.

Néstor García Canclini

How useful is the notion of hybridity as we approach the century's end amid a drastic reconfiguring of cultural boundaries and markets? In the following paper García Canclini reviews his proposed responses in Hybrid Cultures, taking into account the attention being paid to multiculturalism in the 1990s, the processes of supranational integration and hybridisation being promoted by international free trade agreements (NAFTA, Mercosur, etc.), the rethinking of modernity and postmodernity in this decade, and some debates that the book has engendered in the six years since it was published.

Enrique Bustamante

Dialogue between Latin American and European thinkers on communication, in particular, and between everyone working in this field, in general, is crucial to understanding the world in which we live today. Accordingly, the author of the following article pleads for 'a positive alternative project, able to respond to a new communication model and to meet contemporary challenges' in the context of the transnational - or global - era.

Jesús Martín Barbero

'The idea of the linear passage from tradition to modernity is replaced by the affirmation that modernity is defined by the diversity and multiplication of alternatives, the ability to associate past and future. There is a complete change of perspective: it was once thought that the modern world was unified and traditional society was fragmented; today, on the contrary, modernisation seems to be taking us from homogeneity to heterogeneity'.

Alain Touraine