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Cultural Policy Beyond and Below the Nation State: New Forms of Subnational and Transnational Cultural Identity and Citizenship

2005; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Colin Mercer,

Cultural Identity and Representation

Culture – the cultural field – has, in the modern period, historically been the most fundamental and most powerful domain in which a sense of the ‘national’ of national identity, affiliation and belonging, has been developed, consolidated and embedded in both national and individual consciousness. Beyond the formal and legal national identity documents of the passport and the identity card, the myriad of national cultural ‘documents’ – novels, dictionaries, folk tales, poetry, newspapers, art and museum collections, bibliographies, libraries, musical and literary traditions, national broadcasting systems, films – have constantly affirmed and re-affirmed, produced and reproduced, the deepest and most embedded sense of the nation and the national: what is inside and what is outside, the borders. These have been the cultural technologies of national imagining. National cultural and media policies – and policy frameworks – have historically been formed in this context and guided by this logic. But, increasingly, in the context of globalisation, transnational flows of people and cultural goods, the development of diasporas, and the ‘virtual mobility’ produced by the internet and mobile telephony, the national frame and policy remit is proving inadequate to address the realities of cultures which are both subnational and transnational in their allegiances and belongings. These are realities which are often beyond or below the horizons of visibility of established national policy frameworks. We need to begin to more urgently pose the question of what are the new technologies of cultural imagining – CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC World, Bloomberg, the internet, non-terrestrial television and digital radio, the iPod, the mobile phone and text messaging, the weblog, and other communications protocols yet to be envisaged.