Module 10: Cunningham

For each of the following quotes from the assigned essay, interpret and summarize the quote in your own words—in about two to three sentences in length.

Stuart Cunningham, “Popular Media as Public ‘Sphericules’ for Diasporic Communities,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (June 2001): 131–47.

In contrast to Gitlin, then, I argue that ethno-specific global mediatized communities display in microcosm elements we would expect to find in “the” public sphere. Such activities may constitute valid and indeed dynamic counter-examples to a discourse of decline and fragmentation, while taking full account of contemporary vectors of communication in a globalizing, commercializing and pluralizing world (134).
First, they are indeed ‘sphericules’; that is, they are social fragments that do not have critical mass. Nevertheless, they share many of the characteristics of the classically conceived public sphere – they provide a central site for public communication in globally dispersed communities, stage communaldifference and discord productively, and work to articulate insider ethnospecific identities – which are by definition ‘multi-national’, even global – to the wider “host” environments (134-135).
It follows that ethno-specific public sphericules are not congruent with international taste cultures borne by a homogenizing global media culture. For diasporic groupings were parts of states, nations and polities and much of the diasporic polity is about the process of remembering, positioning and, by no means least, constructing business opportunities around these pre-diasporic states and/or nations (136).

Module on Cunningham

Module 10: Cunningham