Abstract
As one volume of the Cultural Discourse Studies series, Discourses of the Developing World, is coauthored by native researchers from China, South Africa, and Argentina, respectively, and proposes to “initiate ‘development discourse studies’ within the broader framework of cultural discourse studies.” Against the backdrop of the dominant and overwhelming Western discourse scholarship, it not only strongly advocates for a cultural-discursive study of the non-Western, developing, Third World, but also strives to reconstruct Eastern paradigms of communication studies. It highlights the importance of the force of “human-cultural growth” as well as resistance to world hegemony, such as rediscovering and reframing the “development discourse.” Shi is Changjiang Distinguished Professor, founding Director of the Centre for Discourse and Cultural Studies, Hangzhou Normal University, China. Prah is Professor Emeritus in Sociology of the University of the Western Cape. Pardo is professor of analysis of the languages of the mass media at the Faculty of Arts, University of Buenos Aires.
The volume consists of three parts that focus on Asian, African, and Latin American perspectives and approaches, respectively. In Chapter 2, “Contemporary Chinese Communication From a Cultural Psychological Perspective,” cultural psychology, to be more specific, a Chinese cultural psychological perspective is employed to reexplicate the contemporary Chinese discourse, as it has “often continued to be misunderstood, misrepresented and misjudged” in international communication scholarship. By illustrating with a variety of examples, Shi argues that contemporary Chinese discourses should be “characterized by the propensities to be dynamic, tacit, balance-harmonious, face-minded, dialectic, authority-conscious, patriotic and aesthetic.” Taking the analysis of “patriotism” (aiguo zhuyi in Chinese), for example, given that it has usually perceived and interpreted by Western academia negatively as “nationalism,” “nationalist fanaticism,” or even “xenophobia,” Shi explains the Chinese feeling of patriotism from the combination of historical and intercultural perspectives, as “valued emotion of love of the mother country,” which has the “particular and unique dimension of cultural humiliation, bitterness and indignation from the experience and tradition.”
In Chapter 6, “Language Policies and Power Dynamics in Africa: Problems Linked to Linguistic Policies and Power Relations Within Countries as Well as Between Countries,” Prah argues that “development as a cultural process is ultimately a question of engaging mass society with the linguistic tools needed to transform the conditions and quality of their social lives.” He points out that due to the significant effect of colonialism in African history, there has been a clear sociocultural division between the African elites and the masses along language lines. It should be noted that “more than 95 percent of African newspapers publish in the colonial languages,” which according to Prah, means that “the overwhelming majority of Africans are excluded from the consistency and market of these newspapers.” He then highlights the important role of the African media in spreading indigenous languages and contributing to the African masses’ involvement in democracy and development.
In Chapter 9, “Modernity, Postmodernity, Culture and Representations of Work in the Discourse of the Argentine Extreme Poor,” it is quite impressive that Pardo compares the cultural differences between modern and postmodern capitalist logics by using examples drawn from the corpus composed of “life-story interviews with over 60 homeless people over 17 living in Buenos Aires” from 2003 to 2010, which reveals that the extreme poor of Buenos Aires are still deeply affected by the ideologies of modern values and take the modern view toward work.
Several elements make the volume rather attractive, such as a collective authorship, native scholars with wide research experience in the relevant discourses, case studies on socially broad issues and unique cultural perspectives, and tools toward development communication studies. As a whole, it is a well-organized and somewhat an innovative book with a range of merits. First, it provides rich content and selects multifarious local discourses pertinent to “development” from the continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, respectively, which enables both diversity and usefulness. Second, different from most existing researches of development, it adopts multifaceted historical and cultural perspectives to demonstrate the changes of the developing world in many respects, including economy, politics, science, technology, and culture. Third, it is vitally important and significant, though it seems ambitious, that against the mainstream communication studies and critical discourse analysis, the authors strive to construct plural, creative, critical, and non-Western paradigms of discourse studies, such as the nascent paradigm of cultural discourse studies (CDS).
Nevertheless, it would be more systematic and convincing if more cases from other developing countries could be included in the volume. As the (re)construction of a new theory or paradigm is inevitably more or less restrained by the current state of research, this book is no exception. Despite the fact that it is “not an all-encompassing study” but preliminary and tentative, I would highly recommend this book to scholars and students who are interested in cultural discourse/communication studies and development studies.