Special issue: Difference and globalization

Key Aims and Assumptions

One first key assumption underpinning our work here is that the visual provides a privileged and in fact crucial mode of communication in (con)texts of globalization. This is both thanks to its perceptual availability and transcultural potential. The visual has an ability to authenticate, resemble and connote without the aid of language, and often in the absence of a clear demarcation of its possible uses and functions. In the face of cultural and historical idiosyncrasies, the concurrently indexical, iconic and symbolic substance of images contributes to making the visual especially powerful as a mode of communication for the performance, exchange and production of prized identities in the contemporary semioscape, that is, the ‘globalizing circulation of symbols, sign systems and meaning-making practices’ (Thurlow and Aiello, 2007: 308) that has become vital to post-industrial politics and economics.

It is also largely for this reason that visual communication scholars have taken a keen interest in the study of globalization processes, although they have so far focused predominantly on ‘traditional’ media (e.g. film, advertising, television, journalism) and more recently on digital and social media. Because visual communication transcends a narrow definition of visual ‘media’, though, we concur with Couldry’s (2009: 441) view that due to the progressive hybridization of communication practices and products ‘the media’ should no longer be seen ‘as a privileged site for accessing a common world’. Combined with Silverstone’s (2002: 761) claim that ‘all communication involves mediation’ and that the latter is ‘a transformative process in which the meaningfulness and value of things are constructed’, this expanded definition assists us in placing the visual mode at the centre of communication in its various forms of mediation.

This special issue examines a range of communication materials drawn from genres that comprise while also reaching beyond those that are typical of ‘traditional’ or new media, and that include formats such as women’s lifestyle magazines (Chen and Machin), corporate store design (Aiello and Dickinson), international news magazine covers (Nothias), ethnic museum websites (Johnson and Carneiro), participatory film and photography (Shankar; Pristed Nielsen and Thidemann Faber), and urban space in its own right (Pauwels). The contributions rely on methods such as interviews with image-makers and media producers, on-site observation, field photography, qualitative and quantitative content analysis, and participatory visual research.

Another important assumption for the purposes of this special issue is that difference is central to globalization. The rise of global capitalism has been overwhelmingly associated with the increasing ‘loss’ of difference in cultural production. As a fundamental issue in global interconnectivity, the key tension between homogenization and heterogenization has generated interest and apprehension over the preservation and disappearance of difference across cultures (see Appadurai, 1996). And while scholarship on the homogenizing forces and effects of globalization has flourished, less systematic attention has been given to how cultural and social difference may be mobilized for symbolic and material profit in global(izing) communication contexts, while also being a significant factor in the production and reception of texts (Georgiou, 2013; Kraidy, 2005).

As a concept, globalization suggests an ‘all-inclusiveness’ (Featherstone, 2006) which, in turn, can be critically translated into ‘an expansion of capitalist production, market-based consumption and Western culture’ (Waters, 2001: 232). In addition, in its common usage the term ‘globalization’ is often framed as an entity and an actor in its own right rather than a process – or set of processes – grounded in agentful human actions. The ‘nominalization’ of globalization (Fairclough, 2006) contributes to framing major inequalities and tensions as inevitable and completed states of things which can neither be attributed to specific institutions and individuals nor reversed, or even simply changed. It follows that globalization is often mistaken for a finite condition of economic decentring and cultural homogenization, which has occurred without reference to geographical divides, political struggles, economic imbalances, cultural specificities, and social inequalities.

Clearly, globalization is a subject of controversy that demands a very nuanced deliberation of its many real and perceived trade-offs and dilemmas. We steer away from a conceptualization of globalization as a ‘linear process of social integration’ (Featherstone, 2006: 387) with the understanding that cultural exchanges and intercultural engagement are deeply rooted in the power relations underlying advanced capitalism and the corresponding concentrations of power that operate in specific urban, national or regional contexts. It is in this sense that there are voices and visions that are better able to cross geographical, cultural and institutional boundaries, and circulate as symbolic capital by virtue of their sanctioned, well-supported, at times capillary, and ultimately powerful political economy. At the same time, the growing capacity of reception to turn into production, together with the ongoing merging of genres that are usually found in institutional or corporate communication and those that are characteristic of self- or community-based representation (Thumim, 2012), make for an ambiguous if not ‘messy’ picture of global communication.

Speaking of difference, rather than sameness, allows us to examine globalization itself as an ongoing processual phenomenon entailing intensified flows and overlaps of both material and symbolic products and practices across geographical, institutional, and cultural borders. And because it is in a web of locales and through a wealth of trajectories that globalization comes into being, this special issue strives to cover as much ground as possible, both figuratively and literally. With a selection of contributions whose geographical foci span across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, we aim to highlight the multiple directions, shifting forms and ideological variations taken by flows of semiotic materials and visual resources.

A third and final assumption that shapes this special issue lies in the recognition that cultural and social differences are largely constituted through discursive means and that, in late modern times, identities also contribute to generating tangible political and economic realities – and in particular inequalities – that reach far beyond local or national contexts. Stuart Hall’s intellectual legacy is evident here, and we are especially indebted to his argument that identities are never fixed, but are constantly (re)produced in ‘a process of becoming rather than being’ (Hall, 1996: 4) while also being dependent on what they leave out, that is, a constitutive outside which is also constantly changing (Butler, 1990).

This dynamic approach to identity formation is at the heart of our critical understanding of the significance of difference (or heterogeneity) as a key resource for success in the heavily semioticized, rather than simply mediatized, global marketplace(s) of contemporaneity. The ‘new’ or advanced capitalism that underlies contemporary processes of globalization is set apart by a centrality of communication. And, as the political and social project that sustains and co-constitutes advanced capitalism, neoliberalism is not about erasing difference or engendering homogeneity, but it is rather tied to the active management and exploitation of specific identities – for example, locality, ethnicity, nationality or even broader constructs such as ‘Africanness’ (see Hall, 2011).

Because globalism – or the idea that the cultural dimensions of globalization are regulated by the logics of the marketplace – is at the core of much of the production and distribution of visual imagery in late modern times, rather than undergoing a crude process of homogenization the representation of cultural and social specificities is most often ‘designed’ to fit into a globalizing aesthetic. Ultimately, success in the marketplaces of advanced capitalism may be progressively tied to any given economic, political and cultural actor’s ability to deploy difference in communication, but only insofar as this is a highly structured (and possibly sanitized) endeavour for the achievement of globalist ends.

Concurrent Themes and Outcomes

A multivocal approach to research design and analysis enables us to offer a wealth of insights into some of the ways in which the visual contributes to shaping, constraining and expressing both social and cultural difference in the globalizing rather than already global arenas of contemporary media and communication. Spread across the digital and the analogue, the ephemeral and the material, and the institutional and the participatory, the texts and practices examined in this special issue offer a particularly rich snapshot of the status and potential of visual communication in relation to old and recent migration, gendered lifestyle identities, corporate branding, urban cosmopolitanism, postcolonial inequalities, and neoliberal aid and development. Through this assortment of foci, there are three main themes that arise from the special issue and that pertain to the recontextualization, stylization and texturization of difference, respectively. Each of these themes addresses a distinct though not isolated process of transformation undergone by specific dimensions of cultural and social difference in their encounters with globalization, through a range of visual resources and with related discursive outcomes.

Recontextualizing Difference

In globalizing settings of visual communication, difference is often ‘moved’ from one specific cultural or social context to another. This transfer is usually associated with adaptation, slippage, and even struggle. This process of displacement, recentring and reframing may be defined as recontextualization, insofar as it is characterized by acts of top-down colonization and/or bottom-up appropriation (see Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). In either case, and often as a combination of the two, recontextualization entails significant changes in semiosis (as in the use of particular visual resources) which point to broader changes in ideologies and practices. Through this theme, we highlight that the movement of visual resources across borders is never neutral or straightforward, and in fact contributes to continually redefining the position and status of given cultural and social traits over others.

In their article ‘The local and the global in the visual design of a Chinese women’s lifestyle magazine: a multimodal critical discourse approach’, Ariel Chen and David Machin foreground a major process of recontextualization, which has become fairly common in the regional globalization of media patterns in East Asia, while also reaching into ‘Western’ popular culture. In their analysis of how the Chinese women’s magazine Rayli has changed over nearly two decades, Chen and Machin uncover designers’ perspectives on the magazine’s progressive integration of discursive elements originating from Japanese Kawaii culture, which emphasizes cuteness and vulnerability in contexts of youth culture, specifically those aimed at girls and young women. They argue that, together with the gradual adoption of more properly global branding and design principles, the recontextualization of ‘cuteness’ into Chinese media discourse and women’s lifestyle magazines in particular contributes to redefining core Chinese values regarding social relations and womanhood alike.

In a similar fashion, in ‘Beyond authenticity: a visual-material analysis of locality in the global redesign of Starbucks stores’, Giorgia Aiello and Greg Dickinson outline the trajectories taken by visual-material signifiers of locality as these were transferred into the global store design strategy devised by Starbucks in order to revive its image in the face of the economic crisis and the McDonaldization of its brand. As Starbucks opted for an aesthetic of locality, rather than authenticity, the new store design strategy imported and adapted meaning potentials of materiality and community from cultural repositories associated with vernacular cosmopolitanism. This process of recontextualization, Aiello and Dickinson argue, entails a top-down selection of discourses and rhetorics of locality which, in turn, contributes to redefining bottom-up practices around consumption and sociality.

In his article ‘“Rising”, “hopeful”, “new”: visualizing Africa in the age of globalization’, Toussaint Nothias examines British, French and US international news magazine covers that portray Africa, highlighting that a host of visual resources originating from globalizing communication genres like advertising and stock photography are mobilized to frame the continent in optimistic and even glamorous terms. He argues that, nonetheless, the ‘Afro-optimism’ that has increasingly become popular in neoliberal mediatized debates on contemporary Africa is eminently constrained by the (re)inscription of essentialist, hierarchical and racialized assumptions, which are firmly rooted in the longstanding ‘Afro-pessimism’ of postcolonial and globalizing media portrayals of Africa as the ‘dark’ continent.

With a critical and participatory focus on a related topic, Shankar’s article ‘Towards a critical visual pedagogy: a response to the “end of poverty” narrative’ problematizes NGOs’ appropriation of neoliberal discourses and imagery emphasizing the desperate poverty, pathological helplessness and radical otherness of marginalized communities in India as a way to solicit international aid and continued private and government funding for development projects. Following this critique, Shankar then proposes yet another form of recontextualization of this narrative, namely one that works to deconstruct its ways of seeing and create alternative forms of visibility within marginalized communities and in sight of a lasting engagement with both local and global audiences.

In keeping with a sustained analysis of ‘othering’ in the age of globalization, in ‘Communicating visual identities on ethnic museum websites’, Melissa Johnson and Larissa Carneiro describe how certain stereotypes associated with specific ethnic groups in the United States are actively appropriated and reframed by non-profit ethnic museums to craft visual and multimodal narratives for their official websites. By mobilizing some of the same tropes that were previously used to profile and discriminate against the groups that they represent, ethnic museum websites promote ‘self-othering’ narratives, which work to turn such stereotypes into positive identity markers through devices like an emphasis on heritage and the selection of metonymic imagery associated with some of the readily recognizable ‘characteristics’ of any given group.

In a similar vein, the research participants involved in Helene Pristed Nielsen and Stine Thidemann Faber’s participatory study ‘A strange familiarity? Place perceptions among the globally mobile’ draw from a repertoire of representational resources that are available to them in the space of their host country (Denmark) to produce photographs that ‘defamiliarize’ and, in this way, redefine some of the established, local meanings attached to particular places and signs in space through the lens of their personal, embodied experiences as recent immigrants. Finally, with his visual essay ‘World cities reframed: a visual take on globalization’, Luc Pauwels offers a striking visualization of the juxtaposition of the unique spatiality of internationally known cities like New York, Copenhagen, Hong Kong and Athens with both visual and linguistic references to geographical and cultural ‘elsewheres’. The co-presence and even collapse of signifiers pointing to globalization, exoticism and locality contributes to redefining each of these terms in their own right and in relation to one another. Urban metropolitan spaces are indeed sites par excellence where encounters with difference become apparent.

Stylizing Difference

In conjunction with the recontextualization processes outlined above, another theme that surfaces from this special issue’s contributions is that difference is often ‘performed’ in ways that are tied to the pursuit of symbolic capital. Broadly speaking, the notion of stylization pertains to the ‘promotion of particular ways of being (or styles) involving language, image, social practice and material culture’ (Cameron, 2000; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2006: 105). In other words, ‘a reflexively managed resource’ (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2006: 104) such as visual semiosis can be mobilized to produce and stage, rather than simply represent, prized identities. In the process of stylization, the substance of representation is actively managed and ‘designed’ to achieve discursive ends regulated through broader social practices – for example, those associated with lifestyle and consumer capitalism. What emerges from this theme, then, is that the globalizing communication of difference is most often preceded by the strategic foregrounding, enhancement, containment, reduction, or even loss of specific identity traits.

Johnson and Carneiro’s article offers a prime example in this regard. In their detailed content analysis of visual resources used across ethnic museum websites, they point out that there is a shared tendency to craft strategic imagery aimed at projecting a desirable identity both for publicity and funding purposes, for example by foregrounding uplifting pastoral sceneries or historic architectural details, while relying on muted if not absent narratives of a specific ethnic group’s history of hardship through migration and discrimination. Along the same lines, both Nothias and Chen and Machin highlight that, in news and women’s magazines, images of specific identities are increasingly abstracted and decontextualized, to the extent that complex issues regarding particular groups or places are visualized through symbolic and generic visuals that are typical of advertising and stock imagery, and which could be equally used to illustrate a number of other texts.

Responding to largely different exigencies, imagery associated with humanitarian aid and development tends to rely on illusions of authenticity. As Shankar points out in his critique of the ‘end of poverty’ narrative, photographic images of marginalized communities in developing countries are most often staged to communicate their subjects as ‘others’ urgently needing help by means of heightened realism (or modality), a deliberate focus on the interaction between portrayed individuals and the viewer through the adoption of a ‘demand’ gaze, and the selective exclusion of visual traces pointing to the relationships that portrayed subjects may have with other members of their communities and the image-makers themselves. Pristed Nielsen and Thidemann Faber’s research participants are in turn stylized in their self-representation, inasmuch as the performativity of their images is constrained by social norms regarding the separation of private and public space together with their own positionality as outsiders.

Both Aiello and Dickinson’s work on Starbucks stores and Pauwels’ visual essay on globalizing cities point to yet another form of stylization: that of indoor and outdoor urban space for market- and lifestyle-driven arenas such as commerce, tourism and planning. In both cases, there is an orchestrated attempt to balance and foreground the dialectic between the global and the local, in the pursuit of distinction within recognition and by combining generic references to architectural and consumer cosmopolitanism with markers of urban grit and specificity.

Texturizing Difference

This special issue’s third theme is rooted in the attention given by some of the contributions to both hegemonic and resistive attempts to confer ‘texture’ – that is, a specific feel and experiential quality – to the visual communication of cultural and social difference. As a way to underscore the processual nature of this final, burgeoning theme, we propose the term ‘texturization’ to describe the active deployment, amplification and organization of the graininess, consistency and concreteness of difference through visual and multimodal means. While texturization may seem to be at odds with stylization, we suggest that the former may in fact be an emergent development of the latter. Both stylization and texturization involve the transformation of representational substance for performative reasons and with the aim of crafting desirable identities. Whereas stylization often entails techniques aimed at ‘cleansing’ images from ‘inappropriate’ characteristics (Cameron, 2000), texturization works to add visual cues that invoke the emplaced, embodied and overall phenomenological qualities of given representational resources.

Germane to the now hugely popular notion of affect, texture is a visual rendition of haptic and more broadly sensorial, indexical features. In other words, texture is a semiotic resource that conjures up sensations regarding the physical and motivated – rather than conventional and arbitrary – nature of visual communication (Djonov and Van Leeuwen, 2011). It is in this sense that texturization entails a purposeful attempt to amplify perception through residual or excessive cues and, in doing so, also interrupt interpretation. References to texture, albeit often more symbolic than indexical, are present across our special issue’s contributions. For example, Chen and Machin explain that ‘cuteness’ is associated with the visual representation of items of clothing that range from fur and flannel, to imply softness, to ruffles and lacy textiles, which point to the delicateness and vulnerability of childhood. Likewise, Johnson and Carneiro describe some of the ways in which textural aspects of layout and backgrounding are emphasized to imply tradition.

Generally, such references to texture seem to design ‘weight’ into given representational resources, while also functioning as a visual counterpoint to more stylized cues, like the increasingly decontextualized backgrounds and human ‘types’ which - as both Nothias and Chen and Machin demonstrate - are now commonly used in print magazines. Pauwels’ visual essay offers a vivid impression of the hybrid layering of textures in the urban fabric of world-known or aspiring world-class cities, from the smoothness of the glass and steel used in landmark buildings and the cleanliness of fonts and imagery in outdoor advertising to the roughness of graffitied walls and the unevenness of human bodies in public space. It is in this layering of urban textures that Pristed Nielsen and Thidemann Faber’s research participants find points of attachment to engage with questions about their own lived experiences of difference as recent immigrants in North Denmark, for example through the expression of affiliation with the materiality of particular places and localities.

In two cases, however, texturization is at the very centre of efforts to communicate difference as concrete and material. On the one hand, Aiello and Dickinson’s article examines Starbucks’ top-down approach to texturizing its stores through visual-material anchors to the local provenance of fixtures and furnishings, which are visibly dented, scratched, grooved and mismatched. In this way, the Seattle-based corporation strategically embeds its homogenizing forces in the material feel and sensuous experience of emplaced difference. On the other hand, in his own pedagogical practice, Shankar advocates the bottom-up texturization of community-based film and photography, as a means to reveal the mechanisms of production and radically question the implied objectivity and authenticity of imagery that is commonly used to portray impoverished communities. By crafting an aesthetic that relies on semiotic resources grounded in self-authoring practices – and which, therefore, are often shaky, blurry, or compositionally messy – Shankar and his students mark their visual narratives as embodied and relational, thus questioning both the implied audiences and institutional goals of development-oriented imagery of poverty and suffering.

In both cases, though with wildly dissimilar motivations and results, texturization contributes to bringing out the grain and frictions of globalization, rather than its supposed seamlessness and liquidity. This, in turn, has an impact on producers’ and viewers’ experience of difference within the global, insofar as the presumed opposition between homogenization and heterogenization, as well as the hegemonic and the vernacular, becomes untenable. To conclude, it is precisely such grain and frictions that this special issue as a whole aims to highlight, with the hope that visual communication scholars and those who are more generally interested in cultural globalization find methodological, empirical and theoretical entry points into further critical investigations of the numerous, unanticipated, and even seemingly contradictory trajectories of contemporary cultural production and exchange in and through visual communication.