George YÃºdice
The Expediency of Culture, is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly globalized world. George YÃºdice explores critically how groups ranging from indigenous activists to nation-states to nongovernmental organizations have all come to see culture as a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied sociopolitical and economic ends. Through a dazzling series of illustrative studies, YÃºdice challenges the Gramscian notion of cultural struggle for hegemony and instead develops an understanding of culture where cultural agency at every level is negotiated within globalized contexts dominated by the active management and administration of culture. He describes a world where â€œhighâ€ culture (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain) is a mode of urban development, rituals and everyday aesthetic practices are mobilized to promote tourism and the heritage industries, and mass culture industries comprise significant portions of a number of countriesâ€™ gross national products.YÃºdice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean that todayâ€™s increasingly transnational cultureâ€”exemplified by the entertainment industries and the so-called global civil society of nongovernmental organizationsâ€”is necessarily homogenized. He demonstrates that national and regional differences are still functional, shaping the meaning of phenomena from pop songs to antiracist activism. YÃºdice considers a range of sites where identity politics and cultural agency are negotiated in the face of powerful transnational forces. He analyzes appropriations of American funk music as well as a citizen action initiative in Rio de Janeiro to show how global notions such as cultural difference are deployed within specific social fields. He provides a political and cultural economy of a vast and increasingly influential art eventâ€” ,in,site, a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on the city of Miami as one of a number of transnational â€œcultural corridorsâ€ and on the uses of culture in an unstable world where censorship and terrorist acts interrupt the usual channels of capitalist and artistic flows.
Cultural,Academic
The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era