Transcultural Subjectivity

Brian Creech

Situating their article in the field of Transcultural Media Studies, the authors adopt a perspective that investigates globalized modes of meaning-making alongside economic modes of international media production and distribution. The essay argues that material, semiotic, historical, geographic and political tensions are often given intelligible form through the production of transcultural media products that eclipse traditional global/local framings of international media and offer modes of expression that reveal hybridized, postcolonial identities existing within a mode of global exchange. Drawing on literatures of globalization and postcolonial media criticism as well as concepts of subjectivity, the authors theorize their concept of transcultural subjectivity, which they then illustrate by means of a case study of how journalist and Google executive Wael Ghonim became one of the central figures in the international media representations of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. The nuances and contradictions within these representations illustrate that a transcultural understanding of media subjectivity requires attention and adherence to the conditions that such mediated figures as Wael Ghonim emerge in.