Wednesday 28 September 2011

Warwick 1B response to B1 Glocal mindmap

The mindmap response by B1 to our keyword, ‘Glocal’, brought our attention to the possible transactions that takes place in cultural interaction processes, with those listed being ‘space’, ‘identity’ and ‘communication’. However, we were unclear of the relationship between these terms of transaction with the ideas of ‘local’ and ‘global’ in ‘Glocal’.

To us, deciding on the term ‘Glocal’ was our response to the challenge of finding a ‘critical apparatus for understanding the complexities of cross-cultural interaction’ (Gilbert and Lo, 11). What ‘Glocal’ signified for us that we thought surpassed the other terms of ‘cross-fertilisation’, ‘Universopolis’ and ‘postcolonialism’ was a neutral platform that allowed embodied possibilities. It was also a term that was free from the historical, economic, political and cultural baggage. By creating a dialectic between the global and the local, a space which allows for the very real tensions that exist when we address plural identities emerges. This space is void of vertical status relations and is rather like an open horizontal plane where our competing cultural identities can be challenged and re-formed. An example of such a space would be:

‘Theatre, [which is] lucidly described by Yan Haiping as ‘a humanly animated site where living community and live performance are mutually engendered and the lifeworld at large is writ small with human materiality’, provides an exemplary site through which to examine the limits as well as the potential of cosmopolitan thinking. The materiality of theatre, manifest at multiple levels, offers practical ways of grounding the abstractions of theory, allowing us to relate ideals and concepts to tangible ways of living in the world.’ (Gilbert and Lo, 12)

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