Wk 1: A Longing to Be - The Scapes of Globalisation

Part of what the term globalisation means to me is finding new ways to identify myself – with others, with time and with the world around me.

After misconstruing my nationality, a co-worker asked me the other night what I was. When I answered, “Australian,” he said (and I'm not exaggerating for the purposes of dramatic story-telling), “there’s no such thing”. In following the trend of the majority of the world, the ethnoscape (Appadurai, 1990) of our Land Down Under has become increasingly multicultural over the years as part of the processes of globalisation. As people become increasingly migratory and the ideas traditionally associated with place – national borders, sovereignty, etc – become more arbitrary, issues of identity and belonging become harder to define. We can distinguish ourselves on a regional, state or national level or now even as a ‘global citizen’. All point to where we think we belong. Although many believe we are in a post-colonial stage in Australian history, there may always be an underlying sense that we don’t technically belong here. We weren’t here first.

My great-great grandparents came to Australia from Germany in 1913. Although our name changed during the Second World War to distance ourselves from ‘the homeland’, two generations after immigrating here, my grandpa is still quite German. He wouldn’t identify himself among us Aussies, and although his heritage is German, technically he is not. As seen from my vignette, I hold no such views (Aussie, Aussie, Aussie...). The difference in opinions over the generations exemplifies that:

“...terms with the suffix –scape... are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle but, rather, they are deeply perspectival constructs” (Apparundai, 1998: 33 in Rantanen, 2005: 13).

The flows of globalisation force us to reflexively analyse the changing world through the frameworks of –scapes, as ideas of identity, community and cultures are “deterritorialized” and instead generated and experienced “translocally” (Rockefeller, 2011: 560). The physical flows of globalisation not only change the ethnoscope of places but also the ideoscapes of what it means to belong to those places and have done so long before we used the word globalisation to describe our increasingly interdependent and interconnected world.

Hello!

Hi there, my name is Claire Parnell.

I'm in my second year at Deakin, Burwood studying Media and Communications and while this blog is a necessity for the Globalisation and the Media unit (if I want to pass, which I do) I hope you enjoy reading it nonetheless!

Ta ta for now :)