"The Global in the Local" Arif Dirlik

This article begins with the utopian story of a movie called Local Hero. Where giant corporation falls so much in love with a town that they scarp a development deal and build companies that help the town. But this doesn't happen in real life , instead Disney builds it's own town and corporations like Walmart run all the small business out of small towns.

But why do we care ? Why is it that there is a fight between the global and the local?


With the creation of products and services intended for a global market but customized to suit local needs and technologies that provide local services on a global basis there doesn't need to be a fight any longer , you can inhabit a space between the two.

There are many problems with this because it still creates a lot of the same problems as globalazation .


Even if when you go to the CocaCola website you are taken to a site specific to where you are your still being sold a western product that represents a lot of western ideals. Just because it's marketed differently doesn't change where it came from and what it represents.

Theres also the products that are produced to multiple countries , but here you see the division of labor drawn across ethnic lines. The people in the west are going to have the better jobs i.e not working in sweat shops.

"Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity'?" Stuart Hall

I think identity is something that is a really hard topic to deal with because it encompasses so much . I think Halls ideas about identity starting with the idea of identification is a good place to start. We see ourselves be identifying with a set of characteristics of a certain group and therefore it is a process of construction.

Thus because we construct are own identities they also change over time . Just like our identities change so do those of cultures , due to historical reasons such as globolization or colorization . These changes in cultural identity also effect personal identity as the groups we identify with change .

This idenitity isn't constructed through difference , we can only construct our identity if we can see the "other" . We find ourselves in what we lack. thus idenidy can only be formed where two different sides meet and identity can only exist at a site of conflict between two differing sides .

I think an artist who really embodies identity conflict is Adrian Piper. Because of her light colored skin she is able to pass for both black and white , witch allows her to embody two sides of racial identity politics . My favorite piece of work by her is her calling card series which really confronts the viewer to think about identity politics and why we create these sites of conflicts related to race in our society .

I think you can see it even more so in a reaction to Pipers work that I found on youtube where as any race can be placed into the card , calling on the universality of the problem .

I think both piece question why we have made racial identity such an issue and how it still continues to be a problem for many people today. We shouldn't judge people on their identities .

"From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the age of Globalization" Robert Stam and Ella Shohat

In discussions of globalization and identity one must look at the media because they are the way we are able to interact with foreign places and peoples . Because the media has such a global reach it allows for culture to move around the world and outside of just one nation .Because or this the third and first worlds have become interlinked and depend on one another

I think in our society the term globalization has both negative and positive connotations . We see it as a way to interact with the world around us and all learn to live together as tolerant people but it also become a way with which to homogenize the cultures of the world . To avoid both extremes we need to find a place in the middle in which to exist.

Right now we seem to inhabit a world of neo-colonialism where the first world exports culture and the third world receives it . We can see an example with the show Bay-watch , which is the most watched show world wide mostly because it has been exported to so many countries . Yet here in the west we rarly see productions from other parts of the world other than a few telenovellas which is mostly due to the high number of Spanish speaking Americans.

All this exchange of information takes ideologies with it . Meaning that the west is exporting it's media and ideologies around the world. When people see the show friends on TV they want to live like the people they see on the show and adopt a more western lifestyle.

I think an artist who deals with this well is Banksy because he mixes pop culture media images to create new meanings and make us question the world we live in and how passive we have become to the media both that we produce on a larger scale and that we take in on a personally level.

"The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project" Tim Barringer

You never think when you are a child and going to museums that they could be impeding your world view , you see them as a place where you go to expand your mind and learn new things. But like everything else you have to use your own judgment and draw from many sources to learn the reality of a situation.

Once again it's amazing to me how little has changed in museums , they may try to hide it but they still take a very imperialist view just like history textbooks and other materials do.

I am reminded of a recent trip to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa . It seems like every battle we were ever in we were the good guys , we were always fighting for the winning side and we're always justified in our actions. Which may or may not in many cases be true . Also in Ottawa at the National Musuem of art is a church that has been moved inside the art gallery which is reminiscent of the mosque at the Egyptian exhibit although a coffee shop has not been put inside the church it is still an odd feeling to walk inside and not be presented with what we associate with a religious environment.


I think that James Luna deals with this imperialist view of museums in his peice titled artifact peice , in which he places himself and some objects under museum cases. As a Native he is representing all the times that his people have been misrepresented in institutinal settings. The signs in the case point out things on his body and links them to stereotypes relating to Natives such as a sign saying scars due to excessive drinking .

“Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ Sadiah Qureshi

Sara Baartman was taken from South Africa and tranfered to Europe as a curiosity . Because of her looks and the tribe from which she was from she was labeled the Hottentot Venus. Her body was put on display in Europe and curious on lookers paid to see her . Even in death her genitals were cut off and put on display.

In 1995 South Africa requested her body parts be returned and buried in the proper way of her tribe which represents black artists to reclaiming their image and sexuality as their own and not of that of the European Colonizers.

Also mentioned in the Article the work of Coco Fusco who put themselves on display in a cage as a new recently discovered tribe , they even charged people to see the male genitalia or to make the women dance . Her the audience took the role of the colonizer and objectify these new tribes people and treat them as if they were animals . It's amzing how many people believed the act and bought into it .

"Photography at the Heart of Darkness" Nicholas Mieerzoff

One of the surprising things I'm finding with this course is how much a lot of the behavior exhibited by the colonists still exists today as pointed out at the end of this article. It really is of much distress to me , because growing up as a white women in Canada I lived in a bubble in which I saw everyone as equal and didn't know how much of a problem racism deeply rooted in colonialism was. Reading this article I couldn't help but thinking about how modern artists like Robert Mapplethorpe still see the African body as a source of excitement and mystery and set to document it as such.

By photographing black man nude Mapplethorpe's work is reminiscent of the taxonomic photographs of the early 1900's. He also really plays up racial stereotypes that exists in our society such as the black male being more muscular and having a larger penis than that of other races. He highlights what may been seen as the visual signs of difference. He marks his subjects just as Lang marked his with racial difference that is placed mostly onto the body .

I think like Lang he documents something that is more like a dream than reality. Lang talked about colonial mimicry making the people of the Congo happier, but in reality we have no real idea about how they fault about others taking their land. Mapplethorpe puts the African Male body as a sexual dream something that we all want , when in reality we don't. I think that both works can be seen as a form of subjectification.

"The White Peril and l'Art Negre: Picasso , Primitivism and Anticolonialism" Patricia Leighten

What was interesting to me about this piece was that it showed a new way of thinking , it doesn't criticize anything but instead focuses on an event that really was proactive . Being a fan of Picasso and having seen a lot of his work it was really interesting to learn what may have been behind the paintings.

It gives me a lot more respect for Picasso and other modernist painters that they were aware of the colonial exploitation that brought the African art to Europe and thus used primitivism as a way to contest and contrast the use of Africa in much of pre WW! French art. And although some people saw the Modernists work as being exploitative they really were trying to use primitivism as an act of social criticism and as a search for a new art.

It reminds me of the Canadian artist Brain Jungen who uses running shoes to create masks that mimic those of Native Canadians. I think that like Picasso he doesn't do this to exploit those from who the mask come from but instead to create a social commentary and conversation with the viewer. Looking at these piece I begin to question why the west over took the Natives land ... was it so we could buy $200 dollar Nike shoes ? I think it also shows how much we live in a consumerist society where as generations before us depended on the land and themselves for a lot more.

I think it both cases , Picasso and Jurgen , it brings a whole different set of people and hopefully these people realize and appreciate the originals that the work is based on and where they came from.

"The Vanishing Canadian" Daniel Francis

One person who I find extremely interesting is Edward Curtis. Though many people documented Natives in North America , I feel that his work because it is photographic we think represents truth and documents things as it was. We know that paintings present misrepresentations of people but photographs seem to have more truth to them a lot of the time. In is also of interest that these are the only pictures that exist of some of these people and they are faked. What I do like about Curtis is he realized that these people were important and wanted to document them before they disappeared , problem being is he decided to represent a stereotype instead of reality. I think stereotyping is something that we all need to work on in the western world , even right now when I was picking an Edwards photo to use , I tried to pick one that to me represented the stereotypical Native to help illustrate my point.


Growing up some of the only Canadian artists I knew were the members of the group of seven and Emily Carr. Their landscapes embodied Canada to me. I was lucky enough to grow up down the road from J.E.H MacDonalds , one of the member of the group of sevens house. I can remember playing in the yard where he painted some of his paintings. It was always such a dreamlike place where I thought anything could happen

But now what I see is whats missing and to me what is missing in all of these photographs people who were here before we were. I think that all of these works represent that loss. In particular Emily Carrs , whose west coast paintings picture the artifacts left behind by the so called the " Vanishing Race".

"Colonialism" and "Imeperialism" Robert J.C. Young

I found this reading very interesting because I've never really thought about the differences between colonialism and imperialism before. I knew that both were forms of domination and subjection , but never thought of them being as closely linked as they are .

Growing up the only real form of imperialism that I ever really experienced was the cultural imperialism that the states holds over much of the Canadian media. Growing up all the tv shows we watched and most of the toys I played with came from the States. If my parents hadn't made an active effort to have Canadian cultural items around and take as to meseums and galleries , i world know very little about Canadian Culture.

I think that now I've started to reject the American Imperialism I feel better about who I am and what I am doing. By supporting smaller media outlets not just from Canadian but from around the world I think you can learn a lot more and see the world from varying perspectives. I think that there is starting to be a backlash towards the American Cultural Imperialism. As evident in Daniel Edwards work, a statue of Britney Spears giving birth, which I think acts to show how obbsessed some people have become withe the American idea of a Star.

I think it's important to learn the history of both colonialism and imperialism. I think it's important to open your eyes to the problems that others are facing world wide so that problems can start to be fixed and people can be recognized for who they are.

Part of my interest in taking this course was learning about the colonialism linked to Canada and Native Canadians. Being 7th generation Canadian , it means that my family was one of the first to settle this land . I think it's important as a decendent to learn about their wrongs so that I can a make an active effort not to be like them.

"Reading Art?" Mieke Bal

To me one of the best examples of showing off the new ideas that reading art brings about is this picture of a pipe tilted The Treachery of Images", with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) written across the bottom in French by Rene Magritte . Rene is asking us to look at objects and in specific painting in a new way . In linguistics it would be called the thick and thin definitions. To look at objects in a different way, we all say that this is a painting of a pipe , but we can not hold it in our hands , fill in with tobacco and smoke it .


To take a reading of Art even further we could say that we never really know that the real painting exists. We can assume that it exists somewhere in some way , but until we are standing in front of it in a museum all we can know this is this and other digitized version.



Another piece of art that makes us question the way we look at things is ' one and three chairs " by Joseph Kosuth . Here a chair is juxtaposed against a picture of a chair and than the definition of a chair .This representation highlights the relationship between referent , and the language and picture that we chose to represent it . In semiotics this would be the denotative and connotative meaning of the chair .

"The Post-Colonial and the Postmodern" Homi K. Bhabha

To me one some of the most interesting points that Bhabba makes are his ideas about culture extending outside the so called high art, and becoming an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value.

This reminded me of the Europeans who came to North America and started to purchase off of and trading with the Natives to obtain traditional objects such as masks. These were items that the Natives used in traditional ceremonies and in some cases were seen as scared. The Europeans saw them as pieces of art and displayed them in museums and in private collections.

These artifacts were put on display and for a lot of Europeans may have been their only contact with Native North Americans , from this lots of assumptions could have been made about the way they live and their culture. In many cases they weren't even displayed with the artifacts as the Europeans classed all the Natives as one and didn't recognize the distinct tribes that dotted the so called New World.

I think this example really shows the way the west saw those that they conquered and colonized . They were interested in very small amounts of their cultures that represent only a little of who they were . They didn't really respect the Natives as intelligent people and just saw them as something else to exploit whether for their land or their cultural artifacts such as the masks.