ABSTRACT

Transnational television has pushed the understanding of the medium beyond the nation. In doing so, it has undermined questions of power in favour of processual notions of cultural and economic politics. This has emerged from the eagerness with which transnational television has been accommodated by concepts that move beyond the significance of physical spaces and times in understanding television. Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’, Manuel Castells’ ‘space of flows’ (The Informational City) and Arjun Appadur-ai’s notion of ‘mediascape’ have all offered a foundation for conceptualizing television as a fluid cultural construct or global economic force abstracted from physical locales. Discourses of transnational television that have attempted to challenge national perspectives on television (Chalaby) have proliferated the view of television as a (cultural or economic) construct guided by what Castells called a ‘placeless logic’ (The Rise of the Network Society) that overrules physical places. Abstracting space and time, transnational television loses its affinity with understanding power. Space makes a difference in the way power works, while the interplay of different forces constructs the power of specific locales. In other words, ‘power is intrinsically spatial’ and ‘spatiality is imbued with power’ (Allen 159). While I will argue that instances of crossing borders in the history of television have negotiated different hegemonic relations with the state in a Gramscian sense, 1 my argument will move further to emphasize that the spaces in which these hegemonic negotiations play out can re-shift the balance between dominant and alternative forces. In this sense, the localization of transnational television, not only within social relations of negotiation but also within power-imbued spaces, helps pinpoint historical changes of power.