Whither Eurocentrism?

The anti-parochialism trend and the call for internationalizing media studies in recent years has managed to unsettle a number of assumptions and propositions. The growing concern over a ‘Western bias’ in media theory and its negative parochial impact (Downing, 1996; Curran and Park, 2000) has certainly created an awareness of the limits of Eurocentrism of Media Studies which is increasingly accused of projecting globally what are local experiences and local situations. This growing awareness (interestingly enough, Western sponsored and conducted in English and expressed mostly in American and British journals ¹ ) in itself raises a number of questions. The concern with Eurocentrism and the issue of ‘relevance’ and ‘academic dependency’ in the social sciences in the global south is not new. Edward Said (1979) and a decade later Samir Amin (1989), then Immanuel Wallerstein (1997), and more recently Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) tried to examine how the ideas of ‘Europe’ and the ‘Orient’ were perceived, constructed and articulated. In a sense the concerns over ‘Western bias’ and the call for ‘de-Westernising’ or ‘internationalising’ media studies addresses a situation of crisis that has been a concern for decades, lest we forget that the project of ‘internationalisation’ has always been a key object and aim of the radical/critical project. But the questions that need to be asked are: Why now? And more significantly, what direction has it taken or should it take, if we agree that there exists a diversity of ‘concerns’ and diversity of ‘solutions’ to this crisis? Without doubt the concerns have something to do with the consequences of ‘global modernity’ and the effects of global capitalism which are also felt in academia and higher education. As Dirlik has suggested:

[T]he cultural requirements of transnational corporations can no longer afford the cultural parochialism of an earlier day. Focusing on liberal arts institutions, some conservative intellectuals overlook how much headway multiculturalism has made with business school administrators and the managers of transnational corporations, who are eager all of a sudden to learn the secrets of East Asian economic success in ‘oriental’ philosophies, who cannibalize cultures all over the world in order to better market their commodities, and who have suddenly become aware of a need to internationalize academic institutions (which often takes the form not of promoting scholarship in a conventional sense but of ‘importing’ and ‘exporting’ students and faculty).

(Dirlik, 1994, pp. 354–5)