ABSTRACT
For decades at U.S. universities, the label “international communication” was reserved for scholars at departments of journalism and mass communication who researched media and communication in the world outside the United States. International communication was therefore a marginal, non-U.S.-centric enclave of research and teaching. Fortunately, the field of media and communication studies has grown more diverse, which affects how we consider the “global” which has come to supersede “international” after the broad-ranging multi-disciplinary debate about globalization during the 1990s. As scholarship in global media and communication studies continues to internationalize, in both perspective and geographical location of knowledge production, it is crucial for us to reconsider some of the latent assumptions driving the field. Chief among these, in my opinion, is the primacy accorded to the global, however implicitly, in theory and research focused on the global–local interaction. The global, latently identified with the Western-modern, is installed as a central node through which, and only through which, different locals can relate to one another. This is reflected in the postcolonial world, where, to take one example, scholars, professional and diplomats from Africa, Asia and the Middle East communicate in English or French – postcolonial communication inescapably mediated by colonial languages.
