Translocal and Colonial Landscapes: Mapping the Relocalization of Telenovelas

• In Event: 35.040 - Literacies Across Local, Global, and Translocal Imaginaries: Ethnographies of Becoming Transnational

Abstract

The political and economic relationship between Puerto Rico and United States is grounded in multinational–media and commercial–colonial flows of material goods, people, media and political ideologies that now are usually understood as “globalization” (Flores, 2000). This paper presents the results of a study grounded in the tradition of ethnographies of globalization (Kraidy, 1999; Kearney, 1995) and aims to provide an expansive definition of “sites” and engagement with texts and literacy practices across locations by specifically addressing the presence of the multinational media phenomena of telenovelas–melodramatic television shows that resemble soap operas—in local urban community in Puerto Rico.
Using Marcus’ (1995) work on multi-sited imaginaries in ethnographies of globalization, the notion of globalization as homogenization and relocalization from Pennycook, (2010), the presenter argues that telenovelas establish “some form literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites” (Marcus, p. 105). The mappings of these sites produced better understandings of the complex social and political dynamics that frame globalization in the context of Puerto Rico, particularly the process of relocalization of dominant global media texts.
This work took place as part of a larger four year ethnographic study conducted in collaboration with two teachers in a second and third grade classroom in an urban public school in Puerto Rico. Through a critical inquiry approach (Lewison, Leland & Harste, 2007) the students self selected the topic of telenovelas to explore in the classroom. They explored telenovelas within a consumer/producer hybrid space in the classroom. Parallel to the classroom inquiry, elements of ethnographies of globalization were used to gather data--visual, observational and textual—to document the multiple ways telenovelas are made available and how people engage with these media texts. The data related to the globalization of telenovelas form thefocus of this presentation.
The question framing the analysis was how telenovelas work as a global network in a moment or time within a community in Puerto Rico and the everyday interactions that happened around these texts? Using methods of translocal discourse analysis (Blommaert, 2005) the findings show the complex ways telenovelas as multinational media sites, and how the flows of images and discourses are accessible through global tools and artifacts such as television, internet, magazines, etc. that circulate and get politically relocated in relation to their presence in the local community. This analysis makes visible the materiality of telenovelas in relation to local communities and provides an understanding of how these media texts, as complex global networks, can be understood as a material and discursive mediascapes (Appadurai, 1996) circulating and interacting in the immediate locality where the students live but also in interaction with other global-local networks and imagined worlds. This aspect of the analysis helps contextualize people’s engagement with multimodal texts and literacy practices beyond classroom boundaries that are part of their everyday lives but that transcend participation across spaces (real and imagined).

Author

• Carmen L. Medina, Indiana University - Bloomington