Global weds local

Abstract

Globalization is frequently understood in terms of social, political, economic, and cultural processes, but there is, given the epistemological critiques raised by postcolonial theory, a need to address it as a representational practice as well. This article attempts to broaden the notion of globality in audience research and cultural studies by examining the investment media audiences make in certain kinds of meaning, and by posing the global as not only ‘what the world means’, in certain contexts, but ‘what means the world’ to viewers as well. A reception study in India of the immensely successful Hindi film Hum Aapke Hain Koun(1994), a festive celebration of weddings and family life, indicates how the family emerges as a category of such a notion of globality in the context of liberalization in India, and the broader historic context of the fragmentation of families under modernity. This article argues that, while the reception of this film indicates the articulation of consumerism and tradition in the context of the meeting of global capitalism and local forms of privilege, the audience’s investment in the family as a category of globality represents the possibility of epistemic opposition to hegemonic notions of the global. This possibility highlights the need for cultural studies to address the family as a site of struggle in modernity and globalization.