Dealing with New Identities
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: December 05 2015 -
There is a theory which says that trans-national thoughts as reflected in print and electronic media challenge boundaries, questioning the principle of “territoriality.”
The proposition expounded here has raised the question: Are we then suppose to conclude that it is very well the end of modern nation states’ attempts to reinforce the idea of a territorially or nationally “established order”?
Certainly not, if one closely monitors and identifies who actually hold the power to monopolise the process of knowledge production and allows their ideas to shape people’s perception of socio-political reality.
To make sense of such a situation, one has to understand the logic that sets trans-national ideas into motion.
In the Post Globalisation period, scholars around the world have argued that national boundaries have become even fuzzier and nation states are increasingly finding it difficult to control the flow of political, social and cultural imageries.
However, it should be noted that the origin for this phenomenon has been invariably traced to the power of influencing and also determining cross-border movement of ideas, goods, capital and people.
The world over, there have been serious scholarship on the dynamics of globalisation and its subsequent impact on cultures of the world.
And with the emergence of new communication technologies like the internet as potent medium of communication, media discourse has now focussed on examining earlier models of communication.
Here, it should be noted that the impact of the global process of shaping and re-shaping ideas does have a definitive impact on smaller nationalities, ethnic groups and minorities.
Though there have been serious attempts to intentionally homogenise diversities within a nation, any powerful state’s endeavour has had either mixed response or an impact never likely to be imagined in the 1960s or the 1970s.
The phenomenon and the process of knowledge production vis-ŕ-vis spawning of ideas on formation of new identities have to be minutely understood by those who foresee the pangs of being an endangered group.
While doing so, it would always be wise to project a bigger collective vision of the people and the State instead of being swayed by momentary belief in a singular grand-narrative.
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