To internationalize global communication

The authors of “Global Communication as Standpoint: An Invitation to Think about Research, Pedagogy, and the Profession from a Global Communication Lens” have presented us with an important and convincing argument for taking global communication seriously as an area of study within communication and media studies. Building off feminist standpoint theory, the authors argue that global communication and media studies can constitute a particular standpoint in higher education, representative of four characteristics that communication and media studies scholars should attend to in their research and pedagogy. First, an important characteristic of the global communication approach involves what they call situatedness, or an acknowledgment that context matters in theoretical and methodological development. The second characteristic is an acceptance of historically grounded knowledge, or the idea that the history surrounding an object of study is necessary to comprehend all relevant phenomenon. The third characteristic involves focusing on power, or a recognition of how power differentials shape the world and academic approaches. And the final characteristic involves comparison of different ways of knowing, or an understanding that concepts can be unsettled when accounting for different contexts (Girginova et al., 2023: 7–10).

What the authors examine is something that we have been asking ourselves in our own research lately: what constitutes knowledge in communication studies, global or otherwise? The global position, the authors contend, answers this question, for example, by pointing us toward the discipline’s weddedness to Cold War politics. In this light, communication studies is a part of a highly Western, capitalistic, (neo)liberal, colonial framework, a framework that operates as one of the central organizers of knowledge for the discipline. New ways to theorize knowledge inside and outside of communication and media studies, inside and outside of Western frameworks, can be found in the authors’ global communication approach. Therefore, the authors advocate less for a full eradication of Western frameworks, but they do argue for a better comprehension of the existence of alternative concepts of knowledge within and outside of Western frameworks.

What we find interesting is the resonance between the authors’ position and another figure’s thought, a figure who is not fully discussed in much communication and media studies, global or otherwise: the Caribbean Marxist C.L.R. James. James, too, did not fully advocate for a full eradication of Western thought. Indeed, in our 21st century moment, where discourses of decolonial thought are highly popular, James’s 20th-century approach to Western thought might turn some people off, as he often found much of utility in the West. McClendon (2004), for example, is one of many who have addressed James’s approach to using Western civilization to speak to a larger project of anticolonialism and anticapitalism. Importantly, for James, Western civilization was not something to be celebrated due to Western European racial logics that situated Europe as the height of all human history; instead, Western civilization and thought were toolboxes from which to pull important lessons for Black and Brown people worldwide. Arguably, one of the most important lessons, for James, came from Marxist internationalist thought.

We remain struck by the authors’ question at the end of the first paragraph: “what is global about global communication studies?” We follow that question up with a question of our own, inspired by the life and the thought of James: How might we begin to map onto the authors’ global communication approach an equally important Marxist, Jamesian internationalism? To think about an answer to both of these questions requires a bit of a detour into the differences between the global and the international, as we are using it. Much of the discussion of the global in media and communication studies can be dated back to the 20th century. In the 1960s, for example, Marshall McLuhan’s (1962) theory of “the global village” largely referred to the development of electronic forms of media, particularly the television, as opening up the path toward a far more interconnected, networked world. More recently, scholars like Levinson (2001) would argue that McLuhan’s global village predicted the contemporary commercialized Internet. This, then, spoke to a general feeling of optimism in the 20th century, well into the early 21st century, associated with new communications technologies. For example, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun similarly argues that many people in the 1990s were increasingly making arguments that the Internet, or “cyberspace would free individuals from oppression and national sovereignty because it was ‘the new home of the Mind’” (Chun, 2021: 1).

A different iteration of the global in communication and media studies seems to have developed in the late-20th century and early 21st century context. This use of the global in communication and media studies seems to pick up from the interdisciplinary study of globalization. Though from very differing perspectives, much of this literature in media and communication studies seemed to represent an anxiety in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union: with what appeared to be little challenge to U.S. hegemony, the critique of capitalism seemed to turn toward “cultural movement” (Curtin, 2007; Herman, 1997; Kraidy, 2005, 2018). These studies generally concerned themselves with an endless fluidity of the world, people, capital, and cultures. This position seemed to mirror U.S. politics: the country viewed itself as fully unhindered in its global reach. In many ways, then, the globalization research was a reaction to the new heights of U.S. imperialism, a world in which the U.S. was the dominant political and economic force.

While an important and influential form of thinking, in many ways these discussions of the global do not provide insight into potential futures that exist outside capitalist expansionism. They largely figure the global within capitalist logics of the global, in which we must prepare for the worst, rather than within a frame of transnational forms of solidarity to fight the worst. These two forms of the global are, of course, far from the only iterations of the global in media and communication studies, and we do not have the space to flesh each of them out. However, we simply seek to mark a particular understanding of the global that does not match neatly onto what we are calling the international.

There is a more actional politics, which is to say one concerned with the building of a better world, to thinking about the concept of the global, building off histories of oppression to challenge such oppression: this is what we are referring to with the international. The structure of the international, for Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, was outlined in a variety of places. In The Communist Manifesto, for example, Marx and Engels (1967) argued that, due to shared language, shared heritage and traditions, and more, the European working classes were taught that they had more similarities with the European bourgeoisie of their own nations than other working classes around the world (p. 232). In the process, the bourgeoisie were able to break any potential solidarities between a worldwide, international proletariat by appealing to nationalist sentiment. Another related breaker of international solidarity would be what Robinson (2000) called “racialisms” in his classic book, Black Marxism, or those racial-like sentiments that predated capitalism and informed its organization (Kelley, 2017). The point being that with the maturation of capitalism, both liberal nationalist and racist feelings were convincing disrupters of internationalist solidarities.

Marx and Engels were at the forefront of building such a politics of internationalism, which they materially located in the organization they helped to found called the International Workingmen’s Association and what is now called the First International. In Marx’s “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” he argued that the goal of the First International was the conquering of political power by the working class in England, but also to connect the English working class to the working classes in Germany, Italy, and France (Marx, 1964, p. 286). Heavily influenced by the work of Vladimir Lenin, James would expand Marx’s conversation into the colonies. Indeed, much of the anticolonial movements of the 20th century would find inspiration in the work of not merely Marx, but Lenin, James, Rosa Luxemburg, and Mao Zedong (Scott, 2004; Towns, 2023).

Due to his Marxist leanings, the word global was less of interest for James than the idea of internationalism. In opposition to the more liberal and conservative histories associated with the global, the international spoke to worldwide revolutionary possibility, toward the abolition of capitalist-colonial exploitation. Given the interconnected relationship between colonialism and capitalism, James, like Fanon (2004), bent Marxism to the colonial situation, suggesting that to talk about the international was always to talk about the eradication of Black and Brown oppression as well. Indeed, according to James, the history of capitalism could not be told without attention to the forms of oppression faced by Black and Brown people worldwide.

It is to this more internationalist approach that we seek to push our contemporary discussion of global communication studies, as we argue the international deals with far more materialist concerns. Like the global, these forms of international thinking were far from perfect. In fact, as James (2017) reminds us, they failed on many occasions. But they did have within them a concern for a better future, beyond exploitation. The question we keep returning to, then, is can media and communication studies take similar concerns of internationalism as a framework for theorizing the global? To ask this question, we believe, would force a new mode of thinking. It would signify less a theorization of how media and communication contribute to a globalized world, and more a commitment to the production of transnational politics to fight transnational capitalism, of which media and communication would have to contribute. Another way to put this is to internationalize global communication is to situate global communication not merely as an assessment of the problems of global capitalism, but as a mode of thinking about solutions, of theorizing new solidarities. In a global communication approach, we have a base to begin such conversations.