The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era

by George Yúdice

The Expediency of Culture is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly globalized world. George Yúdice explores critically how groups ranging from indigenous activists to nation-states to nongovernmental organizations have all come to see culture as a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied sociopolitical and economic ends. Through a dazzling series of illustrative studies, Yúdice challenges the Gramscian notion of cultural struggle for hegemony and instead develops an understanding of culture where cultural agency at every level is negotiated within globalized contexts dominated by the active management and administration of culture. He describes a world where “high” culture (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain) is a mode of urban development, rituals and everyday aesthetic practices are mobilized to promote tourism and the heritage industries, and mass culture industries comprise significant portions of a number of countries’ gross national products. Yúdice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean that today’s increasingly transnational culture—exemplified by the entertainment industries and the so-called global civil society of nongovernmental organizations—is necessarily homogenized. He demonstrates that national and regional differences are still functional, shaping the meaning of phenomena from pop songs to antiracist activism. Yúdice considers a range of sites where identity politics and cultural agency are negotiated in the face of powerful transnational forces. He analyzes appropriations of American funk music as well as a citizen action initiative in Rio de Janeiro to show how global notions such as cultural difference are deployed within specific social fields. He provides a political and cultural economy of a vast and increasingly influential art event— in site a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on the city of Miami as one of a number of transnational “cultural corridors” and on the uses of culture in an unstable world where censorship and terrorist acts interrupt the usual channels of capitalist and artistic flows.

Genres: Cultural, Academic

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Sangjoon · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I argue in this book that the role of culture has expanded un an unprecedented way into the political and sconomic at the same time that conventional notions of culture largely have been empied out…I approach the question of culture in our period, characterized as one of accelerated globalization, as a resource…culture is increasingly wielded as a resource for both sociopolitical and economic amelioration, that is, for increasing participation in this era of waning political involvement, conflicts over xitizenship, and the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin (2000) has called “cultural capitalism” (p.9)

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

My experience reading The Expediency of Culture on the heels of The Trouble with Diversity (Walter Benn Michaels) was itself troubling. But where Michaels frustrates by accusing the multicultural left of being the handmaidens of the conservative right, Yudice analyzes the collaborative arrangements by figures from all ideological positions to asses what strategies and coalitions more (and less) effectively work for communities in Latin America as well as in the U. S.
At times the work seems unfocused, but dealing with so many strands seems necessary to avoid oversimplifying the complex uses to which culture is put on local levels in globalized contexts.