Arjun Appadurai – Melanie Roth

Arjun Appadurai’s article Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, presented theories that related back to previous theorists whom we have already studied. By doing this, I personally had an easier time understanding the reading, and what Appadurai’s was theorizing.

            One of the main topics discussed was the notion of technology connecting people at a global level. Appadurai states, “For with the advent of the steamship, the automobile, the airplane, the camera, the computer, and the telephone, we have entered into an altogether new condition of neighborliness, even with those most distant from ourselves” (512). This passage suggests that nations are connecting to one another through technological advances, allowing one to travel or communicate in a much simpler way. This allows us to be able to quickly share ideas, spread information, and connect on a personal level globally. This media, technology, and travel have resulted in “nationhood” which is what fuels consumerism.

            I found it interesting when Appadurai brought to light the notion of nostalgia, stating, “As far as the United States is concerned, one might suggest that the issue is no longer one of nostalgia but of a social imaginaire built largely around reruns” (512). These reruns are past scenarios from different eras, and it is theorized that nostalgia is a “central mode of image and reception” (512).

Appadurai states, “Americans themselves are hardly in the present anymore as they stumble into the megatechnologies of the twenty-first century garbed in the film-noir scenarios of sixties’ chills, fifties’ diners, forties’ clothing, thirties’ houses, twenties’ dances, and so on ad infinitum” (512). We continue to use past era phenomenon’s and styles to create past familiarities. I find it interesting that even if one is not from a specific era, it is easy to put yourself in such a scenario, through a construction of ideas taken from the past. “The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory .It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued” (Appadurai 216).