Against Banal Inter-nationalism

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses, with an emphasis on Japanese and East Asian contexts, the ways in which the increasing pervasiveness of the inter-nationalised modes — “inter-national” with a hyphen in the sense of highlighting the nation as the unit of global cultural encounters — of production, circulation and consumption of media cultures makes exclusive national boundaries even stronger and more solid. The underlying tenet of “methodological nationalism” has been promoted and instituted by the synergism of the process of cultural glocalisation and state’s policy of national branding that endorses it. What has been engendered in this process is “banal inter-nationalism”; a container model of the nation is further instituted as the inter-nationalised circulation and encounter of media culture has become a site in which national identity is mundanely invoked, performed and experienced. Banal inter-nationalism suppresses and marginalises multicultural questions within the nation, as national boundaries are mutually re-constituted through the process in which cross-border cultural flows and encounters are promoted in a way to accentuate an inter-nationalised form of cultural diversity.