Across pedagogical contexts, it is quite common to encounter the belief that the “global,” in conjuring something like a planetary scale, refers to a totality. At least two significant misperceptions follow from this. The first is the idea that the global is a new term for what used to be called the universal. Contemporary imaginations, institutions, and practices of the global have incorporated many of the 19^th century values and orientations about “our world.” These include an imputed universality, even though universalist paradigms have been justifiably disputed, and many even debunked for their discriminatory exclusions. Contemporary documentary’s focus on “universal” human rights and freedom (not to mention cinema’s abiding obsession with “universal humanism)” is a particularly salient example of this tendency. The appeal to the global-as-universal is as much about setting an ideal or aspirational horizon (expressed as commonality, all of humanity, the whole wide world), as it is a will to power (enacted in coverage, capture, decimation). A discussion of Bollywood or Nollywood—signaling global aspirations through the act of naming, while simultaneously marking the named object’s presumed derivativeness—brings out these antinomies of “global media.” Here, the global is not a given. As attempts at the standardization of media businesses according to Hollywood norms (the putative universal benchmarks) run up against local industrial modes and aesthetic regimes, the global begins to take shape from the encounter, the various forces changing in the process. The point here is to move from a transcendental sense of the global-as-universal to a distinctly immanent sense of the global.

The second misperception is the assumption that the global emerges from the sum of all the various locals making up our world/planet. The continuing purchase, indeed the revivification of “world cinema” as a concept in recent decades, especially in British screen studies, seems to rest on such a founding assumption. Notwithstanding all the meticulous and empirically rich discussions of cinematic worldings, it is apparent that the idealistic project that once animated Goethe’s “world literature” not only appears unsustainable in a world of dissensions and opportunisms, but also has given way to hierarchies of value and cultural influence. World cinema’s referent is generally understood as a totality (which renders the concept tautological) or, more perniciously, as a remainder: as the aggregate of mainstream Anglo-American cinema’s esoteric others. The unitary additive model of the global, for all its commonsensical appeal, does not correspond to actually existing globalities, of which there are many. Neither all-encompassing nor stable, every imagination and materiality of the global is continually morphing; hence, more than any cumulative wholeness, key processes and shifting relations should be central to the pedagogy of the global.

Since the 1980s, the global has come to be understood in rather monolithic terms, as an outcome of neoliberal, i.e. economic, globalization. For many academics, the term seems complicit with capital’s totalizing drives. However, when scholars interrogate the orchestration of cultural hegemonies from political economic perspectives, they often slide into their own totalizing modes. A range of influential critical discourses, from McDonaldization and Disneyfication in the 1980s and 1990s to getting “Zucked” in the last decade, attend to primarily top-down and imperialist processes of media agglomeration and expansion with recognizably U.S. origins, characteristics, and icons. Perhaps because of the primacy of the U.S. during this period, criticality from political economic or cultural perspectives cannot dispel a lingering U.S.-centrism. The long intellectual purchase of “the American Century,” a pithy rhetoric initially invoked as a performative nomenclature in the 1940s, speaks to this entrenched tendency. While registering the overwhelming impact of the U.S. on the 20^th century, what function does such a synoptic, unipolar rendering of world history play now? What narratives of the global are stabilized, and what potential histories—that is, futures—are occluded? These reflexive questions about knowledge production are important for classes in global media, more so when they are being taught in U.S. institutions.

Not surprisingly, over the past two decades, the study of the national has been eschewed in favor of approaches that focus on transnational circuits and global capital. While transnational media collaborations, satellite television, and the internet demand such a shift, the alacrity with which the national could be jettisoned within the U.S. academy (that is, before Trump’s resuscitation of patriotism as the lifeforce of U.S. politics) had much to do with the fact that “the global” now stood for a U.S.-centric (i.e. “nationalized”) idea of the world. For those of us who work on other parts of the world and are often designated as “area studies” scholars, the national has continued to matter in significant ways, and the local moorings of the global prove to be crucial. But we also have to take transnational forces seriously, so that the encounter between the local and the translocal remains centerstage in our work, and the global is understood as emerging from this encounter. When U.S. critical media studies scholars analyze the neocolonial machinations of U.S. media in terms of, say, media agglomeration, satellite and underwater cable infrastructures, and military or business surveillance, their focus remains squarely on U.S. strategies and their efficacies, fallouts, and ethical-legal accountabilities from U.S. perspectives. How local communities perceive, understand, and negotiate these structural intrusions remain largely recessed, if not outright ignored, in these critical “global” accounts. The challenge, then, is one of globalizing the global.

Some of the difficulties of doing research on global media have to do with a lack of language proficiency and cultural competency. But one of the bounties of globalization is that because of its largely Anglophone core, there are always a decent body of English-language sources available. While not the optimum scenario in tracking local perspectives, it is nevertheless a necessary starting point for students. Reading assignments should also include scholarship that draws on vernacular primary documents. But very often, more fundamental problems inhere in the standard methodologies and frameworks of research. For instance, the purchase of “empirical knowledge” ends up reproducing biases, both acknowledged and unthought, that persist in data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Consider how the understanding of global cinema changes if, instead of taking box office receipts expressed in dollars as the measure of a film’s success, one considers the headcount of people that watched the film. How, then, do the histories of global cinema and media shift?

In recent years, China, India, and Korea have emerged as alternative poles of academic interest about global media ownership and power; the unipolar seems to have been supplanted by a multipolar understanding of the global. However, the point is not to replace the “American Century” framework with a “Chinese Century” orientation. While that shift would no doubt bring other domains of media practice to the forefront, it would detract attention from the more basic problems of global media research and pedagogy. The field’s focus remains on very large scale, market-driven corporate entertainment with financial returns as the primary endgame. Top-down corporate processes and circuits, as well as transnational players, are no doubt important; they constitute the matter of the global media business. And yet, it remains difficult to subsume the “American” and “Chinese” cultural elements, or the seemingly idiosyncratic specificities of Bollywood and K-Pop, under any abstract notion of global media capital: these material-semiotic granularities matter, and constitutively so, arguably more than boardroom strategies, excel sheet projections, and quarterly revenue movements. There are massive domains of media production, distribution, and consumption that take place on the ground level among communities in vast swaths of this world, scuttling corporate plans of usage and obsolescence via copying, remediating, recycling, rewiring, and repurposing of media technologies and forms. It is these piratical practices, which students now increasingly identify with, that constitute the bulk of global media—if one takes access and participation, and not revenues, as the criterion for measuring volume. There can be no meaningful pedagogy of global media without a pedagogy of the piratical.

In light of the discussion above, I will enumerate a few key points that I try to get across to students in my courses on global media—points that help us collectively deconstruct “the global.” It is not always possible to find precise reading assignments that work out these points; they are better earned in the discussions across readings and screenings.

• The global is not a stable category but a series of shifting relations and transactions.
• The global cannot be understood in terms of any additive model. When various local formations are brought into a translocal encounter, each side is transformed, even when the terms of the encounter are not equal.
• The global is best understood as an emergence. By articulating disparate points into novel relationalities, the global materializes more complex, and often surprising, media assemblages. Students should be instructed to look for certain nodes at which these emergences become particularly legible: a star, a film festival, a video game, a controversy, a legal case, a localized videocinema, a series of fan reaction videos, a subgenre on an online platform, a content subscription service, and so on.
• Each local formation conjures its own sense of the global: such a globality is shaped by local resources, exigencies, and sensibilities. In spite of its totalizing aspirations, each instance of the global is contingent and partial, and remains one among many such globalities. Since there are many globalities, “our world” is essentially pluriversal.
• While the “transnational” has been highly amenable to empirical research, it has generally been tracked as a supra-national register that transcends the national. In articulating the subnational with the supranational, a global perspective renders complex media congeries more legible (e.g. localized videocinemas of Africa and Asia).
• Piratical media practices are central to any understanding of contemporary global media. If these practices subvert, exploit, and exceed media protocols, they wrest certain agencies on behalf of the global-popular, forging fresh domains of legitimacy that challenge extant media legalities.
• Media technologies not only represent but also shape global processes; in some instances, they also intervene in, and shift the public conversation on, crises scenarios such as flexible accumulation and precarious labor, forced migration, genocidal state repressions, and global warming.

Bhaskar Sarkar is professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research addresses questions of modernity and community; media formations that emerge in the gaps between legality and legitimacy; the political and cultural nodes of the global-popular; and the Global South as method. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (2009), and has coedited Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (2009), and Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (2017).