Expediency of Culture

The Expediency of Culture is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly global world. George Yudice explores 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, Yudice shows how the concept of culture-as-resource absorbs and cancels out hitherto prevailing distinctions like those between high and mass 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. Yudice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean, he points out, 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. Yudice 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 - inSite, a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on 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.