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MARGINALIZED SPACES:
RE-DEFINING MINORITY RADIO IN FRANCE AND
GERMANY
In a world where both imagined and physical movements of people and ideas
make up the fabric of our social lives, our capacity for cultural change and negotiation
has become increasingly inevitable. There is today a gradual awakening in academe to
the limitations of conceptualizations of culture as bounded and monolithic. Globalization
has accelerated such a realization as it influences and even dislocates national cultural
identities but, as Hall argues, only in the sense that it has a pluralizing effect, suggesting
new alternative positions of identification (1992). This is particularly true in the case of
diasporic subjects who usually resist singular belonging. Their experiences of a
suspended sense of belonging compounded by multiplying globalization processes have
increased their resources and diversified their attachments. There is perhaps no more
opportune time to rejoice and celebrate the looming end of the reign of essentialist
thinking, at least among a few researchers working with subjects situated between
cultures of origin and countries of settlement. Ironically, many of those celebrating
themselves perpetuate an essentialist discourse that reifies the either-or positioning of
hyphenated identities.