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GEORGE YÚDICE. The Expediency of Culture. Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 466 pp.
George Yúdice's new book analyzes the role that culture is asked to play in the era of globalized capitalism, drawing its case studies from various settings across the Americas (particularly the United States and its borders and Brazil). The originality and theoretical breath of its approach sets this book apart from the myriad cultural studies that have as their point of departure an object preconceived as 'cultural' (high or low, artistic, social, performative, etc.), and reads in this object the social forces that it echoes, and/or the problems that it reveals vis-à-vis the era or the context in which it intervenes. Besides representing a fundamental reading of what 'culture' stands for nowadays, Yudice's theoretical stance is devised to provide a way out of the confusion that afflicts certain sectors of the humanities, torn between the paradoxical diagnoses of culture as both devalued and omnipresent. Yudice overcomes this deadlock by concentrating on the 'uses' of culture, that is, on what 'culture' is called upon to perform. 'Culture,' the author argues, becomes an expedient value for different actors - from corporations, to NGOs, to activists, to inhabitants of a shantytown, to actors traditionally defined as artists in ongoing negotiations of power that are played out in the 'management' of cultural resources, or of 'culture' as a resource, and from which certain gain is expected. The sites of these negotiations are predominantly national, although the forces are global. Therefore the interventions through which these actors gain power or agency required a self-reflective mapping of the forces at work. These particular imbrications of the global and the national define the trajectory of the book, which goes back and forth between comparative analyses of national settings (i.e., when drawing the different attitudes and expectancies toward the rule of law in differential national settings) and the mapping of forces that resist or eschew such a frame.
"Culture" is thus part of the equation with which social programs gain authority, activists gain public support, and corporations gain income and respectability. Many of the cases and discussions in the book (breathtakingly numerous and thus impossible to mention in their entirety) concentrate on the degree...