Africans in the Americas by Michael L. Conniff

Further, Schiller argued that both US industry and government had a desire to control media in other countries in order to create ideological support for a capitalist transformation. Given what I had read in graduate school by Herbert Schiller and others in terms of cultural imperialism and dependency, I had expected a penetration of Brazil’s media by US-style capitalism, by institutions such as advertising agencies, by multinational advertisers, by direct investment from US companies, and by the co-optation of national elites. In the excitement and hubris of youth and doctoral study fieldwork in the late 1970s, I argued that cultural dependency and cultural imperialism, at least in the Brazilian television industry, were being transformed, or Brazilianized. Keywords: Global Television, Regionalism, Transnationalism, Cultural Imperialism, Brazil

It is a prominent case of a cultural industries’ growth from import substitution to increasing national self-sufficiency and then to transitional and global prominence as an exporter. To continue this theoretical reexamination, several key moments from the example of Brazilian network television are examined and theorized. One of the first ways that this process became visible, historically, was through the growth of different kinds of television to fill different spaces.

The globalization of media industries has proceeded by a process of accumulation or sedimentation of layers or spaces that burst upon the world media stage but gradually take their place as parts, often very important parts, of complex industries such as television.

Africans in the Americas by Michael L. Conniff