Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
allow important forms of effective action and affective understanding to
be articulated. For a family's emotional security, the pursuit of economic
agency can be a Faustian bargain for all its members.
Murder and the Media
In a circumscribed village society news is shared interpersonally. In a global
society interpersonal interests still shape the selection and interpretation of
information but sources from distant places are invariably the media, for
mediascapes provide one of the constitutive elements of the global order
(Appadurai 1996). Although Appadurai's theses on cultural globalization
have been challenged, he is surely right to emphasize the role of media in
shaping the identity of peoples and places. In an electronic age, medias-
capes mould the imagination of other places as potential migration destina-
tions (Teo 2003). Yet the media are never innocent, and consciously and
unconsciously project the intentionality of the society (and government) in
which they are embedded. The Mainland Chinese television series,
Goodbye
Vancouver
, filmed on location in the city beneath grey skies, composed a
deliberately lugubrious future in Canada for university graduates and poten-
tial emigrants in China who had become obsessed by the city's emancipa-
tory potential. The media both reflect and reproduce the social interests
that they explicitly and implicitly represent.
The social construction of the news has been an abiding issue in examina-
tions of immigration, for 'mainstream media' are typically embedded in
mainstream interests. They under-report immigrant-specific news, while
coverage is often shaped by unsympathetic categories such as immigrant
crime (Dunn and Mahtani 2001). The real estate investment in Vancouver
accompanying the arrival of wealthy immigrants from East Asia from the
mid-1980s attracted concerted media attention, repeatedly highlighting
the 'monster house', a large new property constructed for wealthy new
Canadians to the maximum permitted size and typically unresponsive to
pre-existing neighbourhood design tastes (Ley 1995; Mitchell 2004). While
there were real differences of opinion about house styles, the adoption of the
vernacular term, the 'monster house', by seemingly authoritative media cast
the discussion in an unflattering idiom for new residents. What does one
make of such headlines as 'How we saved Shaughnessy from monsters'
(Ohannesian 1990), or 'A monster problem in Shaughnessy' (Griffin 1992),
with their capacity to entangle place and identity as tightly as the stigmatiz-
ing caricatures of Old Chinatown? Sun (1998: 147) deconstructs the meta-
phor as a 'concrete dimension to the traditionalist Orientalist image of the
Asian as an inscrutable, mysterious and ugly ethnicity'. But Sun is not writ-
ing as a neutral observer either, and has perhaps over-interpreted historical
