Global Divides in Cosmographic Genres Charity, Solidarity and Different Explanations of Difference

Abstract

This chapter sets out to explore charity and solidarity approaches in three cosmographic genres: aid galas, foreign news, and documentaries about foreign nations. I argue that their nation-based ratio together with the panoptic character that allows the home nation a privileged invisibility as the rest of the world is being written, constitute predominantly charity approaches. Solidarity approaches towards global, inter- and intra-national divides do however appear when dialogic modes of writing (verbally and visually) are used. They also concur with political rather than culturalistic understandings of these divides, therefore oppose naturalization of differences and open up for possibilities of change. In the end I discuss possible ways of analyzing solidarity in relation to power in media studies, as well as ways of constituting solidaritarian media texts. A key feature in this project is the break- up of the opposition of genres that discuss the domestic respectively the foreign.