Globalisation, the state and cultural production in Mexico: The national film industry and the issue of cultural sovereignty

This dissertation seeks to advance an understanding of how the exigencies of neoliberal globalisation influence national politics and affect the state's role in cultural production, with specific reference to the indigenous film industry in Mexico. Historically, through interventionist policies the state embraced cinema as a medium of political socialisation to advance its post-revolutionary nation-building project and to facilitate the formation of Mexican national identity. Neoliberal globalisation challenges this strategy. Within the context of economic and political transition in Mexico, the politics of the relationship between the state and the film industry comes into stark relief, through the interplay of local and transnational social forces and the Mexican state. State-led initiatives throughout this period reveal the tensions between economics and cultural production---between material interests and ideas---highlighting the dialectical relationship between globalising forces and the state's attempt to sustain national cultural production.; Studies on globalisation and the role of the state in cultural production tend to adopt two principal arguments---neoliberalism and cultural dependency/cultural imperialism. While these approaches differ in important ways, they share the assumption that the globalisation process limits state agency in the affairs of national-level governance. These arguments typically see the state in structural terms or as privileging local and global capital, with a resulting tendency to yield deterministic or functionalist explanations.; Through its analysis of the state's role in the Mexican indigenous film industry, this dissertation argues that the state is an active political agent in shaping how globalising forces influence domestic political outcomes. It contends that the ideological imperatives of the state are no less important in shaping the state's role in cultural production than is its accumulation strategy. Theorising the state's role in cultural production requires a view of the state and globalisation nexus as mutually constitutive and capable of integrating politics with economics and national with international politics, to understand what appear to be competing state strategies. The neo-Gramscian perspective provides useful heuristic tools for contextualising the consolidation of the neoliberal state in Mexico and its responses in cultural production. This dissertation contends that even in an era dominated by the discourse of markets, the state must reproduce more than its accumulation strategy; it must also reproduce the imagined political community as a means to fortify national sovereignty.