{"id":760,"date":"2014-06-21T17:48:43","date_gmt":"2014-06-21T17:48:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/?p=760"},"modified":"2017-11-03T03:31:46","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T03:31:46","slug":"transnationalism-and-globalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/2014\/06\/21\/transnationalism-and-globalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Transnationalism and Globalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Defining the Term<\/h3>\n

In sweeping strokes, we can understand \u201cglobalism\u201d as closely related to the term \u201cpostcolonialism\u201d itself. The two terms share the idea of cosmopolitan centers in changing relations with rural areas and the emerging metropolises of the Third World. For the purposes at least of this page, however, we will use \u201cglobalism\u201d to refer to economic relations and shifts in modes of production that occur between financial centers like New York, Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles and emerging nations around the world. Usually narrated as positive processes like \u201cinvestment,\u201d \u201cprogress\u201d and \u201cdevelopment,\u201d activists and scholars around the world have begun to discuss globalism with ambivalence as they unpack profound asymmetries between center and periphery. The most visible actors in these relations are abstract, imagined entities called \u201cTrans-\u201d or \u201cMulti-National Corporations\u201d(MNCs). The sites where MNCs do (and do not) set up shop become the crucibles for radical change in material conditions and cultural production as well as potential sites of resistance from people whose lives have changed dramatically, as often as not for the worse, despite the rhetoric of progress. (See Marx and the Idea of Commodity<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Flexible Accumulation<\/h3>\n

Although many theorists have offered engaging descriptions of Late Capital\u2019s strategies, geographer David Harvey has formulated a succinct and useful set of concepts that captures the way MNCs do business:<\/p>\n

Flexible Accumulation<\/em>\u00a0\u2026 Rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both between sectors and geographical regions\u2026. It has also entrained a new round of what I shall call \u2018time-space compression\u201d \u2026 In the capitalist world the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space. (The Condition of Post-modernity<\/em>, 147)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Flexible accumulation, then, belies the nature of corporations that are not so \u201cmulti-\u201d as much they are \u201ctrans-\u201d. Transnational accumulation does not occur equally between geographical areas, but rather in specific locations \u2014 Wall and Bond Streets, for example \u2014 with transactions that transgress no end of boundaries with increasing speed.<\/p>\n

For people living in locations affected, directly or indirectly, by the presence of MNCs, the ebb and flow of global capital becomes a destabilizing force, something to follow or find and that seems to value them as labor. In turn, however, new-found cash incomes create new markets consisting of people not previously thought of as viable consumers. In the worst case scenario, peoples marginal to urban centers where MNCs are headquartered become doubly exploited, first as labor and later as consumers. Both processes increase accumulations of capital far from the sites where goods are produced.<\/p>\n

Cultural Implications<\/h3>\n

Focusing on the cultural implications of transnational\u00a0capital,<\/a>\u00a0anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has tendered a useful set of terms for a world that has undergone what he calls, after Deleuze and Guattari, \u201cdeterritorialization.\u201d In Appadurai\u2019s scheme a variety of \u201cscapes\u201d \u2014 ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finacescapes and ideoscapes \u2014 are constantly at play. Most crucial and human among these post-territorial scapes are the ethnoscapes \u201c\u2026 who make up the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers and other groups and persons [that] constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to an unprecedented degree.\u201d(See Representation<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Where cultural practice takes hold in the interstices of this transnational culture is in the production of the imagination, a term Appadurai uses not in an individual sense, but rather in terms of \u201ca social practice.<\/em>\u201d New or refined forms of media financed by ideologically thick apparati produce what is possible, what we can imagine in and between cultural and geographic boundaries. (See as response to Nationalism<\/a>)<\/p>\n

In his considerations of mediascapes, Appadurai harkens back to Guy Debord, theorist of the spectacle, who examined a technologically accelerated process by which a new mode of spectacular production transforms social relations in a total frame: \u201cThe spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images \u2026 The spectacle is\u00a0capital\u00a0<\/em>accumulated to the point where it becomes image.\u201d<\/p>\n

Extending this framework,\u00a0Rey Chow<\/a>\u00a0follows spectacular logic to the point of inversion, as the visuality of the transnational society of the spectacle finds media supplanting imagination in creating what she calls \u201cPostmodern Automatons.\u201d Her first step in locating an arena for a feminist intervention in global power relations comes in recognizing that \u201c\u2026 a perception of the spectacular cannot be separated from technology, which turns the human body into the site of experimentation and mass production.\u201d Once spectacle dissolves human agency, it finds the human body a fertile site for production.<\/p>\n

Writers<\/h3>\n

Writers and Theorists<\/h4>\n

Chow\u2019s search for sites and strategies for intervention \u2014 which she locates in the mediation between \u201ccritical regionalism\u201dand the supposed abandon of postmodern theory \u2014 opens up the crucial question of finding other sites and strategies where resistance can or does take place. Chow\u2019s work complements the work of other feminists who consider the many positions women hold or can take both in regard to transnational capital and academic feminism\u2019s subject matter. Expanding on a phrase coined by Adrienne Rich, writers like Chandra Mohanty, Caren Kaplan, and Lata Mani interrogate the \u201cpolitics of location\u201d by which discursive assymmetries and ellisions of real agency parallel the material conditions fostered by globalism.<\/p>\n

Locating the problems of \u201cpostcoloniality,\u201d Arif Dirlik offered an early salvo along this front from within the intellectual or academic institutions implicated in the logic of globalism:<\/p>\n

I would suggest \u2026 that postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism. The question, then, is not whether this global intelligentsia can (or should) return to national loyalties but whether, in recognition of its own class-position in global capitalism, it can generate a thoroughgoing criticism of its own ideology and formulate practices or resistance against the system of which it is a product. (356)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"In<\/a>
In An Antique Land, 1994.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anthropologist and novelist\u00a0Amitav Ghosh<\/a>\u00a0has explored the relations of people in and between nations through wars and accumulation, in both his novel\u00a0The Shadow Lines<\/em>, which takes place in India, Britain, and Bangladesh, and his non-fictional book\u00a0In an Antique Land<\/em>, follows people through the Arab world at the time of the Gulf War and back through history.<\/p>\n

Antiguan writer\u00a0Jamaica Kincaid<\/a>\u00a0imagines her own country through the eyes of a tourist at the same time as she exposes the global transformations that legitimate and illegitimate transnational economic flows have affected Antigua in\u00a0A Small Place<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Anna Tsing\u2019s\u00a0In the Realm of the Diamond Queen<\/em>, an imaginative ethnography, links marginality in what some would call an isolated area in Indonesia to broader \u2014 regional, national, and global \u2014 concerns. She shows how\u00a0 female cultural innovators incorporate and overturn observable, local depredations of various processes that have global implications.<\/p>\n

Vandana Shiva, a physicist and Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in Dehra Dunn (India), confronts the environmental challenges that large scale industry presents to ecologically minded feminists as she relates environmental health to human health, insisting that the two are a continuity, not independent spheres.<\/p>\n

Works Cited and Bibliography<\/h3>\n
    \n
  • Ahmad, Aijaz. \u201cJameson\u2019s Rhetoric of Otherness and the \u2018National Allegory.\u2019\u201d\u00a0Social Text<\/em>\u00a017 (Fall 1987). 3-25. (A response to Jameson, below.)<\/li>\n
  • Appadurai, Arjun. \u201cGlobal Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.\u201d\u00a0Recapturing Anthropology<\/em>. Satnta Fe: School of American Research P, 1991. 191-210.<\/li>\n
  • \u2014. \u201cDisjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.\u201d\u00a0The Post-Colonial Studies Reader<\/em>. New York: Routledge, 1995. 324-339. (Reprint from\u00a0Public Culture<\/em>\u00a02:2 (Spring 1990). 1-24.)<\/li>\n
  • (Both of the above articles are included in Appadurai\u2019s recent\u00a0Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization<\/em>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.)<\/li>\n
  • Baudrillard, Jean.\u00a0Selected Writings<\/em>\u00a0(Mark Poster, ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988.<\/li>\n
  • Debord, Guy.\u00a0The Society of the Spectacle<\/em>. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. New York: Zone Books, 1995.<\/li>\n
  • Dirlik, Arif. \u201cThe Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,\u201d\u00a0Critical Inquiry<\/em>\u00a020 (Winter 1994): 328-56.<\/li>\n
  • Ghosh, Amitav.\u00a0In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller\u2019s Tale<\/em>. New York: Vintage, 1992.<\/li>\n
  • \u2014.\u00a0The Shadow Lines<\/em>. New York: Penguin, 1990.<\/li>\n
  • Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan (eds.).\u00a0Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices<\/em>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1994.<\/li>\n
  • Harvey, David.\u00a0The Condition of Postmodernity<\/em>. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,1990.<\/li>\n
  • Jameson, Fredric. \u201cThird-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.\u201d\u00a0Social Text<\/em>\u00a015 (Fall 1986). 65-88.<\/li>\n
  • Kaplan, Caren. \u201cResisting Autobiography: Outlaw Genres and\u00a0 Subjects.\u201d Smith & Watson, eds,\u00a0De\/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women\u2019s Autobiography<\/em>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 115-138.<\/li>\n
  • Kincaid, Jamaica.\u00a0A Small Place<\/em>. New York: Plume (Penguin), 1988.<\/li>\n
  • Mani, Lata. \u201cMultiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception.\u201d\u00a0Feminist Review<\/em>\u00a035 (Summer 1990). 24-41.<\/li>\n
  • Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. \u201cFeminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience.\u201d Barrett & Phillips, eds.\u00a0Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates<\/em>. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992. 74-92.<\/li>\n
  • Sangari, Kumkum. \u201cThe Politics of the Possible.\u201d Mohamed &Lloyd, eds.\u00a0The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse<\/em>. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.216-245.<\/li>\n
  • Shiva, Vandana (ed.).\u00a0Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide<\/em>. Phildelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994.<\/li>\n
  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt.\u00a0In the Realm of the Diamond Queen<\/em>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Author: Pete Nowakoski, Spring 1996
    \nLast edited: October 2017<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Defining the Term In sweeping strokes, we can understand \u201cglobalism\u201d as closely related to the term \u201cpostcolonialism\u201d itself. The two terms share the idea of cosmopolitan centers in changing relations with rural areas and the emerging metropolises of the Third World. For the purposes at least of this page, however, we will use \u201cglobalism\u201d to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":327,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[12,45,41,72],"class_list":{"0":"post-760","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-terms-and-issues","7":"tag-diaspora","8":"tag-hybridity","9":"tag-identity","10":"tag-nationalism"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paWL6U-cg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/327"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3008,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions\/3008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}