Edited by one of the most prominent scholars in the field and including a distinguished group of contributors, this collection of essays makes a striking intervention in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions of globalization. While including discussions about what globalization is and whether it is a meaningful term, the volume focuses in particular on the way that changing sites—local, regional, diasporic—are the scenes of emergent forms of sovereignty in which matters of style, sensibility, and ethos articulate new legalities and new kinds of violence.
Seeking an alternative to the dead-end debate between those who see globalization as a phenomenon wholly without precedent and those who see it simply as modernization, imperialism, or global capitalism with a new face, the contributors seek to illuminate how space and time are transforming each other in special ways in the present era. They examine how this complex transformation involves changes in the situation of the nation, the state, and the city. While exploring distinct regions—China, Africa, South America, Europe—and representing different disciplines and genres—anthropology, literature, political science, sociology, music, cinema, photography—the contributors are concerned with both the political economy of location and the locations in which political economies are produced and transformed. A special strength of the collection is its concern with emergent styles of subjectivity, citizenship, and mobilization and with the transformations of state power through which market rationalities are distributed and embodied locally.

Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Jean François Bayart, Jérôme Bindé, Néstor García Canclini, Leo Ching, Steven Feld, Ralf D. Hotchkiss, Wu Hung, Andreas Huyssen, Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Achille Mbembe, Philipe Rekacewicz, Saskia Sassen, Fatu Kande Senghor, Seteney Shami, Anna Tsing, Zhang Zhen

Arjun Appadurai is Samuel N. Harper Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

  

  

  

  

Table of Contents

Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination / Arjun Appadurai
At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa / Achille Mbembe
Mapping Concepts / Philippe Rekacewicz
Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia / Andreas Huyssen
On Foot / Boubacar Touré Mandémory
On Wheels / Ralf D. Hotchkiss
Toward an Ethics of the Future / Jérome Bindé
A Chinese Dream by Wang Jin / Wu Hung
Mediating Time: The “Rice Bowl of Youth” in Fin de Siecle Urban China / Zhang Zhen
Inside the Economy of Appearances / Anna Tsing
A Sweet Lullaby for World Music / Steven Feld
Prehistories of Globalization: Circassian Identity in Motion / Seteney Shami
On the Predicament of the Sign: The Modern African Woman’s Claim to Locality / Fatu Kande Senghor
From National Capital to Global Capital: Urban Change in Mexico City / Néstor García Canclina
Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization / Saskia Sassen
Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism of the Age of Late Capital / Leo Ching
The Paradoxical Invention of Economic Modernity / Jean-François Bayart
Contributors
Index