Transnationalism & Globalism
Defining the
term
In sweeping strokes, we can understand "globalism"
as an alternate term for "postcolonialism" 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 "Globalism" 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 in positive processes like
"investement," "progress" and "development,"
activists and scholars around the world have begun to discuss globalism
with ambivalence as they unpack profound assymmetries between center and
periphery.
Although the most visible actors in these relations are abstract, imagined
entities called "Trans-" or "Multi-National Corporations"
(MNCs), the sites where such corporations set up shop, or do not, become
the crucibles for radical change in material conditions and cultural production
and potential sites of resistance from people whose lives have changed
dramatically, as often asnot for the worse, despite the rhetoric of progress.
Flexible Accumulation
Although many theorists have offered engaging
descriptions of Late Capital's strategies, geographer David Harvey has
formulated a succinct and useful set of concepts that captures the way
MNCs do business:
Flexible Accumulation ... 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.... It has also entrained
a new round of what I shall call 'time-space compression" ... 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 Postmodernity
, 147)
Flexible accumulation, then, belies the nature of corporations that are
not so "multi-" as much they are "trans-". Transnational
accumulation does not occur equally between geographical areas, but rather
in specific locations-- Wall and Bond Streets, for example-- with transactions
that transgress no end of boundaries with increasing speed.
For people living in locations affected, directly or indirectly, by the
presence of MNCs, the ebb and flow of global capital becomes an 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.
Cultural
Implications
Focusing on the cultural implications of transnational
capital, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has tendered a useful set of terms
for a world that has undergone what he calls, after Deleuze and Guattari,
"deterritorialization." In Appadurai's scheme a variety of "-scapes"--
ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finacescapes and ideoscapes-- are
constantly at play. Most crucial and human among these post-territorial
scapes are the ethnoscapes "... 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."
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 "a social practice."
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.
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: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather,
it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images....
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes
image."
Extending this framework, Rey Chow follows 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 "Postmodern
Automatons." Her first step in locating an arena for a feminist intervention
in global power relations comes in recognizing that "... a perception
of the spectacular cannot be separated from technology, which turns the
human body into the site of experimentation and mass production."
Once spectacle dissolves human agency, it finds the human body a fertile
site for production.
Writers
Writers and
Theorists
Chow's search for sites and strategies for intervention--
which she locates in the a mediation between "critical regionalism"
and the supposed abandon of postmodern theory-- opens up the crucial question
of finding other sites and strategies where resistance can or does take
place.
Chow's work complements the work of other feminists who consider the many
positions women hold or can take both in regard to transnational capital
and the current ascendance of Euro-American academic discussions of the
questions women face. Expanding on a phrase coined by Adrienne Rich, writers
like Chandra Mohanty, Caren Kaplan, and Lata Mani interrogate the "politics
of location" by which discursive assymetries and ellisions of real
agency parallel the material conditions fostered by Globalism.
Locating the problems of "postcoloniality," Arif Dirlik offered
an early salvo along this front for critical practice from within the intellectual
or academic institutions implicated in the logic of globalism:
I would suggest ... 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)
Anthropologist and novelist Amitav Ghosh has explored
the relations of people in and between nations, through wars and accumulation,
in both his novel The Shadow Lines, which takes place in India,
Britain, and Bangladesh, and his non-fictional In an Antique Land,
which tries to follow people through the Arab world at the time of the
Gulf War and back through history.
Antiguan writer Jamaica Kinkaid imagines 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 effected
Antigua in A Small Place.
Anna Tsing's In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, an imaginative ethnography,
links marginality in what some would call an isolated area in Indonesia
to broader-- regional, national, and global-- concerns. She finds how Meratus
Dayaks, especially female cultural innovators, incorporate and overturn
observable, local depredations of various processes that have global implications.
Vandana Shiva, a physicist and Director of theResearch Foundation for Science,
Technology and Natural Resource Policy in Dehra Dunn (India), confronts
the environmental challenge 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.
A Bibliography to Start with
Ahmad, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National
Allegory.'" Social Text 17 (Fall 1987). 3-25. (A response to
Jameson, below.)
Appadurai, Arjun. "Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational
Anthropology" in Recapturing Anthropology. Satnta Fe: School
of American Research P, 1991. 191-210.
---. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy"
in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995.
324-339. (Reprint from Public Culture 2:2 (Spring 1990). 1-24.)
(Both of the above articles are included in Appadurai's recent Modernity
at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1996.)
Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings (Mark Poster, ed.). Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1988.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith,
trans. New York: Zone Books, 1995.
Dirlik, Arif. "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the
Age of Global Capitalism," Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994):
328-56.
Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller's
Tale. New York: Vintage, 1992.
---.The Shadow Lines. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan (eds.). Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity
and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: U of Monnesota P,
1994.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1990.
Jameson, Fredric. "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism." Social Text 15 (Fall 1986). 65-88.
Kaplan, Caren. "Resisting Autobiography: Outlaw Genres and Transnational
Feminist Subjects" in Smith & Watson, eds, De/Colonizing the
Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1992.115-138.
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place . New York: Plume (Penguin), 1988.
Mani, Lata. "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age
of Multinational Reception." Feminist Review 35 (Summer 1990).
24-41.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics
of Experience" in Barrett & Phillips, eds, Destabilizing Theory:
Contemporary Feminist Debates. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992.74-92.
Sangari, Kumkum. "The Politics of the Possible." in Mohamed &
Lloyd, eds, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. New York:
Oxford UP, 1990.216-245.
Shiva, Vandana (ed.). Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health
and Development Worldwide. Phildelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.
Author: Pete Nowakoski, Spring 1996
Links
within this site
Postcolonial Studies at Emory
(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J.
Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler
Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)
