The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ new intellectual conversations emerged between scholars from across the disciplines who were drawn together in a quest to understand enduring real-world problems at home and abroad—problems of racism, inequality, development, neocolonialism, and neoimperialism. Opportunities for dialogue among Third- and First-World scholars developed at the fringes of these conversations, introducing new ideas, alternative perspectives, and competing epistemologies into the Western academy that broadened its knowledge base and underscored its Eurocentric bias (Wallerstein 1996: 48).

      Pressures mounted for universities to look beyond their national borders as well as to reexamine domestic agendas and respond to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The decades that followed saw a proliferation of interdisciplinary programs on university campuses, including area, ethnic, women, gender, religious, and environmental studies (Ferguson 2012). Cultural, ethnic, and area studies programs ushered new conversations into universities. Some of these programs focused on non-Western regions, issues of race and class, and some on alternative viewpoints and voices of minority peoples. Among these programs, area studies represented an explicit effort to initiate new knowledge about non-Western countries and places.

      Within the United States the international studies programs were sponsored in large part by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, who worked collectively to support interdisciplinary area studies as a matter of public policy (Lagemann 1989; Chomsky et al. 1998; Ludden 2000; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002; Szanton 2004; Schäfer 2010). Under the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the introduction of Title VI grants, funding was made available to approximately 125 universities to support area studies, language studies, and education abroad programs, which were known as National Resource Center Programs. This resulted in a diverse number of academic units being developed, such as African Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, East Asian Studies, European Studies, and Pacific Studies. Together they reflected Cold War tensions and the United States’ expanding neocolonial reach and development aspirations into other parts of the world.

      In the United Kingdom Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall established Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 in an explicit attempt to grapple with issues of race, class, and power. Heavily influenced by socialist and Marxist thought, these social theorists and historians began exporting their critical interdisciplinary ideas to the United States, where cultural studies blossomed in the 1980s. At approximately the same time, postcolonial and subaltern studies began to flourish. These fields pushed Western scholars to interrogate their essentialist cultural assumptions and view the history of the world from a bottom-up perspective that foregrounded the experiences of non-European peoples and their often very different readings of the past. While many of these conversations were marginalized on university campuses, they nonetheless opened up intellectual space within the Euro-American academy to develop critical perspectives and foster alternative epistemological positions (see however Spivak 2003; Chow 2006).

      The cross-pollination of ideas between these various interdisciplinary programs cultivated a wide range of ideas about subjectivity, identity, governmentality, postcoloniality, and so on. As we discuss in Chapter 3, the concept of transdisciplinarity, coined by Jean Piaget in 1970, encapsulates these dynamic theoretical exchanges within and between the global north and the global south in the second half of the twentieth century (Piaget 1972). These exchanges informed a new set of thematics that transcended disciplinary thinking and that have reshaped conventional disciplines within the academy over the past three decades. Transdisciplinarity provides the theoretical platform upon which global studies as a new field of inclusive inquiry is currently building.

      DEBATING GLOBALIZATION

      The flourishing of new ways to analyze complex social relations between nations and peoples in the postwar period was followed by the emergence of globalization as a focus of study. While there have been many periods of globalization over the centuries, twentieth-century globalization blossomed under geopolitical and technological conditions unique to the current era (Nederveen Pieterse 2012). Global processes in the 1970s took the interconnectedness between nation-states, multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and a host of other nonstate and civil society actors to new levels. Globalization first became topical within the international finance and trade sectors, in new articulations of global capitalism. As markets opened up, new economic theories and policies substantiated what has come to be called the age of neoliberalism. Encapsulating neoliberalism as an economic logic, Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, declared in 1970 that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits” (Friedman 1970).

      The United States and United Kingdom led the charge in implementing neoliberal economic policies that favored business interests, maximized private corporate power and profits, and devalued the role of the state in regulating exploitative financial practices that jeopardized labor safeguards and public interests. China began its own push toward market liberalization (Duménil and Lévy 2004; Harvey 2007). New digital technologies heightened the speed and capacities of economic exchange around the world and facilitated a sense—at least in the global north—of a new era of free-market globalization. The financial cycles of the 1980s and 1990s and the formation of international business elites underscored the rise of a new “global imaginary” (Steger 2008). During this period, the United States emerged as the global economic superpower, taking advantage of emerging economies in countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (collectively referred to as BRICS). Today, of course, the political and economic landscape is very different. The size of China’s economy has grown rapidly and the United States is no longer the undisputed world leader. Neoliberalism has come under attack, and it is largely blamed for undermining democratic processes in its promotion of unsustainable greed. The 2008 global economic crisis can be seen as the culmination of a long, slow process of global privatization and deregulation that brought the financial world to its knees, dismantled the middle classes, and created unprecedented levels of global inequality and insecurity (Beck 1992, 2009; Chomsky 1999).

      It is important to note that globalization was not entirely driven by transnational economic exchange and international financial practices, as economists, with their determinist theories, are inclined to claim (see Appadurai 1996). In the 1980s and 1990s the world also experienced huge shifts in ideological affiliations with the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism, the rise of postcolonial aspirations through self-determination, and the evolution of new cultural and social networks that were both transnational and subnational in nature. Put differently, in the latter half of the twentieth century new forms of community and subjectivity that transcended standard nationalist ideologies and allegiances emerged. The rise of a global environmental movement and Green Party politics, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa through global political pressure, the call for a global response to the AIDS epidemic—all of these events highlighted people’s global interdependence and affirmed that a global worldview was essential for dealing with issues that could not be managed or contained by any one country. These events, and other global challenges, disrupted the centrality, stability, and ideology of the sovereign nation-state, ushering in what some commentators have labeled our current postnational or “post-Westphalian” age (Falk 2002).

      As neoliberal economics picked up traction and dismantled welfarism and regulatory state bureaucracies throughout the 1990s and 2000s, so too did notions of democracy come under attack within both Western and non-Western societies. Ideological and political shifts across the world diminished people’s sense of an active public sphere and a strong secular state system that could defend the rights of workers, women, and ordinary people against greedy capitalists and deregulated financial markets. These shifts helped to bolster the rise of religious fundamentalism and extremism around the world among Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and other religious communities. Religious extremism has offered new forms of authority that have attracted millions of people in lieu of the nation-state paradigm, which has proven unable to protect the rights of citizens and in the process diminished many people’s sense of national loyalty (Juergensmeyer СКАЧАТЬ