The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith
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Название: The Global Turn
Автор: Eve Darian-Smith
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Социология
isbn: 9780520966307
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AN EMERGING GLOBAL WORLDVIEW
The field of global studies is typically associated with studies of globalization that began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s. These studies of contemporary globalization were matched with a growing number of studies focusing on globalization in earlier historical periods (Sachsenmaier 2011). According to Manfred Steger’s narrative of the history of global studies, “it is no accident that the academic origins of the new field of inquiry [global studies] coincide with the explosion of the keyword [globalization] in both academic and public discourses in the 1990s” (Steger 2016: 238). We contend, however, that the intellectual trajectory that informs the transdisciplinary field of global studies started long before the 1990s. We suggest that the emergence of a new global worldview is linked to the moment of opportunity and optimism that was incongruously opened up by the devastating world wars of the twentieth century (Herren, Rüesch, and Sibille 2012). In this postwar moment, the modern Western understanding of the world was profoundly shaken and concepts such as state sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism were called into question. An emerging worldview reflected a postwar yearning for peace, stability, and multilateral political cooperation between countries and peoples from a wide range of ethnic, religious, and ideological backgrounds.
Building on the multilateral conversations that surrounded the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, and the first attempt at a League of Nations, the United Nations was successfully established in 1945. The UN played an important role in connecting millions of displaced people after the war, and heralded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. These events ushered in an unprecedented era of global optimism about countries’ ability to work together to avoid future wars. Unique to this brief post-WWII period was Western countries’ inclusion of the so-called Third World in this global venture. Support for decolonization underscored international efforts to create a more just and equitable world that contributed to decolonization and the “liberation” of many millions of people from Anglo-European control.
An event that encapsulated people’s newfound capacity to think in terms of global democracy and freedom was the opening of the New York World’s Fair in 1964. The fair billed itself as a “universal and international” exposition. For the 51 million visitors that poured through its gates, the World’s Fair represented the promise of technology and advanced communications to link people around the world in new ways. It featured a new ride by Walt Disney called “It’s a Small World”; a rotating “Carousel of Progress” demonstrating new technologies such as televisions, computers, and kitchen appliances; and high-tech trains and architectural wonders that brought to life science fiction’s futuristic world (see Samuel 2007; Tirella 2014)
Among these wonders of modern technology, the Unisphere was the fair’s key attraction (fig. 3). This was an enormous stainless steel model of Earth that reached twelve stories high and was designed to celebrate “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.” Like the Statue of Liberty, which had been built in France and erected in New York Harbor eighty years earlier, the Unisphere was intended as a symbol of freedom and global democracy (Mitchell 2014). Importantly, the Unisphere also reflected the growing popular excitement associated with a new space age. It foreshadowed the Apollo 8 mission that would take place a few years later, in 1968, and enable its three-man crew to see Earth for the first time from an outer-space perspective. Astronaut William Anders’s famous Earthrise photograph, and which some have labeled the most influential environmental photo ever taken,1 invoked a new way of thinking about man’s vulnerability in the universe and humankind’s common and interlinked future on a single planet.
Figure 3. Unisphere, New York World’s Fair, 1964–65.
Events such as the establishment of the UN, the World’s Fair, and the success of Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, which put man on the moon, together reflected a remarkable period in which a new global imaginary of mankind’s interconnectedness emerged and took on weight in the popular imagination, particularly in the United States. The growing environmental movement furthered this imaginary, spurred on by Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book Silent Spring and the 1969 Santa Barbara, California, oil spill. In response to the spill, an estimated 20 million Americans took to the streets in 1970 in defense of the global environment, celebrating the first Earth Day. This mass mobilization forced the US federal government to establish the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and helped launch Green Party politics in Australia and then Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Germany (Spretnak and Kapra 1986; Wall 2010).
At the same moment that the UN Charter established a platform upon which to “maintain international peace and security,” however, the superpowers of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom were already mobilizing against the Soviet Union and setting up the conditions for the Cold War that posited capitalism against communism. Against the upbeat rhetoric of global inclusion that flourished in the latter half of the twentieth century, it is impossible to ignore the oppressive historical realities that underpinned and perhaps explain the desire for an optimistic global imaginary. The jubilant Unisphere imagery of the World’s Fair elided the fact that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated only five months before the world exposition opened. It also obscured the Cold War realities of the 1960s, which witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall (1961), mounting fears of nuclear warfare in incidents such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), looming and ongoing regional wars (Korea and Vietnam), and the USSR’s suppression of the liberation movement known as the Prague Spring (1968). In Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world, the 1960s witnessed extreme violence in response to liberation movements, deeply tainting the global optimism surrounding decolonization that flourished immediately after World War II. Self-determination was often accompanied by waves of oppression and brutality as ethnic and religious communities were artificially divided and cordoned off into new nation-states across Asia and Africa.
In the wake of genocide and nuclear warfare, or what Eric Hobsbawm has called “total war,” the foundations of modern rationality were profoundly shaken within intellectual circles in this postwar era (Hobsbawm 1994). Many societies developed deep-seated anxieties about the failings of modernity’s promises of science, development, progress, democracy, and self-determination, which had dominated Euro-American thought since the Enlightenment. These anxieties manifested within twentieth-century European art and literature movements, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, that bridged the post-WWI and WWII periods, as well as in the existentialist, absurdist, and nihilist movements in philosophy and literature. Artists and intellectuals, many of whom had fled Europe for the United States in the late 1930s, grappled with the sensation that nothing was predictable, stable, or fixed in a world turned upside-down that had become in many ways unrecognizable.
Within the Euro-American academy, leading intellectual figures began reaching out beyond the conventions of academic disciplines to explore a turbulent postwar period that had brought women into the labor force, released black and brown societies from colonial rule, and revealed the violence and depravity of ostensibly civilized European societies. As Immanuel Wallerstein notes, this was a period when the “centrist liberal geoculture that was holding the world-system together” was essentially undermined (Wallerstein 2004: x).
Against rapidly shifting social and political contexts, scholars began “deconstructing” or questioning the basic assumptions underpinning modernity. Taken-for-granted categories of nationality, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity became sites of controversy, exploration, СКАЧАТЬ