BiblioVault - Books about Nation-state and globalization

Dislocalism

The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Americanism

Sarika Chandra

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Notwithstanding its now extensive, trans-disciplinary bibliography, the full reality of globalization remains less well understood than commonly thought. As an objective, secular phenomenon, globalization has continued to be obscured by ideological and rhetorical strategies that travel under the same name but posit it as simply the abstract-universal other of the local. Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Americanism makes such strategies and the global/local binary they reinforce into objects of critical analysis.

Taking her title from a new theoretical concept at the heart of this critique, Sarika Chandra argues that the historically dominant position of the United States in the global order takes on a uniquely urgent and problematic form: globalization is experienced not only as external to the American “nation of nations” but also as something internal to it. Through close study of four discrete intellectual/cultural arenas from the 1980s to the present—management theory, the literature of immigration, travel writing, and narratives of the culinary exotic—Chandra further argues that an Americanized imperative to globalize results in a repositioning of the local to maintain national and institutional boundaries. To “dislocalize” becomes, simultaneously, to “dislocalize.”

By mapping out the deeper, often hidden discursive ambiguities and historical specificities of an Americanized globalization, Dislocalism effectively redefines and re-orients the fields of American literary and cultural studies.

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Dwelling in American

Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

John Muthyala

Dartmouth College Press, 2012

Globalization is not the Americanization of the world, argues John Muthyala. Rather, it is an uneven social, cultural, economic, and political process in which the policies and aspirations of powerful nation-states are entangled with the interests of other empires, nation-states, and communities. Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization takes up a bold challenge, critiquing scholarship on American empire that views the United States as either an exceptional threat to the world or the only hope for the future. It does so in order to provincialize America, to understand it from outside the borders of nation and location, and from inside the global networks of trade, power, and culture. Using comparative frames of reference, the book makes its arguments by examining the work of a diverse range of writers including Arundhati Roy (War Talk, Power Politics), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran), and Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat). This is an original, complex, and often bracingly counterintuitive critique of the idea of American empire that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of globalization.

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The Fateful Triangle

Race, Ethnicity, Nation

Stuart Hall

Harvard University Press, 2017

“Given the current political conditions, these lectures on race, ethnicity, and nation, delivered by Stuart Hall almost a quarter of a century ago, may be even more timely today.”
—Angela Y. Davis

In this defining statement one of the founding figures of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, often deadly consequences of our contemporary politics of race and identity. As he untangles the power relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups introduced new meanings to the representation of difference.

Hall challenges us to find more sustainable ways of living with difference, redefining nation, race, and identity.

“Stuart Hall bracingly confronts the persistence of race—and its confounding liberal surrogates, ethnicity and nation…This is a profoundly humane work that…finds room for hope and change.”
—Orlando Patterson

“Stuart Hall’s written words were ardent, discerning, recondite, and provocative, his spoken voice lyrical, euphonious, passionate, at times rhapsodic and he changed the way an entire generation of critics and commentators debated issues of race and cultural difference.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Essential reading for those seeking to understand Hall’s tremendous impact on scholars, artists, and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.”
—Artforum

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