Critique Of Globalization Research Articles

Economic Globalization and its Problems: A Response to Eaton, Herpel, and Moe-Lobeda and Spencer

Building on the other papers in this issue, I offer a theological critique of economic globalization. The theory, or "theology" that supports it leads people of good will, despite the many negative consequences of the globalized pursuit of growth, to pursue such growth, as measured by GDP, as the goal of economic policy. This economistic theology takes no account of human community or ecological sustainability. Until it is changed economists will continue to direct us toward catastrophe.

Filming Loss

Two Argentine filmmakers of the postdictatorship generation have used the documentary as a space in which to question constructions of history, memory, and identity in the aftermath of traumatic and tumultuous experiences. Both projects foreground the idea of loss and the difficulties of writing a “truthful” version of the past when confronted by politically motivated “official histories,” temporal shift, ideological change, lost referents, and missed experience. Andrés Di Tella’s La televisión y yo (2003) questions the intersections among history, identity, and the media. In it the filmmaker’s identity, fragile and tenuous, is shown to be based upon memories of the television programs of his youth that he missed because of his family’s self-imposed exile during the Onganía regime. The film is a clear critique of globalization’s effects on subjectivity. Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003) highlights the tenuousness of her identity by exploring the gaps and silences of memory. It raises key questions about “postmemory” and generational shifts and, more particularly, about how those at a generational remove from the traumas of dictatorship can comprehend these traumatic historical events and their own relationships to them.

IMAGINED, DESIRED

In this review I introduce readers to three exemplary ethnographies. All three contribute not only to anthropological and queer studies literatures but also to discourses and critiques of globalization, transnationalism, and neoliberalism. Further, these works destabilize notions of what constitutes ethnography in the general field of queer studies and demonstrate that queer anthropology is imperative to consider in present and future developments in queer theory, methods, and analyses. These texts argue that it is time to move beyond the search for that which is “queer” as emerging from “tradition.” They demonstrate that social constructions of queer subjectivities are ever-changing and emerging in contemporary historical contexts, often in relation to the nation-state and against hegemonic Euro-American notions of what is considered “queer.”

Contemporary Tornedalian Fictions by Ester Cullblom and Annika Korpi

In recent years discussions concerning ethnicity have gained increased importance in projects which question the homogeneity of modernity. This development involves a critique of the effacement of the implications of gender, class, and ethnicity in the production of discourses about the nation and the people. From this theoretical vantage point the article examines the intertwinings of diverse identity factors in contemporary fictions about the Swedish Torne Valley, a multi-ethnic and multilingual border area in northern Scandinavia. The article analyses the construction of images of the Torne Valley, through a juxtaposition of the prose writings of two contemporary Swedish women authors, Ester Cullblom (b. 1932) and Annika Korpi (b. 1972). The aesthetic framework and the poetics of the texts are examined. The literary texts are, furthermore, contextualized by being related to feminist critique, regional politics, and developments of migration and globalization. The conclusion presented is that Cullblom's prose exemplifies literary realism and that the image of the Torne Valley presented is imbued with critique of traditional gender patterns. This critique is inspired by Scandinavian and Anglo-American 1960s and 1970s feminism. Korpi's prose, on the other hand, displays elements from post-modernist aesthetics and post-structuralist theory. In her debut novel ethnicity, together with migration, globalization, and social hierarchization, have a major role in shaping an image of the Torne Valley as a land of freedom and justice.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Resisting the Neo‐liberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Resisting the Neo‐liberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens

Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Globalization of Self: Role and Identity Transformation from Above and Below

Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Globalization of Self: Role and Identity Transformation from Above and Below

The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s <i>Empire</i>

The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire Zahi Zalloua (bio) In their landmark Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a reconfiguration of the field of political theory, arguing that critics must go beyond a “politics of difference” that has been “outflanked by [new] strategies of power” (138). Singled out in their analysis are postcolonial and postmodern thinkers who engage in a demoded—and dangerously ineffective—form of critique by continuing to privilege fluidity and hybridity in their struggle against “the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty” (138).1 While Hardt and Negri themselves have downplayed the radicality of their approach,2 their manifesto arguably makes the case for the urgency of theorizing globalization differently, as “Empire”; this renewed understanding, they contend, is the only means to come to terms with the complex and changing reality of the present and, subsequently, to find a more efficient mode of resisting the repressive, homogenizing elements of that reality: “In the face of the new forms of sovereignty, new strategies of contestation and new alternatives need to be invented” (Brown and Szeman 2002, 182). In this essay, I propose to scrutinize and supplement Hardt and Negri’s understanding of difference through a reflection on the place of ethical theory in the conceptualization of new strategies of political resistance in a global era. Drawing on the works of Edouard Glissant and Jacques Derrida, I would [End Page 127] like to theorize and rethink the problematic of difference within Empire, this “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii). If the authors of Empire rightly underscore the limits of a politics of difference, calling attention to the ways “difference” can always be coopted by dominant discourses, they do not adequately develop the ethical dimension of difference, bracketing from analysis any discussion of its postcolonial/postmodernist inflections and devoting to “the politics of difference” less than ten pages in a five-hundred-page volume.3 This is all the more puzzling, as we shall see, given Hardt and Negri’s own commitment to more general questions of ethics and difference—albeit in their more Spinozian and Deleuzian inflections—and, more particularly, to the deployment of the ethico-political figure of the multitude as the true subversive subject of globalization.4 Fighting a New Enemy The merits of Empire lie in its desire to reconfigure the center/periphery model of analysis, and, more importantly, to complicate the identification by postcolonial theorists of globalization with neo-imperialism (or the U.S.) by examining more closely how repressive power currently functions. At the heart of Hardt and Negri’s critique is their contention that the nation-state is an outdated notion, belonging to a prior era of “modern,” imperialist sovereignty that has been superseded by the new, imperial sovereignty of an “Empire” structured by the flow of capital. Any critique of globalization based on the assumption that nation-states are the primary locus of power is misguided: “We insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital” (43). No one is immune from the logic of global capital. Inside/outside and local/global dichotomies are, strictly speaking, illusory, since we all “feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine” (45). It is therefore not [End Page 128] only false, but counterproductive and damaging, “to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire,” that is, to think difference in terms of a particular locale resisting a general global trend (45). As a corrective to this misguided vision of the nation or the local’s capacity for resistance, Hardt and Negri argue for a reconceptualization of globalization as a “regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization” (45). This understanding of globalization relies more specifically...

The Last Musketeer of the French Revolution: Exploring the Republican Political Agenda of Pierre Bourdieu

This paper argues that Pierre Bourdieu was motivated by the frustration of the French Revolution. His work continually criticized the gap between the ideological promise of the Enlightenment and the actual persistence of inequality in modern France. This paper exposes the centrality of the failed revolution in Bourdieu's oeuvre by visiting four topics he delved into: Education, gender, globalization and the role of social science. The analysis shows that the contrast between the ideals of equality and meritocracy and their poor implementation in schools and universities has motivated his sharp critique of the French system of education. Similarly, the failure of the State to support gender equality drove him to expose the deeply embodied cultural mechanisms that guarantee the advantages men have over women. The paper further shows that Bourdieu also extended this preoccupation with the failure of the Revolution to global politics. Specifically, his recent critique of globalization and global organizations suggests that capitalist Western elites betray the cosmopolitan vision of the Revolution while using international law and global companies to exploit third world countries. Finally, the paper shows that Bourdieu's preoccupation with the Revolution reappeared in the role he projected for social science and concludes that, for Bourdieu, the French Revolution is still to come. In that sense, Bourdieu was consistently preoccupied with the Revolution, and it is thus most fitting to see him, emphatically, as the last Musketeer to fight the betrayal of the French republic. The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the Social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected, and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. (The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,

The Liberal Difference: Left and Right Conceptions of Global Injustice

In left critiques of globalization, it is often argued thatliberal-egalitarian principles are inadequate for thinking about andstruggling for global justice; that they are, in fact, part of the problem.For the case of identity politics as a left alternative, the paper pointsat two fallacies in this notion, regarding two ‘liberal’ elements:individualism and universalism. (1) The paper examines groupidentityclaims in far right conceptions of global injustice, and showsthat cultural diversity of groups does not necessitate or even favourequality and democratic participation. (2) It then examines the leftgroup-based claims in the global justice discourse, showing that theaspirations for equality and freedom assume the liberal notions thathave been often rejected as inadequate. The paper concludes thatthis ambivalent position undermines the democratic and egalitarianaspirations of left critiques of the global order. The analysis is basedon manifestos and publications of political parties and movements inWestern Europe (France, Germany and Austria).

Wild Dances and Dying Wolves: Simulation, Essentialization, and National Identity at the Eurovision Song Contest

This paper examines Eurovision as a site for the public representation of the nation and explores the tendency toward simulation in such representations. The contest's transnational audience and implication in commercial practices create pressures toward representing the nation through simplified, well-known images. A critique of globalization from southeast Europe argues that cultural production from marginalized countries which emphasizes local distinctiveness is a sign of structural inequality. This critique is tested against representational strategies from Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia. Eurovision is then related to tourism through an analysis of the representation of the Mediterranean in Eurovision performances, which reflect symbolic hierarchies constructed by travel writing since the Enlightenment. Finally, the paper considers the overarching representational power exerted by host states.

Postcolonial Literary Criticism and Global Warming

Postcolonial criticism generally has not had a strong history of engaging with environmental or ecological discourses but the prospect of global warming is likely to change this. It is likely to be particularly significant for postcolonial literary criticism, a discipline that in recent years has struggled to make itself relevant to the task of opposing globalisation. Some postcolonial literary critics have already begun using the arguments and concepts drawn from environmental discourses and eco criticism, and in doing so they have contributed powerfully to the postcolonial critique of globalisation; however, to date few postcolonial critics have thought to use these same arguments and concepts to analyse fictions that speculate on the social effects of global warming. Taking a short story by a leading Australian author that is set in the year 2035, the last half of the article sets out to demonstrate the political potential of such a critical approach and the value of reading apocalyptic speculative fictions in particular.

Distressed workers: What has globalization to do with it?

We have recently witnessed a flurry of comment, by prominent figures such as Ben Bernanke and Larry Summers who are strong proponents of Globalization, asking the question: how do we assist the unskilled workers whose wages have been stagnating for far too long? Several of them also believe that even the “middle class” is at risk. Lou Dobbs of CNN, the labour groups’ think-tank Economic Policy Institute, and nearly all the Democrats newly elected to the Congress, believe that globalization has much to do with the economic distress of the working and the middle classes. Therefore they have coherence and plausibility on their side when they want to lean on the door, even to close it, on trade with poor countries and occasionally on unskilled immigration from them. But the proponents of globalization, when they typically skirt and hence accept this “distributional” critique of globalization and nonetheless propose that the adversely affected constituents accept globalization but allow themselves to cope with their affliction in other ways, find themselves in a politically implausible position. Indeed, if it pours, we do not have the means to turn the torrent into sunshine and must open an umbrella. But man allows globalization; and men can turn it off.

Feminist epistemology after postmodernism: critiquing science, technology and globalisation

This article provides a reasoned overview of contemporary developments within feminist theories of the subject after the decline of postmodernist thought. It stresses the foundational importance of feminist situated epistemology, and hence of a brand of materialism that stresses embodiment and embedded perspectives. The article explores neo-materialist feminist theories in a number of areas, with special emphasis on science and technology studies and critiques of globalisation. It argues that the neo-materialist trend results in a new call for an ethics attuned to the complexity of our era.

Austrian Counter-Hegemony

This article examines select discursive contributions to Austrian civil society as counter-hegemonic forms of engagement with (trans)national structures of power and exclusion. Their ideological opposition is shown to unfold around three thematic areas: (1) conceptualizations of (ethnic) identities that subvert discourses of ethnonationalism; (2) initiatives that challenge everyday racism and asylum seekers’ structural marginalization; (3) a recurring critique of neo-liberalism and economic globalization. The article also demonstrates that the political agency in question is informed by a narrative of interpretation, which partly converges with seminal contributions to the sociology of globalization and which differs radically from neo-nationalist responses to the dislocations and uncertainties of contemporary capitalism.

Book Review of The False Promises of Constructivist Theories of Learning: A Global and Ecological Critique

Book Review of The False Promises of Constructivist Theories of Learning: A Global and Ecological Critique

Contested Sovereignties and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund

The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) is a new global conservation funding project created in 2000 through start‐up funds from Conservation International, the World Bank, the Global Environmental Facility, and the MacArthur Foundation. It aims to protect the world's biodiversity hotspots, promote civil society, and assist in the Millennial Development Goals to eradicate poverty worldwide. This essay analyzes the CEPF through the making of the Mountains of Southwest China eco‐profile and in light of Hardt and Negri's much‐debated critique of globalization. While the CEPF imagines itself as a universal project with planetary ambitions, which move around the world empirelike, in China it has had to funnel its monies through a range of organizations connected to an increasingly anxious state. What results is a transformed global project, where the meanings of environmental activism, civil society, and grassroots resistance are up for grabs. The CEPF thus provides a window in the production of contested sovereignties in the bold new age of imperial sovereignty.

Stiglitz and his discontent

Globalization and its Discontents is Joseph Stiglitz's attempt to articulate to a wide audience his trenchant critique of the International Monetary Fund, its vision of globalization and, in effect, the organization of the world capitalist system. This paper argues that while Globalization and its Discontents is deeply flawed, it is ultimately an important book. Stiglitz's critique of IMF-style globalization is rooted in mainstream economic theory, but its conclusions are quite radical. Stiglitz argues that IMF policies favor the rich over the poor, stifle development, undermine democracy, and promote financial instability and crisis. His claims are by no means original. But no economist with comparably impeccable mainstream credentials has asserted so forcefully that globalization's critics are, on many crucial issues, correct. The power of Stiglitz's book lies primarily not in its originality or insight, but in its legitimization of popular criticisms of globalization.

Reflections on Modernity: The Third Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival and the 21st Guadalajara International Film Festival

Reflections on Modernity: The Third Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival and the 21st Guadalajara International Film Festival The international film festivals in Mexico City and Guadalajara offer distinct approaches to overcoming the vicissitudes of creating, distributing, and exhibiting independent cinema in Mexico. While the wellestablished Guadalajara festival seeks to develop existing and emerging channels for the production and dissemination of Latin American cinematography, the incipient but ambitious Mexico City event aims to stimulate an environment for the consumption of and intellectual engagement with nonmainstream film, placing a small selection of the region's output within a broadly-defined worldcinema context. Mexico City's documentary selection showed the creativity of Latin American filmmakers financially obliged to forego 35mm production in favor of video and digital technologies. Two films cast sidelong glances at modernity via the enormity of geography and time at the outer reaches of this continent: Soledad en elfin del mundo/Solitude at the End of the World (Carlos Casas/Fernando Zuber, IT/AR, 2005), an observational study of three absolutely isolated lives in the unforgiving Tierra del Fuego, and the beautiful observational-poetic portrait of a Minas Gerais cavedweller, A alma do osso/The Soul of the Bone (Cao Guimaraes, BR, 2004). Without patronizing or idealizing these primitive, monumental hinterlands, both films sculpt them as metaphors for their inhabitants' memories and solitude. Alma dexterously blends crisp, quotidian digital footage of its gnarled protagonist Dominguinhos with more gradated, abstract super-8 explorations marveling at the infinite shapes of nature. Both films lack narrative intent, for such lives obey no linear drive. Alma's final moments, with the subtlest nod towards cinema verite, show Dominguinhos smilingly viewing Guimaraes' film, hinting that these images both express and attenuate his circular, hermetic existence. Also of note was El ultimo confln/The Furthest Boundary (Pablo Ratto, AR, 2005), which contrasts the brute materiality of forensic anthropologists' efforts to excavate and identify the remains of those disappeared during Argentina's 1976-1983 military dictatorship with dieir families' harrowing but human memories and belated mourning. Venezuela Bolivariana (Marcelo Andrade, VE, 2004) engages with the region's long militant documentary tradition, constructing a seductive if flawed macro-narrative from television footage, emotive interviews, and rousing music to celebrate leftwing president Hugo Chavez, even as it warns against the duplicitous fabrications of the country's rightwing media. Subtler critiques of unequal globalization were De nadie/No-One (Tin Dirdamal, MX, 2005) and the scrupulously honest Crossing Arizona (Joseph Mathew/Dan DeVivo, US, 2006), which document through interviews and film reportage the ruthless violence and humane generosity that meet illegal migrants over Mexico's southern (De nadie) and northern (Crossing Arizona) borders. Arizona's rigorous analysis of the impact of immigration policy from all sides makes it an invaluable tool for informed debate. Antonino Isordia's debut featurelength documentary 7573 (MX, 2005) is an unsettling portrayal of regret, resignation, and cold recollection that blends searching interviews, home videos, reconstructions, and archive footage through an array of formats, from Hi-8 video to 35mm. Isordia paints a grim triptych of the shattered hopes, dreams, and ambitions of a generation: three characters (all, like Isordia, born in 1973) driven variously to the violent pursuit of power, self-destruction, and matricide. Each story attains a certain tragic universality, but these are far from exemplary tales: the entangled confessional interviews, filmed from unnatural angles in a grainy, overexposed black-and-white reflect the murky nature of memory, suggesting selfjustification more than rounded analyses of the past. …

Caribbean Dependency Thought Revisited

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the contribution, limitations, and contemporary relevance of Caribbean dependency thought (CDT). CDT emerged in the early post-colonial period in the English-speaking Caribbean with a mission to extend political decolonization to the intellectual, economic, social, and cultural spheres. While part of broader international currents of radical thought, it had its own special characteristics, associated with the theory of plantation economy and society. After outlining the historical context, the paper identfies four main expressions of CDT for review: “New World” thinking on epistemic dependency; the plantation school and multinational corporations as the institutional foundations of economic dependency; other structuralist formulations of dependency; and dependency as peripheral capitalism. Also discussed are the social and political theories of dependency and their policy prescriptions. CDT had a strong influence in Caribbean intellectual and political circles in the 1970s, but it generated vigorous critiques from both Marxist and mainstream social science. The paper suggests that its eventual decline was due to several unresolved theoretical methodological and political issues as well as to wider intellectual and political developments. The paper concludes by pointing to the significant historical contribution of CDT to Caribbean and Third World critical thought, and argues that its stance and method have relevance to critiques of contemporary globalization.

Cosmopolitan Globalism and Human Community

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the normative foundations and political implications of David Held's cosmopolitan social democracy are insufficient as solutions to the moral and social problems he criticizes. The article develops a life-grounded alternative critique of globalization that roots our ethical duties towards each other in consciousness of our shared needs and capabilities. These ethical duties are best realized in political projects aimed at fundamental long-term transformations in the principles that govern major socio-economic institutions.