Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization

by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (Editor)

Overview

Beyond Dichotomies examines literary texts, cultural production, and concrete local practices within the context of modernity and globalization by focusing on the ways in which some societies confront the complexity of cultures reflected in new forms of knowledge, narratives, and subjectivities. The contributors explore how particular societies negotiate the relations between the global and the local, and use a geographical, comparative perspective combined with an interdisciplinary approach to offer a diversity of views and illuminate the cultural impact of globalization on different societies around the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. These societies face complex questions regarding people's histories, identities, and cultures that embody the ambivalence, contradictions, and anxieties generated by the process of globalization. The contributors provide a compelling conclusion for a rethinking and reconfiguration of cultures and intercultural relations in today's global world in which dichotomized representations coexist with a discourse of globalization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791488553
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/01/2012
Series:	SUNY series, Explorations in Postcolonial Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	343
File size:	635 KB

About the Author

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Stanford University and the author of L'Oeuvre romanesque de Jacques-Stephen Alexis: une écriture poétique, un engagement politique.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface
Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi

PART 1. BEYOND DICHOTOMIES

1. The Perspective of the World: Globalization Then and Now
Michel-Rolph Trouillot

2. Modernity and Periphery: Toward a Global and Relational Analysis
Mary Louise Pratt

3. Beyond Dichotomies: Communicative Action and Cultural Hegemony
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze

4. Mankind's Proverbial Imagination: Critical Perspectives on Human Universals As a Global Challenge
Mineke Schipper

PART 2. CONTESTED PLACES, CONTESTED (SELF) ASCRIPTIONS

5. Bringing History Back In: Of Diasporas, Hybridities, Places, and Histories
Arif Dirlik

6. The Romance of Africa: Three Narratives by African-American Women
Eileen Julien

7. Ethnicity As Otherness in British Identity Politics
Robert J. C. Young

Chapter Eight Reincarnating Immigrant Biography: On Migration and Transmigration
Akhil Gupta

PART 3. TRANSLATING PLACES, TRANSLATING AMBIVALENCE

9. Warped Speech: The Politics of Global Translation
Emily Apter

10. National Identity and Immigration: American Polity, Nativism, and the "Alien"
Ali Behdad

11. Richard Wright As a Specular Border Intellectual: The Politics of Identification in Black Power
Abdul JanMohamed

12. Beyond Dichotomies: Translation/Transculturation and the Colonial Difference
Walter D. Mignolo and Freya Schiwy

Conclusion: The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World
Edouard Glissant (English translation by Haun Saussy)

About the Contributors

Index

Editorial Reviews

Originating from a 1998 Stanford University conference of the same name, this volume explores how local communities negotiate the cultural impact of globalization. Mudimbe-Boye (French and comparative literature, Stanford U.) presents 12 papers that discuss the persistence of dichotomies of colonizer/colonized, center/periphery, local/global, premodernity/modernity, and similar examples in the face of the supposed homogenizing force of globalization. Representing a range of approaches and viewpoints the papers reflect on power-based binaries, questions of places and the construction of new identities, and the possibilities of moving beyond dualist representations of social reality Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"While the book offers a critical retrospective appraisal, it is also a reminder of the valuable perspectives and analytical tools that postcolonial studies have offered." — H-Net Reviews (H-Gender-MidEast)

"Culture is taken here in a very inclusive sense to denote not only ways of living, doing, and forms of expression, but also to designate the responses associated with the sociological determinations of race, gender, and class. The book examines how these and other points of reference affect the relations between peoples and individuals across cultures and geographical boundaries." — F. Abiola Irele, Ohio State University

From the Publisher