Narratives of Globalization: Reflections on the Global Condition
202
Narratives of Globalization: Reflections on the Global Condition
202eBook
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Overview
Narratives of Globalization explores how a range of key ideas in the study of globalization are made manifest in the lives of people all over the world. Each chapter explores a key theme in globalization studies that is explored through a narrative that draws on the contributors own personal experience. It draws together a collection of experiences from across the globe including Chinese migration to Australia, the influence of the internet on education and the popularity of K-pop. These personal perspectives on culture, identity, development and politics attempt to better understand contemporary issues within the global frame and illustrate how ordinary people can engage with and influence processes of globalization.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783484447 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 202 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Narratives of Globalization
Reflections on the Global Condition
By Julian C. H. Lee
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Julian C. H. LeeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-444-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Reflections on the Global Condition
Julian C. H. Lee
This book has its beginnings in the office of Professor Joseph Siracusa. 'Philosophers used to be concerned about what it meant to be human', he said during one of our conversations there. 'But now', he continued, 'the question is, what does it mean to be human in the age of globalization?'
His question points to the way that our lives are fundamentally intertwined with people, entities and processes of which we often have little understanding, about which we frequently have little awareness, and over which we often feel that we have little influence. In our attempts to know ourselves, his question leads us towards the fact that now, more than ever, this cannot be done without understanding ourselves as part of a globalized world.
But the word 'globalization' is now commonplace. What globalization means has been and remains indistinct and dependent on context. Siracusa notes that globalization 'is a hotly contested term. There are all kinds of encyclopedias and handbooks on what globalization is' (RMIT 2014). The historian Paul Battersby adds that it is a broad concept that 'means many different things to many different people' (ibid.). With such diversity being the case, the reader will forgive us for not confining its meaning by providing a definition, instead allowing the meanings of the term to come through in the course of this book's chapters. As the anthropologist Eve Darian-Smith writes, there is value 'in the process of arguing about what the field of global studies is and could be, rather than coming up with any definitive answer' (2015: 165).
That the world is 'global' or 'globalized' is also now taken for granted. In the same way as we are unable to perceive an aroma when we spend too long in its midst, a problem in thinking about ourselves in a global context is that 'globalization' is now so omnipresent that we can sometimes fail to detect its influence, even though its effects are all around us, its products in our hands, its ideas in our minds, and its impacts in our futures. As Jonathan Green has noted about globalization, 'You can't escape it, but you may fail to recognize it' (Green 2014).
What is certain is that globalization is a term and field of study whose time has come. But a more important question is whether it is a term and field of study whose time has come and gone. Emeritus Professor Tony A. G. Hopkins has posed the question 'Is globalisation yesterday's news?' He notes in the context of speaking about the study of globalization by historians such as himself that,
[a]s currently studied by historians, globalisation will not fall because it ceases to be part of the world around us, or because its multiple hypotheses have been refuted. Rather it will be brought down by the most fatal of scholarly ills that also felled previous historiographical phases: boredom induced by banality. (Hopkins 2014)
Hopkins asks, moments later, 'Is the game up?' Is it time to move from globalization to another way of viewing the world? Fortunately for this book, Hopkins's conclusion is that the study of globalization has important differences that mark it out as different from other scholarly fads. Among other things, he notes that 'no competing alternative has emerged', and 'there is no sign either of the subject imploding under the weight of any internal contradictions' (ibid.).
In this context, the approach of this book is to think about how we talk about globalization as much as what we have to say about it. Globalization is often spoken about in abstract ways which can sometimes seem divorced from our lived realities. This book addresses this with chapters that explore various aspects of globalization in ways that are grounded in the direct experiences of the authors themselves as launching points into their inquiries. From there, they lead us through various issues in globalization and tackle an array of key concepts in its study. It is not a textbook and so doesn't seek to be 'complete' in the sense that it seeks to cover all the ground that there is in the study of globalization. While each chapter seeks to explicitly address some key issues in the study of globalization, many other important issues, such as the impacts of migration and the evolving nature of nation-states, return in numerous chapters and are addressed with less explicitness but no less importance. Those interested in more expansive works might consider consulting Manfred Steger, Paul Battersby and Joseph Siracusa's two-volume SAGE Handbook on Globalization (2014), or Paul James's sixteen-volume Central Currents in Globalization Series (Globalization and Politics, James 2014; Globalization and Culture, James 2010; Globalization and Economy, James 2007; Globalization and Violence, James and Nairn 2006).
The personal and narrative approach of much of this book does not mean, however, that there is any less rigor in its thought or scholarliness in its content. During my work with activists, I came to the conviction that too much academic writing was unnecessarily forbidding and was written in a way such that there were large parts of the world to whom it couldn't speak. And if academic writing can cause the likes of the towering academic Noam Chomsky to say that it causes 'my eyes to glaze over' (Chomsky 1995; 2002: 227–33), then, I wondered, what hope is there for most of the rest of us?
Narratives are fundamental to the human condition (Lee 2005) and a key way in which we make sense of the world around us, our place in it, and how we can engage with it (Jackson 2002). The narratives in this book seek to link our thinking about the global condition to the authors' lives and experiences, and in so doing provide a model by which any of us can see our own world, interrogate issues around us, and examine our lives as humans in the age of globalization. The chapters here move in and out of discussions of the personal and the academic, the small and the great, as well as the dispiriting and affirming. At times they tackle high-profile issues head on, and at other times they find their ways towards them through everyday and overlooked occurrences which, when interrogated, reveal a lot about our lives in a global context.
The saturation of globalization into our worlds was evident to me as I sat in Siracusa's office. He shared with me his own stories of migration to Australia from the United States, and his family's migration in turn to the United States from Italy. I shared with him my own story of migration to Australia from Malaysia, and my family's on my father's side from China to Malaysia, while my mother's side migrated to Australia from Ireland. But stories about globalization were also inherent in so many other things in that office if one looked. These included the standard size A4 sheets of paper that occupied most of the horizontal surfaces of his office, the fact that the prescription for his spectacles could have been filled by any optometrist in the world, or that Siracusa's ever-present necktie is a product of global cultural diffusion emanating from seventeenth-century Croatian mercenaries (Williams 2012).
Whether couched in discussions of the everyday or not, the issues addressed in this book are real ones that impact on our lives. These include the impacts of the policies of the United States, the tensions between local cultures and universal human rights, and those whose lives are further harmed by globalizing practices of loan-making in a context of creeping neoliberalism. Among such discussions, my own examination of the YouTube hit 'Gangnam Style' might seem trivial if broader issues around the globalization of culture did not fuel the ferocity with which some people attack others for their participation in activities that are perceived as the result of undue foreign influence.
Sometimes explicitly and often implicitly, the discussions here seek to draw out the ways in which globalization is uneven. It is uneven in the sense that not everyone is able to partake of its benefits equally; not everyone has the same amount of choice and agency in deciding whether and how to participate in its processes and products. The divides are not just between countries but also within them. For example, in the realm of the digital, the 'digital divide' usually refers to the gulfs that exist between countries in terms of their digital infrastructures. However, other digital divides exist within countries; for instance, the elderly in even the wealthiest nations are often not as able to engage with digital technologies as younger citizens (e.g., Annear 2014). And less than 15 percent of those who contribute to Wikipedia are women (New York Times 2011). It is in view of the unevenness of globalization that Jomo K. S. and Jacques Baudot responded to the globalization commentator Thomas Friedman's hopefully titled book The World Is Flat (2006) with their own book titled Flat World, Big Gaps (2007; United Nations 2007).
To explore globalization, the authors of the chapters that follow have focused on issues that are close to their hearts and life stories. In the chapter that follows, I begin at my cousin's wedding, where I danced with everyone else to the South Korean YouTube sensation 'Gangnam Style'. Using this as my jumping off point, I reflect on the impacts of globalization on our cultures and identities, and examine core questions relating to whether globalization is resulting in cultural homogenization. In doing so, I explore the concept of hybridity, and I describe how governments are reacting to the perceived threat of foreign cultural influences and consider the extent to which I think we should be worried.
Our understanding of the relationship between culture and globalization is further developed in Elizabeth Kath's chapter. Here she reflects on her experiences of learning Latin American dance in Australia in order to explore the notion of transculturality. In a context where the authenticity of culture appears to be at stake, Kath's chapter resonates with themes explored in my chapter but draws out the ways in which hybrid cultural forms are a key feature of the era of globalization and that they have woven into them threads emanating from peoples and places faraway.
Such cross-cultural and cross-language encounters are especially evident in the kinds of places explored by Chris Hudson in her examination of so-called 'non-places'. Such places are regarded as symptoms of globalization and are characterized by an absence of people's sense of belonging and of place. The exemplar that she explores is Singapore's Changi Airport. But Changi Airport's Terminal 3, she notes, is an attempt by Singapore to localize the global. It does this by making Terminal 3 not only a global transit node, which is not a 'place' for belonging like many others like it, but also a village of sorts where identities can be formed and maintained.
Place, and our ability to conceive of the world as a place, is a central concern in Tommaso Durante's chapter. In it he presents us with a compelling picture — six pictures, in fact — of the ways in which the global is represented. Through an examination of a series of photographs that he took in cities around the world, he describes how the image is as important to our understanding and participation in globalization as the written word on which we so often focus. He introduces us to the concept of the 'condensation symbol' and describes 'the global imaginary', which help us to interpret the ways that the global and the local are bridged in many of the images we see around us.
Likewise bridging the local and global in an instant is the World Wide Web, the impacts of which Debra Bateman explores through an examination of the ways knowledge acquisition has been transformed, especially in the education sector. In this chapter Bateman describes her transformative experiences with digital technology and virtual worlds and explores the ways in which these are fundamentally changing our world, our relationships with other people, and, in particular, our relationship with knowledge. Digital technology has granted people in diverse parts of the world access to knowledge that was once the domain of those who were fortunate enough to be in proximity to respected places of learning.
Questions of access and equity are explored by Marcus Banks and Greg Marston. By exploring the phenomenon of 'payday loans', they draw out the way in which neoliberalism as an economic ideology has become globally dominant. While its effects have been portrayed as enabling 'a rising tide that lifts all boats', this chapter demonstrates that there are those for whom the impacts of globalization are not advantageous. Unlike microfinance schemes in countries such as India that aim to reduce poverty, Banks and Marston's research shows how these small-scale and short-term 'payday loans' may lead people to become participants in the 'globalization of poverty'.
Questions of privilege also come through in Chantal Crozet's chapter as she describes the way in which the French spoken by her parents was often regarded at her school as incorrect. Drawing on this experience and noting the role of education in fostering peace, Crozet draws on the concept of 'interculturality' and her more recent experiences as a language teacher and a proponent of the 'Intercultural Language Teaching' paradigm to describe how she has learned to cultivate intercultural competence by teaching people how to not only speak and understand another language but also understand the cultures of the people who speak it.
Such considerations about language are important to Lynne N. Li, who shares with us excerpts from her personal journals relating to different moments of her life in China. Her story visits key points in China's history, including its 'Open Door Policy', but she uses these excerpts to explore the attitudes towards language diversity in China and Australia in order to illuminate the ways in which we can constructively engage with the diverse others. And the ability to engage with and work to the benefit of distant others is the focus of Rebekah Farrell in her chapter which describes her experiences in founding a youth-based development organization in Thailand. She draws on Bryan S. Turner and Habibul Haque Khondker's notion of an 'incipient global moral system' to describe how young people can be enabled to work to the benefit of distant others whose lives are subjectively experienced as connected with their own.
A guiding light in our treatment of other people has for many decades been the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, this document, drawn up in the wake of the horrors of World War II, is a source of division over its interpretation and application. Drawing on decades of service with the United Nations, Ian Howie examines four case studies in the field of sexual and reproductive health rights that illustrate the way the 'universality' of this declaration has been put in question. But despite these contestations, the universality of human rights is also affirmed uncompromisingly by key figures in the UN such as its Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, whose assertion that 'it is not the "Partial" Declaration of Human Rights' was made in the hope of advancing the personal security of many marginalized groups of people around the world.
And it is on global security that this book dwells in its final chapter. Through an examination of the use-of-force policies of the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Aiden Warren describes how these administrations have exceeded the grounds laid out in the UN Charter for the use-of-force against international adversaries. In so doing, they place the United States in an 'exceptionalist position', in the sense that the United States regards itself as an exception to international rules for relating to conflict.
While these last two chapters might seem like unhopeful notes on which to end, my afterword seeks to affirm the benefits of our engagement with global processes that can seem abstract or forbidding. Through a reflection on a demonstration I attended in Malaysia in 2012, and some balloons that bobbed above the heads of those with whom I shared the streets of Kuala Lumpur that day, I hope to describe how we might orientate ourselves constructively towards what can sometimes seem like issues of overwhelming scale and impossible complexity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Narratives of Globalization by Julian C. H. Lee. Copyright © 2016 Julian C. H. Lee. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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