Synopses & Reviews
In his provocative new book Arif Dirlik argues that the present represents not the beginning but the end of globalization, which has produced a new era in the unfolding of capitalism-global modernity. The globalization of capitalism following the fall of socialist competitors in the 1980s generated culturally informed counter-claims to modernity. Modernity, globalized, has resulted in the fragmentation of the very idea of modern. Dirlik's global modernity is intended as a conceptual marker to distinguish the present from its Eurocentric past, while recognizing the crucial importance of that past in shaping the present.The study makes its case through (a)historicizing globalization as concept and phenomenon, (b)analyzing differences between globalization and earlier discourses of development-from modernization to various challenges to it in World-System Analysis, Dependency Theory, etc.-it seeks to demonstrate why globalization as discourse derives plausibility from a new situation in the unfolding of global capitalism. It also suggests a strong relationship between an emergent Global Modernity, and discourses of postmodernity and postcoloniality that acquired currency during the same years, and, (c)arguing that the new situation of Global Modernity does not break with its colonial past, but reconfigures it, as capital in its transnationalization creates new class formations that cut across divides of earlier Three Worlds ideas, or clear-cut distinctions between colonizers and colonized.
Synopsis
The essays in this collection address questions raised by a modernity that has become global with the victory of capitalism over its competitors in the late twentieth century. Rather than erase difference by converting all to European-American norms of modernity, capitalist modernity as it has gone global has empowered societies once condemned to imprisonment in premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity--on the basis of those very traditions. Their claims are shaped through the experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of today's globalization. Global modernity appears currently not as global homogeneity, but as a site of conflict between forces of homogenization and heterogenization within and between nations. Prominent in this context are conflicts over different ways of knowing and organizing the world. The essays here, dealing for the most part with education in the United States, engage in critiques of hegemonic ways of knowing and critically evaluate counterhegemonic voices for change that are heard from a broad spectrum of social, ethnic, and indigenous perspectives. Crucial to the essays' critique of hegemony in contemporary pedagogy is an effort shared by the contributors, distinguished scholars in their various fields, to overcome area and/or disciplinary boundaries and take the wholeness of everyday life as their point of departure.
Synopsis
"A compelling essay on the contemporary human condition." William D. Coleman, Director of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University "An unusually perceptive and balanced appraisal of the globalization hype and its relation to the reality of global capitalism." Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University In his provocative new book Arif Dirlik argues that the present represents not the beginning of globalization, but its end. We are instead in a new era in the unfolding of capitalism -- "global modernity". The fall of communism in the 1980s generated culturally informed counter-claims to modernity. Globalization has fragmented our understanding of what is "modern". Dirlik's "global modernity" is a concept that enables us to distinguish the present from its Eurocentric past, while recognizing the crucial importance of that past in shaping the present.