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Laboratories of Universality: A Genealogy of Solitary Latin American Inventors

Carlos Fonseca Suárez

in Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America

Carlos Fonseca Suárez read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Aleph” as a reflection upon the limits of technological universalism as well as a reconfiguration of modern cosmopolitanism. Carlos ... More

Carlos Fonseca Suárez read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Aleph” as a reflection upon the limits of technological universalism as well as a reconfiguration of modern cosmopolitanism. Carlos Fonseca Suárez then explores the figure of José Arcadio Buendía—founder of Macondo in Cien años de soledad (1967)—who in his obsession with scientific innovation takes Borges’s exploration of technological modernity and the impasses of modern progressivism even further, proposing instead a new dialectical model of universalism. Finally, Carlos Fonseca Suárez concludes by adding a final star to this constellation by exploring how the character of Luca Belladona in Ricardo Piglia’s 2010 novel Blanco nocturno allows for a rereading of this Humboldt’s plainsman scene in the contemporary socioeconomic context, where the relation between the global and the local, center and periphery, becomes intertwined in the elusive informational networks of global capital.Less

Terrible Convergence

Zach Sell

in Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital

This book returns to the explosive era of capitalist crisis, upheaval, and warfare between emancipation in the British Empire and Black emancipation in the United States (1833-65) to address a ... More

This book returns to the explosive era of capitalist crisis, upheaval, and warfare between emancipation in the British Empire and Black emancipation in the United States (1833-65) to address a longstanding trouble in the field of empire studies—the relationship between slavery and empire within capitalism. During this age of global capital, U.S. slavery exploded to a vastness hitherto unseen, propelled forward by the outrush of slavery-produced commodities to Britain, to continental Europe, and beyond. Britain waxed fat from this outflow and helped finance U.S. slavery while looking toward its empire to meet the bar U.S. slavery set. As slavery-produced commodities poured out of the United States, U.S. slaveholders transformed their profits into slavery expansion. U.S. slavery provided the raw material for metropolitan Britain’s explosive manufacturing growth and inspired new hallucinatory imperial visions of colonial domination that took root from the Atlantic world to Asia and the Pacific.Less

Cultural Policy as Negotiation of Power: The Chinese State’s Role and Strategies in Its Tug-of-War with Global Hollywood

Wendy Su

in China's Encounter with Global Hollywood: "Cultural Policy and the Film Industry, 1994-2013"

This chapter details China’s evolving cultural policy toward Hollywood-represented transnational capital within the larger context of the state’s pursuit of a “socialist market economy,” its bid to ... More

This chapter details China’s evolving cultural policy toward Hollywood-represented transnational capital within the larger context of the state’s pursuit of a “socialist market economy,” its bid to join the World Trade Organization, and its film sector’s marketization and industrialization process. The author argues that China’s Hollywood policy has changed from containment to “competitive cooperation.” Hollywood is used as a convenient tool to achieve the state’s goal of transforming its cultural industries, including the film industry, to advance China’s soft power. The state retains control of the film sector through policy protection, quotas, and shareholding control. Concerned about strengthening the national culture and national identity and maintaining its legitimacy, the Chinese state is a key player in global communications and reinforces its authoritarian power by incorporating both market forces and global capital into the state mechanism.Less

The New International Environment: Changing the Unchanged

A. Damodaran

in Encircling the Seamless: India, Climate Change, and the Global Commons

This chapter analyses the changing world environment due to globalization. It discusses the impact of globalization on the notion of the Westphalian state. It argues that both terrorism and global ... More

This chapter analyses the changing world environment due to globalization. It discusses the impact of globalization on the notion of the Westphalian state. It argues that both terrorism and global capital are inherently biased against the Westphalian order, although one is opposed to the other. It also assesses the role of epistemic communities in promoting local identities, as well as the emergence of global environmental problems of climate change, biodiversity, and desertification. While climate change has implications for a global public good that transcends nation-state boundaries, the Conventions of Biodiversity and Hazardous Wastes Movements deal with global public goods that are confined within the boundaries of the nation-state. This chapter argues that plurality and diversity are key to world order and that local communities have a role to play by generating local responses to globalization and highlighting their identities.Less

Consuming Damascus: Public Culture and the Construction of Social Identity

Walter Armbrust (ed.)

in Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond

This chapter studies a Middle Eastern state that tries to construct the “local” as a national community which is slightly outside the reach of global capital. It shows that Baathist Syria has had ... More

This chapter studies a Middle Eastern state that tries to construct the “local” as a national community which is slightly outside the reach of global capital. It shows that Baathist Syria has had mixed results in its efforts to preserve a distinctively Syrian identity, despite the fact that Syria has been more hesitant than Egypt to lead the entry of global capital. The chapter also discusses the concept of “mere consumption,” which takes the place of modernist engines for constructing national identity.Less

Sudden Stops and IMF-Supported Programs

Barry Eichengreen, Poonam Gupta, and Ashoka Mody

in Financial Markets Volatility and Performance in Emerging Markets

This chapter suggests that International Monetary Fund (IMF)-supported programs and IMF credits reduce the likelihood of sudden stops. There is some evidence that this stabilizing effect is stronger ... More

This chapter suggests that International Monetary Fund (IMF)-supported programs and IMF credits reduce the likelihood of sudden stops. There is some evidence that this stabilizing effect is stronger for countries with strong fundamentals. This can be interpreted in terms of the literature on global capital account shocks and the stabilizing effect of liquidity insurance. Emergency financial assistance can then reassure individual investors of the country's continued ability to finance its international transactions and reduce their incentive to liquidate their positions. Emergency lending by the IMF can ensure the continued provision of private finance in much the way that lender-of-last-resort intervention by a central bank can limit the scope for bank runs. However, if country fundamentals are weak, IMF financial assistance may only come in the front door and go out the back door, with no impact on the incidence of the sudden stop.Less

World in One City: Travel, Globalization and Placeless Space

in Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool

This chapter explores the contradictions raised by the notion of Liverpool as a ‘world in one city’. It provides a comparative analysis of Alex Cox's films Three Businessmen and Liverpool: The World ... More

This chapter explores the contradictions raised by the notion of Liverpool as a ‘world in one city’. It provides a comparative analysis of Alex Cox's films Three Businessmen and Liverpool: The World in One City, suggesting that these films highlight the heterotopic nature of the city as a space of deterritorialization, consumption and global capital. The chapter also considers the ways in which cinematic geographies can both reinforce and expose the city as a placeless space of global mobility.Less

The Broken Windows of Rosa Ramos: Neoliberal Policing Regimes of Imminent Violability

Christina Heatherton

in Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion, and Change

This chapter considers how “broken windows” policing as both philosophy and practice emerged alongside and also facilitated major transformations of the neoliberal political economy. It further ... More

This chapter considers how “broken windows” policing as both philosophy and practice emerged alongside and also facilitated major transformations of the neoliberal political economy. It further proposes the concept of imminent violability as an analytic through which this vulnerability might be comprehended within the racial, spatial, and ultimately gendered dimensions of neoliberal securitization. By thinking within and across scales, from the regulation of bodies and behavior to the refashioning of spaces for global capital, it argues that imminent violability can serve as a radical feminist critique linking racism, capital accumulation, and the increasingly commonplace vulnerability to state violence most keenly experienced by poor and working-class communities of color across the United States.Less

Material Callings in an Outsourced Outpost: Accounts of an Aspiring Consumer

Sreedeep Bhattacharya

in Consumerist Encounters: Flirting with Things and Images

The author addresses how business process outsourcing (BPO) enabled a generation of urban educated youth to participate in consumption by offering new income opportunities, and instigating new ... More

The author addresses how business process outsourcing (BPO) enabled a generation of urban educated youth to participate in consumption by offering new income opportunities, and instigating new consumerist aspirations. Along with observing operational procedures, appointment processes, spatial dimensions, nature of work, and relations at work in BPOs, this chapter also observes its social impacts. A generation of college-goers flirted with this newfound earning opportunity since the late 1990s to have fun, make friends, or earn quickly. It explores how the consumerist desire gripped a generation that was earlier ineligible to participate in consumption. Narrating his cultural experiences of working in a BPO, the author documents a transition from abstinence to indulgence—a transition that offered freedom to eventuate material aspirations.Less

Femmes Fortes

Jeremy F. Lane

in Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: Representations of Work in Post-Fordist France

Today French women are more likely to be in salaried employment than their male counterparts, albeit being overrepresented in low-paid, part-time jobs. This chapter argues that one of the most ... More

Today French women are more likely to be in salaried employment than their male counterparts, albeit being overrepresented in low-paid, part-time jobs. This chapter argues that one of the most striking cultural manifestations of these shifts in the relationship between sex and employment has been the emergence of the highly ambiguous figure of the femme forte, the strong working woman. Recent novels and films by Éric Reinhardt, Laurent Quintreau, Philippe Vasset, Alain Corneau, Natalie Kuperman, and Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar offer examples of one iteration of the femme forte – the calculating, manipulative, ruthless senior female executive whose pursuit of her career goals requires she abjure all her maternal instincts to become a particular kind of femme fatale, an updated version of Lady Macbeth or the Marquise de Meurteuil. The films, novels, and reportage of Medhi Charef, Florence Aubenas, François Bon, and Robert Guédiguian, meanwhile, offer a different, apparently more flattering iteration of the femme forte – the middle-aged working class woman who, in the face of the loss of stable male industrial employment, bravely struggles to keep family and community together, personifying an embattled tradition of working class struggle. The chapter analyses the ideological implications of these contrasting representations of the femme forte.Less

Learning to Add Value at the Studio

Lilly Irani

in Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India

This chapter details how designers at the studio organized their lives, their relationships, and their self-understandings as they continually relearned how to “add value” in the context of shifting ... More

This chapter details how designers at the studio organized their lives, their relationships, and their self-understandings as they continually relearned how to “add value” in the context of shifting global divisions of labor and speculative hype. Good entrepreneurial citizens did not only find value for themselves and for their clients; they added value to the nation. They channeled their developmental desires and hopes into forms—programming, design, intellectual property, new business creation—that ascended to the highest rungs of a global capital's hierarchies of value. Those who added value to the nation, to the design studio, and to client projects were those to cultivate and include. Those who failed to add value were understood instead as jobless masses and as failed potential. These middle-class ideologies suffused news, policy, client expectations, and everyday talk. As ideologies and as everyday pressures, they shaped the everyday practices of organizing and valuing work and workers in the studio.Less

The Golden Era of Instructed Minorities

Roderick A. Ferguson

in The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference

This chapter analyzes how the emergence of cultural studies in the academe was regulated as power responded to the interventions of anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist movements. It looks at how ... More

This chapter analyzes how the emergence of cultural studies in the academe was regulated as power responded to the interventions of anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist movements. It looks at how the American academy and global capital adopted and renovated the regulations of representative democracy, how those institutions disciplined the critical formations and subjects that the race and gender movements inspired, and how capital and academy attempted to close the social universes that those movements worked to open up. The transformed global capital and the post-civil rights academy would, like their predecessors, selectively incorporate minoritized subjects in a neocolonialist narrative that would subjugate possible chances of reconfiguring the social landscape into a more inclusive, more broadly defined ideal. The social transformations sought by the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s may have convinced established institutions to accept change, but the latter have yet to accept difference.Less

Audiences without Cinemas

Thomas Barker

in Indonesian Cinema after the New Order: Going Mainstream

Indonesia remains underserviced by cinemas with a comparatively low cinema to population ratio. For much of the late New Order and after reformasi, exhibition remained dominated by the 21 Group, a ... More

Indonesia remains underserviced by cinemas with a comparatively low cinema to population ratio. For much of the late New Order and after reformasi, exhibition remained dominated by the 21 Group, a crony company with film import monopoly rights. Recently, new investment has flowed into exhibition from the Blitzmegaplex company which is revealed to be well connected to New Order military figures. More recently new players have entered the industry including South Korea’s CGV who bought Blitz, the domestic conglomerate Lippo, and Raam Punjabi’s Platinum Cineplex chain, introducing both competition and global capital into the sector.Less

From Colony to Empire: Postmodern Faulkner

Leigh Anne Duck

in Global Faulkner

This chapter presents a reading of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) through the Cold War novel Requiem for a Nun (1951) in order to suggest that Faulkner’s concerns about global capital—so fully bodied forth ... More

This chapter presents a reading of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) through the Cold War novel Requiem for a Nun (1951) in order to suggest that Faulkner’s concerns about global capital—so fully bodied forth in the later work—may have shaped his understanding in ways he was not previously ready to name. It suggests that these novels urge us to think differently about history, which becomes in Faulkner’s work not a linear progression so much as a shifting set of vortices, forces, and incidents that reach across periods to transform consciousness and society. Unseating his work from linear time enables us to recognize Faulkner not only as a regional writer describing lost locales, but also as a regional writer describing incipient global transformations.Less

Conclusion

Prathama Benerjee

in Politics of Time: 'Primitives' and History-writing in a Colonial Society

This chapter tries to clarify the unfinished nature of both the work of colonial modernity and its critique. As the nation seeks to ‘liberalize’ its economy and mirror the trajectory of global ... More

This chapter tries to clarify the unfinished nature of both the work of colonial modernity and its critique. As the nation seeks to ‘liberalize’ its economy and mirror the trajectory of global capital, it claims the purity and righteousness of cultural conservatism. It is noted that by the 1930s, the colonized, by way of reclaiming ‘modern’ knowledge-disciplines from the colonizer, hinted at his/her own marginality and lateness in the present. The temporality of re-presentation neutralizes the temporality of encounter, and therefore the temporality of collective practice. Peoples like the Santals became ‘primitive’ in colonial modernity not only because of colonial strategies of other-ing but also because the colonized themselves tried to assume the representational location necessary for modern monetary and epistemological rationalities. Social practices need not necessarily generate others in any epistemological sense.Less

China

David Collins

in The BRIC States and Outward Foreign Direct Investment

This chapter explores the process of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) from China. In the late 1970s, China started to integrate into the world economy. It evolved from a state that merely ... More

This chapter explores the process of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) from China. In the late 1970s, China started to integrate into the world economy. It evolved from a state that merely attracted a high level of investment from abroad to one that has become a leading source of global investment capital. Chinese outward FDI to all regions of the world has since been developing. Among the leading sources of outward FDI from China are the financial services. China still promotes outward FDI, especially in research and development, production and marketing, and energy. Its comprehensive bilateral investment treaty (BIT) regime has drastically enhanced, with most recent BITs containing robust investor protection as well as investor-state arbitration provisions for a wide range of issues.Less

Like Oil and Water, with a Match: Militarized Commerce, Armed Conflict, and Human Security in Sudan

Audrey Macklin

in Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones

This chapter uses the case of the Canadian company, Talisman Energy Inc., which operated until recently in South Sudan, to examine the impact of global capital investment on human displacement. It ... More

This chapter uses the case of the Canadian company, Talisman Energy Inc., which operated until recently in South Sudan, to examine the impact of global capital investment on human displacement. It describes how security has been redefined as the protection of oil company stock prices. The ways in which women have been influenced by the precipitous decline in human security are also explained. It then raises serious questions about the complicity of the Canadian state in the war in Sudan. The health care situation in Southern Sudan is dismal. The report found that oil extraction was exacerbating the armed conflict in Sudan. The actions of individuals, coalitions, and organizations are vital in exposing and destabilizing the warped triangulation of corporate security, military security, and human security.Less