Global mobilities, local predicaments: globalization and the critical imagination
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70 global mobilities, local
predicaments: globalization and the critical imagination Avtar Brah
abstract Analysing some of the key discourses of ‘globalization’ and their relationship to global/local processes of gender, the article makes a distinction between the ‘global’ and ‘globalization’, such that the latter is seen as only one dimension of the ‘global’. Globalization is understood as comprising complex and contradictory phenomena with diverse and differential impact across distinct categories of people, localities, regions and hemispheres. Hence, the notion of being straightforwardly ‘for’ or ‘against’ globalization is problematized. The essay explores media response to a major global event – the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September – in terms of the ‘agenda setting’ role of the US’s ‘mainstream’ national television news coverage in the aftermath of the first two weeks. A subsequent peace rally, the ‘International Day Against War and Racism’, held in Washington DC, is analysed as the site for the emergence of a new oppositional political subject in the current context. The article underscores the importance of addressing ‘intersectionality’ to a critical imagination.
keywords gender; women; feminist imagination; global; globalization; global economy; international economy; Islam; media representations; 11 September and the bombing of Afghanistan; Taliban
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feminist review 70 2002 c 2002 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/02 $15 www.feminist-review.com (30–45)
introduction The dawn of the 21st century is replete with discourses of globalization. Globalization is high on the agendas of such entities as the governments of nationstates as well as the transnational institutions like the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The question of globalization is frequently raised in the mass media, and it is the subject of analysis in evergrowing reams of academic literature produced from within different subject disciplines. It is also the target of political opposition by a wide variety of pressure groups and NGOs all over the world. However, the meanings attached to the word ‘globalization’ in these different sites may vary quite substantially. It is crucial therefore to make a distinction between ‘discourses of globalization’ with their multiple, even disparate connotations and the historical and contemporary ‘processes’ that assume distinctive patterns in different parts of the world under the weight of 21st-century formations of capitalism (Brah et al., 1999). I take this distinction as a point of departure in this article, as I address specific forms of ‘globalization-speak’ and their relationship to economic, cultural and political processes at this conjuncture. My aim is to raise some questions about the possible reconfigurations of ‘humanity’ as a collective political subject that is distinguishable from the universal subject of modernity.
global questions The question of the ‘global’ itself is not new. Human
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