Contesting Globalisms: The Transnationalization of U.S. Cultural Studies

Claudia Sadowski-Smith

Department of American Thought and Language
Michigan State University
cssmith@msu.edu

 

Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998.

 

Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital.Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.

 

Duke University Press’s recent publication of two cultural studies volumes on globalization plays out an interesting paradox. While both collections signal the need to study the role of culture in a world characterized by geopolitical re-alignments, they approach these changes by expanding available postcolonial, ethnic studies, and Neo-Marxist perspectives into transnational space. This review puts the two volumes into conversation to argue that a globalism which increasingly refuses to be simply colonialism/imperialism in a new guise calls for a rethinking of binaries and underlying assumptions that have routinely shaped this scholarship.

 

Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi’s collection, The Cultures of Globalization (henceforth Cultures), and Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd’s volume, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (henceforth Politics), contribute to the burgeoning field of U.S. cultural work on globalization, which has lagged somewhat behind comparable discourses in economics, political science, and sociology. The two volumes set out to explore cultural dimensions of what they variously term “globalization” or “transnationalism.” To name a few of its most salient developments, globalization is characterized by flexible accumulation and mixed production, the worldwide expansion of free market politics, the spread of U.S. mass culture, and the denationalization of corporations and nation-states in the context of intensified border crossings by culture, capital, and people. In this understanding of globalization, the two volumes follow Immanuel Wallerstein’s thesis of the world-system as a global capitalist economy and/or restrict their inquiries to the last decade of this century. Both collections also acknowledge the weakening ability of nation-states to perpetually reinforce nationalist discourses intended to forge what Benedict Anderson has termed “imagined communities,” even as their state apparatuses continue to facilitate the ongoing transnationalization of capital. Building upon this important distinction between state nationalism and statehood, Cultures and Politics set out to theorize “transnational imagined communities.” These are not so much anti-nationalist in direction but rather pose alternatives to globalizing developments which have been characterized by unevenness and inequality since the beginning of modernity.

 

Grounded predominantly in U.S. literature departments, the editors of the two volumes recognize that cultural work on globalization ought to question the modernist division of knowledge production rather than constitute a new field of academic specialization. Perhaps as a result of the injunction to be more inclusive, the collections stand out from other works for their sheer length (393 and 593 pages respectively). Many of the contributors to Lowe’s anthology work in ethnic, area, and women’s studies as well as in interdisciplinary humanities programs, while Jameson’s book additionally includes essays from sociology, philosophy, geography, and anthropology as well as articles from culture workers not located within the academy.

 

Cultures assembles original papers that were first presented at Duke’s 1994 Globalization and Culture conference and subsequently revised to facilitate an internal conversation among the contributors. This process as well as the inclusion of revised critical comments from the audience at the end of the collection are among the volume’s principal strengths and may also explain the time lag between the original date of the conference and the collection’s eventual appearance in 1998. In contrast, several of the articles in Lowe’s volume, which appeared a year earlier, are reprints from other publications. Judging by the endnotes of several essays, the remaining original contributions were first presented at the 1994 Other Circuits colloquium, which was sponsored by the University of California at Irvine.

 

Apart from two exceptions about which I will say more shortly, both Cultures and Politics are similarly organized: they articulate a “Critique of Modernity” and explore “Alternatives” to the current conditions of globalization by focusing on Third-World localities. Regarding globalization as a form of U.S.-dominated neo-colonialism, specifically as an outgrowth and continuation of European colonialism, several essays articulate alternative conceptions of modernity. Others complicate the academy’s generally critical attitude toward nationalist projects. Fredric Jameson and Greeta Kapur in Cultures characterize the nation-state as a useful political structure for protecting its citizens from some of the consequences of globalization, and David Lloyd in Politics emphasizes the radical potential of insurgent nationalisms which lies in their general closeness to other, often more radical social movements.

 

Following a general trend in cultural studies, both volumes do less to explore cultural productions than to theorize modes of resistance, in this case, resistance to hegemonic forms of capitalist globalization. Focusing on local adjustments to globalization that have the potential to become transnational, contributors to Cultures and Politics significantly overlap in the kinds of localities they explore. They converge specifically in their focus on the by now relatively familiar territories of Latin America and India, and, perhaps more surprisingly, on South Korea and China. But even though the two collections initiate their projects of transnational “imagined-community-building” from the same Third-World locations, they do so from different theoretical entry points.

 

Jameson’s collection attempts, in the words of two conference co-organizers, to “develop a theory from/of the third world” (Mignolo 51, original italics) as “a counterhegemonic response to globalization” (Moreiras 90). To this end, Cultures sets itself explicitly within Wallerstein’s model of economic history. This model views globalization as the latest phase in the development of a capitalist world-system which originated in Europe and spread across the globe by the late 19th-century as a result of European colonialism. During its expansion, this system created centers and peripheral areas, which are generally identified with First and Third Worlds. In its emphasis on colonialism and in its investigation of peripheralized areas, Wallerstein’s model intersects with postcolonial theory so that contributors to Cultures also engage the work of well-known postcolonial thinkers such as Bhabha, Said, Hall, and Spivak. Chungmoo Choi’s and Paik Nak-chung’s contributions on South Korea are, however, instructive of the different emphases on postcolonial theory within the two volumes: While Choi in Politics relies heavily on such work to define South Korea’s “deferred postcoloniality” (471) as a consequence of its colonization by Japan and more recently the U.S. (which created conditions of internal displacement and external dependence), Nak-chung takes South Korea’s peripheral status for granted. He instead stresses that Korea’s projected reunification and its ongoing national literature debate might forge models for more innovative state structures and for a new understanding of world literature.

 

Cultures‘ last subheading, “Consumerism and Ideology,” makes explicit the volume’s emphasis on ideologies of consumption as the most likely sites from which alternative, often transnationally structured, anti-globalization projects could arise. Leslie Sklair’s essay posits that “anticapitalist global system movements” could “challenge the TNCs [transnational corporations] in the economic sphere, oppose the transnational capitalist class and its local affiliates in the political sphere, and promote cultures and ideologies antagonistic to capitalist consumerism” (296). Alberto Moreiras’s and Manthia Diawara’s contributions specify examples of such an “exteriority to the global” (Moreiras 95). Moreiras identifies a new type of Latin-Americanist thinking which can preserve as well as constitute a regionalized Latin American identity, and Diawara emphasizes a West African identity whose political and cultural similarities are grounded in comparable histories and patterns of consumption, such as African markets.

 

Rather than consumerism, Lowe’s collection highlights cultural struggles as sites from which the reproduction of global capitalism can be contested. Contributors to Politics specifically challenge what they identify as the neo-Marxist notion of an “outside” to global capitalism; Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay, for example, sets out to transform this concept into a more heterogeneous site of intervention, into “something that straddles a border zone of temporality… something that also always reminds us that other temporalities, other forms of worlding, coexist and are possible” (57). In her introduction, Lowe similarly replaces the search for an “outside,” which, she argues, tends to subsume the cultural under the economic, with a recognition of cultural sites that arise “historically, in contestation, and ‘in difference’ to it” (Lowe 2).

 

Somewhat crudely put, then, if Jameson’s collection represents the transnationalization of theories foregrounding “class” as a fundamental dynamic of social change, Lowe’s volume illustrates the transnationalization of “race.” In his contribution, her co-editor David Lloyd argues that Wallerstein’s approach to globalization needs to be complicated by theories of “vertical” integration “revolving around the term racism” (176). In general, contributors to Lowe’s collection provide the kind of focus on gender and race that is somewhat missing from Jameson’s anthology. Perhaps also in reaction to similar critiques by conference participants articulated at the end of the volume, Jameson concedes in the introduction that his collection does not include essays on “the conflicted strategies of feminism in the new world-system…; or the politics of AIDS on a worldwide scale; the relationship between globalization and identity politics, or ethnicity, or religious fundamentalism” (xvi). If they make reference to “race”-based analyses at all, contributors tend to characterize ideas of cultural difference as “more traditional” and in need of materialist analysis (Jameson 70-71). Readers are left to conclude the need for work such as Lowe’s collection, which she characterizes as a feminist, antiracist revision of both Marxist and neo-Marxist work.

 

Their different approaches to globalization also affect the types of alternatives the two volumes eventually develop. Whereas Jameson’s volume emphasizes transnational theories “beyond the level of the nation-state” (Sklair 296) that stress consumerism as the main site of intervention, Politics focuses on cultural “linkings of localities that take place across and below the level of the nation-state” (Lowe 25, my emphases). “Class”- and “race”-based approaches to transnational community-building, then, articulate differently the ongoing breakdown of distinctions between the “global” and the “local” by identifying either entire regions or more local geographies as transnational sites of contestation. Noam Chomsky’s contribution to Jameson’s volume illustrates the neo-Marxist emphasis on regionalization (the formation of various supra-national regions that are marked by unequal relationships with each other) within the global world-system. He argues that the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan have been able to maintain their hegemonic positions, largely gained as a result of colonialist undertakings, by instituting various forms of market protectionism for their own economies. At the same time that they thus undermine official ideologies of capitalist modernization, these countries, however, relentlessly subject other nations in the periphery to the doctrines of free trade, thereby weakening their state apparatuses and ensuring their continuing subalternization. Alternative globalisms, in this model, may take the form of transnational struggles within or across various subalternized regions, and linkages between regions would emerge from the similarities of their peripheral positions.

 

Focusing on the feminization and third-worldization of labor by transnational corporations, Aihwa Ong’s contribution to Politics, in contrast, privileges transnationally-connected, but more localized forms of intervention. She understands the local-global re-configuration of capital to require an exploration of how globalization effects the constitution of localized subaltern identities. Critiquing Wallerstein’s model for its notion of a homogeneous periphery, Ong emphasizes that the TNC workforce in the Third-World countries of Mexico and Asia is engaged in heterogeneous work situations. Rather than desiring to challenge the industrial system in terms of a common class consciousness, Ong argues that TNC workers envision change in the form of improved selfhood. She therefore suggests re-conceiving TNC “workers’ experiences as cultural struggles” (86).

 

In addition to Ong’s emphasis on connections between subaltern struggles in various re-colonized locations, in Politics‘s sub-section “Unlikely Coalitions” Lowe identifies cross-nation, cross-race cultural practices of Third-World communities in the U.S. and Britain as further sites of contestation. In my opinion, this section constitutes one of the most valuable contributions to transnational cultural studies because it keeps transnational work “at home” and anchored in the problems of racialized groups in the First World (i.e., those below the level of the nation-state). Intended as a rethinking of relationships between African Americans and Japanese (Americans), George Lipsitz’s article on African American soldiers joining the Japanese army during the Asia Pacific War actually ends up illustrating that racialization by a common enemy alone cannot constitute a productive basis for transnational affiliation. Intending to show similarities in the position of African Americans and Japanese vis-a-vis imperialistic undertakings by the U.S., Lipsitz indirectly lists as many reasons why Black Americans should not have supported the Japanese struggle against the U.S. Other contributors to Lowe’s volume, however, point out that meaningful forms of solidarity need to combine struggles against racialization with materialist struggles against the ongoing restructuring of global capitalism.

 

As both Lowe and Ong argue, this restructuring similarly effects the proletarianization of women of color and the exploitation of women in the Third World. In her interview with Lowe, Angela Y. Davis thus envisions a Third-World feminism that bases its cross-ethnic community-making on politics, rather than on the specific identities of racialized communities and their members. Clara Connolly and Pragna Patel’s essay on the British organization “Women Against Fundamentalism” (WAF) puts Davis’s admonition into practice. This organization’s conception of political activism moves beyond U.S. notions of cross-racial solidarity, which have predominantly been based on the similarities of cultural nationalist struggles and the “internal colony” model. WAF unites Black and South Asian Britons in their feminist struggles against both the racism of the British state and the patriarchal control of women’s minds and bodies that is central to religious fundamentalism in their home communities. These struggles also call for the recognition of shifting subjectivities–for example, the acknowledgement that members of an ethnic/national minority can simultaneously be oppressed in Britain and be oppressors in their home countries.

 

Even though neo-Marxist and “race”-based cultural studies approaches thus differ with respect to their theoretical entry points into alternatives to globalization, Jameson’s and Lowe’s collections end up providing many of the same insights into the workings of global capitalism. The charges against Neo-Marxism–that its expectations of a Third-World supra-regional community-building based on class consciousness have not come true–can be similarly levelled at “race”-based models. Solidarities among interconnected re-colonized localities or cross-race, cross-nation “unlikely coalitions” have hitherto also not been able to seriously challenge the modes of global expansion. Most importantly, in their insistence on seeing U.S.-dominated globalization exclusively as an outgrowth of European colonization, the two volumes’ approaches to transnationalism reify well-entrenched First World-Third World, colonizer-colonized binaries. The increasingly more permeable global-local nexus is recast in other dichotomous terms, where the First World becomes identified with the global and the Third World (or Third-World communities in the First World) with the regional or local. While Manthia Diawara in Jameson’s volume, for example, theorizes a supra-regional West African identity that can resist the global homogenization of cultures by emphasizing regionally-specific, pre-capitalist forms of consumption, contributors to Lowe’s collection similarly emphasize the transformative potential of “pre-modern” ethnic groups, peasants, and indigenous farmers in Latin America and the Phillipines.

 

The fact that cultural studies scholarship has already problematized First World-Third World dichotomies by recognizing the heterogeneity of peripheries is manifest in the inclusion of countries colonized by other than European powers, such as South Korea, into both Jameson’s and Lowe’s anthologies. But at the same time that the “postcolonial” has thus become more diverse, the First World continues to be portrayed as a rather homogeneous entity, except for the recognition of Third-World (immigrant) communities within it. This view does not, for example, acknowledge various forms of European colonialization, such as the subjugation of socialist countries by the USSR after 1945 or the ongoing colonization of Eastern by Western Europe since the late 1980s. The revolutions in Eastern Europe have opened to global capitalism previously unavailable areas toward which paradigms of “democratization” and “modernization,” hitherto predominantly pushed onto Third-World countries, continue to be directed. As a result, the territory of Eastern Europe is currently being subalternized by the politics of the IMF and partial promises of inclusion into First-World organizations like NATO and the European Union.

 

The mere expansion of cultural studies’ dualistic frameworks, however, has created the perception that the former Eastern Bloc has disappeared into either the Third or First World (see, for example, Chomsky and Hetata in Cultures). This reification of old binaries that define Second and Third Worlds only in relation to First World centers rather than to each other misses an opportunity to deconstruct both East-West and North-South dichotomies. Their interrelationship originated in decolonization and post-Second World War contexts and is currently taking on new forms. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which prefigured dramatic geopolitical changes in the countries of the former “Evil Empire,” a U.S.-dominated NATO bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosova at the same time that it continued its airstrikes against Iraq. Viewed from this perspective, Operation “Allied Force” against Yugoslavia indicated the further multiplication of “security threats” to a U.S. national interest that has been continuously redefined since the end of the Cold War. The Balkans have joined the Middle East as another key region of U.S. interest (and have thus become, as some have called it, a “New Berlin”). At the same time, so-called former communists-turned-fascists have joined “Middle Eastern terrorists” on the list of major enemies of the U.S.

 

After the simultaneous April 1999 bombings, even mainstream news media such as CNN have begun to link the two sites with each other. Serbians have reportedly visited Iraq to learn how to defend themselves more effectively against U.S.-led NATO airstrikes, and Iraq has declared its support for Yugoslavia. This more than “unlikely coalition” is not grounded in similarities of culture or religion, and seems especially surprising since it involves an Arab country supporting the Serb suppression of predominantly Muslim Kosovars. The strongest link between the two nation-states seems to be the “punishment” they have received from a U.S.-dominated NATO for undertaking (in many other countries and contexts perfectly “acceptable”) nationalist empire-building and state-maintaining projects.

 

The emergence of an admittedly very tenuous “cross-nation” coalition between Iraq and Yugoslavia manifests attempts to counterbalance the disproportionate influence of the U.S. on world politics, culture, and economics, but obviously does not constitute a positive course of action. Nevertheless, much remains to be said in cultural studies about the ways in which both nations have been economically, politically, and culturally peripheralized. It is precisely the regions of Eastern Europe and the Middle East that have gotten little or no attention in Jameson’s and Lowe’s volumes, other than in Homo Hoodfar’s article about Iranian practices of veiling in Politics, and in Sherif Hetata’s re-definition of the Middle East as part of the exploited “south” within a new north/south global division. Since the subalternization of the Middle East and the Balkans has been part and parcel of intensified globalization in the 1990s, the neglect of these two areas in cultural studies cannot be explained as a case of theory lagging behind the speed and subtlety with which geopolitical changes in these two regions have taken place.

 

Often cast in terms of clashes over religious or ethnic differences, conflicts there have, however, been integrated into public debates about the future of U.S. “multiculturalism.” Generally, events in the Middle East and the Balkans are increasingly invoked (but not sufficiently theorized) to illustrate the evils of what Benjamin Barber has called “Jihad” or what has, more recently, been termed “Balkanization” if the U.S. continues on its path of “diversity.” As Sherif Hetata writes in Cultures with respect to religious fundamentalism in the Middle East and what he calls “ethnic and racial revivals” in Eastern Europe, these “have not seemed to have excited the interest of scholars in the arts and literature, in the humanities, or in gender studies” (182). What I am arguing, along slightly different lines, is that cultural studies models of globalization need to explore new forms and instances of “nonglobalism” that have emerged in these regions. These respond to a very complex web of U.S.-dominated forms of globalization of which the perpetuation of (European) colonialism is only one trajectory.