DAVID LEIWEI LI

INTRODUCTION: GLOBALIZATION AND THE HUMANITIES

AS THIS EDITION is in the last stage of preparation, resistance to globalization has hit stateside in its most graphic and gruesome form. Al-Qaeda’s terror is in part an act of rage against an American-led expansion of the world market, whose financial and military might is symbolized by the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Like the advances of transnational capital to the farthest corner of our planet, this eruption of atrocious vengeance directed at the metropolitan center is a product of globalization. Al-Qaeda, after all, is an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) beyond state control, and its mode of operation takes full advantage of the sophisticated transportation and network technologies that have come to characterize our world. It is also not without irony that the Unites States—which has done so much to loosen the state’s rein over the march of capital, to deregulate economies and downsize welfare everywhere, to cultivate and compel the integration of peoples and cultures in the name of an emerging global society—should suddenly embrace both a resurgent defensive nationalism and an unapologetic revival of a militaristic big government in the wake of September 11. The protective walls and borders of the nation-state have once again to be erected and maintained, it seems, despite the instant transfer of finance capital and the free flow of electronic information and imagery.

The contemporary phenomenon of “globalization” is certainly marked with complexities and contradictions. In economic terms, it can be understood as the worldwide domination of free-market capitalism and its local accommodations and resistances. In political terms, it speaks to the changing nature of the nation-state and the emergence of non-governmental organizations, both of which negotiate with border-transcending capital for the governance of peoples and the sustenance of their interests. In cultural terms, it signals an individual’s inevitable mediation with the hegemonic regime of commodification and consumption that either universalizes desires or particularizes traditions. Overall, globalization seems to exemplify the proliferation of compressing and distancing mechanisms that transform our experience of time and space as well as of one another. Thus, David Harvey regards globalization as “time-space compression”—that is, an extraordinary speed-up of social life on a global scale together with the shrinkage of physical space through technology and the reduction of time to a perpetual and schizophrenic present (240). Accordingly, globalization can also be viewed as an example of “time-space distanciation,” in which local and distant social institutions and incidents have become mutually dependent and formative. In Anthony Giddens’s words it is “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring miles away and vice versa.”  Nowhere could one find a more telling example of such intensified processes of planetary interaction, of “the stretching of social, political and economic activities across frontiers . . . on a continuum with the local, national and regional” than the recent carnage in New York.

Manhattan is not an island, and the Manichaean claims of good and evil, of freedom versus fundamentalism, be they from the center or the periphery of world power, seem misleading representations of our global condition. Here, I find Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s comments in Empire especially relevant:

It is more accurate and more useful to understand the various fundamentalism[s] not as the re-creation of a premodern world, but rather as a powerful refusal of the contemporary historical passage in course . . . one could argue that postmodern discourses appeal primarily to the winners of globalization and fundamentalist discourses to the losers. In other words, the current global tendencies toward increased mobility, indeterminacy, and hybridity are experienced by some as a kind of liberation but by others as an exacerbation of their suffering. Certainly, bands of popular support for fundamentalist projects—from the Front National in France and Christian fundamentalism in the United States to the Islamic Brothers—have spread most widely among those who have been further subordinated and excluded by the recent transformations of the global economy and who are most threatened by the increased mobility of capital.

Fundamentalisms are not geopolitically or culturally exclusive; they cannot be circumscribed within national boundaries or coded solely in civilizational terms. The medieval guises in which fundamentalisms appear are modern articulations of authoritarianism—whether of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian origin. Even in an Islamic world that now seems radically to encapsulate the problematic of globalization for humanity, we behold the coexistence of secular Muslims and sacrosanct Muslims, of people who can readily access the market, mass education, and mass media, and of people who cannot afford to eat at McDonald’s, whose only option of education is the madrasa and only dream of salvation, mecca. There is far too much history to be lived before global capitalism can hope to fulfill Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of “the end of history” wherein all prior forms of historical contradiction will purportedly be resolved. Indeed, there is so much of what Samuel Huntington calls “the clash of civilizations”—occurring both within and without civilizations—that our humanity seems under siege.