Articulating the Global and the Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies

This book explores how discourses of the local, the particular, the everyday, and the situated are being transformed by new discourses of globalization and transnationalism, as used both by government and business and in critical academic discourse. Unlike other studies that have focused on the politics and economics of globalization, Articulating the Global and the Local highlights the importance of culture and provides models for a cultural studies that addresses globalization and the dialectic of local and global forces. Arguing for the inseparability of global and local analysis, the book demonstrates how global forces enter into local situations and how in turn global relations are articulated through local events, identities, and cultures; it includes studies of a wide range of cultural forms including sports, poetry, pedagogy, ecology, dance, cities, and democracy. Articulating the Global and the Local makes the ambitious claim that the category of the local transforms the debate about globalization by redefining what counts as global culture. Central to the essays are the new global and translocal cultures and identities created by the diasporic processes of colonialism and decolonization. The essays explore a variety of local, national, and transnational contexts with particular attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as categories that force us to rethink globalization itself.