Culture and Globalization, or, The Humanities in Ruins

Bibliographic Data

ID5111992
AuthorsImre Szeman (0000-0002-2957-5049, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume3
Issue2
Pages91-115
Publication date2003-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCR The New Centennial Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1532-687X • E-ISSN: 1539-6630
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/ncr.2003.0031
OpenAlexW2012262899
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited16

AS THE RANGE AND NUMBER OF BOOKS AND ARTICLES EXPLORING CULTURE IN the era of globalization should indicate, the concept of culture has undergone a significant change at the end of the twentieth and in the early twenty-first centuries—a shift that has necessitated new ways of thinking and writing about culture. 1 This is not only, or even primarily, due to the impact on culture of those forces now inextricably associated with globalization: the unprecedented intensification and extensification of electronically-mediated culture on a world-wide scale; the effects of the growth of finance capitalism, that is, of obsessive speculation on capital itself in place of the attention once paid to the products of industry; a political shift from nation-state based sovereignty to a diffusion of sovereignty into international organizations, trade conventions, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and transnational corporations; and so on. While these forces, individually and collectively, have changed culture and cultures, what is more significant is the conceptual impact of these (thus far largely) empirical developments. Early work on globalization tended to claim that it constituted something like a genuine historical and epistemic break: on the other side of 1989 (the beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire), everything is supposedly different. It has now become more common to see through the rhetoric of newness that surrounds globalization, and to insist on the development of these forces in the longue durée. As with the economy and politics, so too with culture: rather than creating anything genuinely "new" in the sphere of culture, globalization has produced the conditions that might permit us to rethink culture in a larger historical frame, a process that would allow us to see that the concept of culture has always been other than what it claimed to be

Capitalism · Economics · Economy · Empire · Globalization · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · Sovereignty · Speculation · Globalization and Cultural Identity · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · University Challenges and Reforms

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub