Imagined Globalization ‐ by Garía Canclini, Néstor

Garía Canclini, Néstor ([ 1999] 2014) Trans. G. Yúdice. Imagined Globalization, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), xxxv + 288 pp. £59.00 hbk, £15.99 pbk. One may ask why we are only now reading this book fifteen years after its original publication date. The answer to this question illustrates one of Garía Canclini's central points: globalisation results from multiple, often contradictory movements. Consequently, it's highly uneven and not everyone participates in it equally. This is particularly true of the fractures and segregations of cultural globalisation and Garía Canclini is rightfully critical of the lack of interest shown by transnational publishing houses in circulating the intellectual and social scientific work of Latin Americans beyond the region's borders (p. 125). Unfortunately this translation of Imagined Globalization is regrettably fifteen years overdue, however it remains relevant due to Garía Canclini's distinct methodological integration of the metaphors and narratives that create globalisation's imaginary and help us to imagine the world and our place within it (p. 28). This translated version of Imagined Globalization is bookended by a highly insightful reading guide prepared by the translator, George Yúdice, and a uniquely compelling Epilogue consisting of a conversation between Garía Canclini and Toby Miller in 2011. Together they serve to update the text, helping readers to situate it within a larger trajectory of scholarly research on globalisation and Garía Canclini's own body of work. Imagined Globalization deserves the attention of social scientists and Latin Americanists interested in the ‘possibilities-impossibilities of intercultural cooperation’ (p. 71) in a global age. In Chapter 2, ‘Globalization: An Unidentified Cultural Object’, Garía Canclini points out that metaphors proliferate in the ‘hard discourses on globalization’ and accordingly it is fitting to ‘take them seriously as a resource that is not transitory’ (p. 34). He demonstrates how artistic imaginings of global flows and processes, such as Marcos Ramírez Erre's two-headed ‘Trojan Horse’ sculpture at the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing, produce knowledge through their attempt to grasp ‘what becomes fleeting in the global disorder, that which cannot be delimited by borders but rather crosses them’ (p. 35). The book includes his own metaphorical exploration of global flows in Chapter 5, Disagreements between a Latin American anthropologist, A European sociologist, and A US cultural studies scholar, which consists of a fictional exploration of how scholars attempt to make sense of intercultural relations and their own place within a rapidly changing world. As Yúdice insightfully points out, this chapter shows us how theory ‘is not something abstract but actually inheres in scholars’ own lives' (p. xxi). These case studies help us to re-create ways of thinking ‘and at the same time configure new readings of empirical materials’ (p. 35). Garía Canclini is seemingly prescient in his ability to chart a new course for anthropology (and the social sciences more generally) in a global age in which it is no longer possible to understand intercultural paradoxes through studies of ‘local, traditional, and stable cultures’ (p. 38). He rightly points out that contemporary anthropology focuses both ‘on the social order and also on the imaginaries that men and women make in order to act and think according to desires not satisfied by the functioning of that social order’ (p. 181). He suggests, in 1999, that a central question for social scientists is whether subjects can have agency within larger social structures (p. 14). In the years since, a significant portion of anthropological research has explored this very question within distinct cultural contexts. While it seems obvious today, his proposal that scholars closely examine ‘alterity and interculturality, the tensions between the local and the global’ (p. 38) was quite novel in 1999, a time in which the ideology of globalism, tempered by fears of cultural homogenisation, reigned supreme in the social sciences. Garía Canclini repeatedly questions the extent to which individuals have agency within larger social structures. For example, he asks ‘whether there can be active subjects in production and consumption in the domain of these anonymous and translocalized powers’ (p. 10). Is it possible to ‘remake ourselves as subjects of work and consumption’ (p. 13) in an age of transnational corporations, outsourcing, and widespread surveillance? What is missing from Imagined Globalization, written before 1999's Seattle WTO protests, 2012's Arab Spring, or the recent growth in broadband internet coverage and mobile devices, is a definitive answer to this question. García Canclini includes little discussion of ‘parallel culture’, the production, circulation and consumption that take place outside formal enterprises (Yúdice, xxvi), nor does he explore incipient forms of globalisation from below. This absence is discussed in the Epilogue and he ends the conversation with a nod to ‘deglobalization’, the unevenness of global integration coupled with the creation of ‘global movements of local infrastructures (physical and human) that transcend the local’ (p. 215). This omission should not be read as a failing on García Canclini's part but rather a sign of just how much global integration, and our imaginings of it, have been shaped by individual (rather than corporate or political) agency over the past fifteen years

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