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Globalization and Diaspora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

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As James Caesar highlights in Reconstructing America, the word “globalization” seems sometimes to be synonymous with “Americanization” or “Americanism,” evoking negative images. Globalization may bring indigenous cultures to their death and cause national individualism to disappear into a shapeless muddle. On Americanism, Heidegger declared that it was “the future monstrosity of modern times.” This would be homogenization, the rubbing out of cultural specificity, life in one universe, one dimension. Extremists like Alexandre Kohève take it further still. It would be the end of history. Third world nations, particularly the Caribbean countries, would be predesignated victims of such an order, without power in political or economic realms, only making the front page of newspapers during cataclysm and natural catastrophes like Hugo, George, and Mitch. The tiny island of Montserrat, never before known to the West, rose to international fame when its volcano La Soufrière began to erupt. Rwanda would be known for genocide, and the Congo for a civil war and the assassination of its leader.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. James Caesar, Reconstructing America (New Haven, 1998), p. 15.

2. Brent Edwards, Black Globality: The International Shape of Black Culture (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1997), p. 168.

3. Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Paris, 1961), p. 173.

4. Stuart Hall, Culture, Globalisation and the World System (London, 1991), p. 52.

5. Marie-Céline Lafontaine, "Le carnaval de l'autre," in Les Temps modernes (Paris, 1983): 2126-73.

6. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands - La Frontera (San Francisco, 1987), p. 1.

7. José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica : Misión de la Raza Ibero-Americana (Mexico, 1961), p. 78.

8. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté I (Paris, 1964), p. 16.

9. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, 1981), p. 270.

10. See Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Lon don, Nairobi, New Hampshire, 1981,1986).