Volume 15, Issue 2-3 - Special Double Issue on Globality

This article assesses the current state of globality in light of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. It opens with a concise survey of influential meanings and uses of “globality” in extant global studies literature. Offering clarifications and definitions of two pertinent keywords – “globality” and “globalization” – this overview provides a careful conceptual delineation of these two concepts as a prerequisite for determining their causal relation: globalization (the process) shapes globality (the condition). It is argued that the widening disjunctures and cleavages among the major globalization dynamics are transforming the hitherto dominant form of globality. Yielding a plausible response to the crucial question of how globality itself has been transformed by globalization, the clarification of the major structural dynamics linking the disjunctive processes of space-time compression to the restructuring of the mutable condition of worldwide interconnectedness facilitates a comprehensive assessment of the current state of globality. The article ends with a brief speculation on the future of globality and the prospects for overcoming the negative social impacts of disjunctive globalization.

Global health scholarship concerning AIDS governance often regards the global either as products of translocal connections or as external forces that initiate local restructurings. As a state without a membership in major global organizations, Taiwan alternatively presents a case for conceiving of global health as grounded, competing imaginations which serve as the foundation both for a symbolic pursuit of Taiwan’s global membership and for the transformations of the Taiwanese state. Building on a global ethnography perspective, this study explores the idea of in-pursuit-of-globality nationalism by examining three AIDS projects in Taiwan that configured global and national imaginations simultaneously. It particularly looks into how sexuality and race became sites of transformative struggles in those projects, arguing that Taiwan’s marginality is not only a product of global geopolitics but also a standpoint on which multiple globalities are imagined and (re)produced. As such, this study contributes to global health scholarship by rejecting a monolithic view of the global and the national and by centering racial and sexual imaginations in processes of globalization.

In this essay we argue for the utility of moving from a “national” to an “entangled global” perspective on security. Focusing on the post-1945 international context, we discuss how the concept of “globality” can inform and reframe our understanding of transnational security dynamics and help move us beyond traditional state-centric frameworks. Such a move enables a better understanding of historical events and contemporary security dynamics than classical “national security” frameworks alone. After outlining the rationale behind our call for expanding the aperture in the study of security, we theorize security entanglement as a particularly important form of globality with its own internal dynamics and show how the entanglement framework allows us to rethink the post-1945 security environment and events within it. We then focus on three illustrative forms of security entanglement that have been underexplored in security studies: the global nature of the Cold War; dynamics of decolonization and its legacies; and the relationship between migration and security. We conclude by discussing the implications of security entanglement for future visions of world security.

This essay contends that the Anthropocene as a historicization in planetary history is symptomatic of a lurking crisis in historical comprehension. This crisis – rooted in the technologically-induced incongruence between past and future – more generally speaks to the consequent diminishment of human historical comprehension under conditions of unprecedented anthropogenic upheaval, and, ultimately, to the inadequacy of the historicizing impulse itself. Thus the Anthropocene, I suggest, fails in its retrospective redundancy to compensate for the incoherence of the historical situation it aims to comprehend, and is further symptomatic of a world that has not merely been historically mismanaged, but in which historical comprehension has itself broken down.

Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature , discipline , and comparison . As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.

N. Megan Kelley discusses various manifestations of globality in contemporary cinema.

We live in an ever increasingly globalized and highly mediatized world dominated by images, in which machine learning helps the pervasive real cameras to scan and analyze our daily life. At the same time, visual media technologies and global echo-chambers are able to support revolutions or mobilize protest movements across the globe. Yet, in the field of international relations and new global studies, the dynamics of globalization are still generally approached by means of textual-philosophical investigation and the unit of analysis of the nation-state or the global cities, by looking with suspicion at, if not disregarding, the surplus of value of the image. In challenging some of the basic assumptions of globalization hypothesis, this study addresses the following research question: how has globality been transformed by globalized spatial practices of resistance? Informed by theory and methodologically articulated, this article calls for the epistemic function and power of images in the study of globalization. It also highlights strengths and weaknesses of a visual approach in the meaning-making process of the symbolic and social construction of the common sense of the global in people’s everyday life, under present conditions.

Postcolonial discourses often view globality as marking the continuation of the imperialist project. However, discourses entailing a genetic assessment of globality have identified that the workings of the neoliberal economy are largely responsible for its undoing. This mutually destructive relationship between globality and neoliberalism makes it even more necessary to strike a rupture between them. This article illustrates the strands of global and neoliberal discontent, positioning both globality and neoliberalism as arriving at cul-de sac despite vigorous effort to pretend otherwise. In particular, it dwells on the ontological status of the migrants in India by discussing the current strategy to criminalize them and uses Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir to show how criminalized migrants may be turned, by de-globing, into natural inhabitants of the Earth.

Scholarship on “global journalism” – to the extent that the phenomenon is explored empirically – is often based on the analysis of national media. This article considers, instead, how the global fares in global newsrooms, and what has happened to global news since the early years of the millennium. It is argued that, while much has changed in world politics and scholarly agendas, global news is characterized more by continuity than change, and that the interesting differences are not between “then” and “now,” but between news outlets. The results of the analysis of 2189 newscasts, 7591 headlines and 5379 news items broadcast over a period of 13 years by four global news organizations (Al Jazeera English, BBC World, CNN International, and RT) call into question assumptions about the cosmopolitan nature of channels said to speak to the world. They show that only a small percentage of their news can be considered “global” in terms of topic and geographical scope, although there are thought-provoking differences in how the global is narrated. Taken together, they provide occasion to revisit the scholarly debate on global journalism.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including The Crises of Civilization (2018) and Provincializing Europe (2000); and was one of the principal founders of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies . In this discussion he ruminates upon the state of globality; its relationship to the planet Earth; the scope and possible duration of the Anthropocene; and some of globalization's consequences for humanity and human understanding. The interview was conducted by managing editor, Kenneth Weisbrode.