Global Subjects: A Political Critique of GlobalizationPolity, 2007 - 373 pages Taking the plane or sending an e-mail: globalization has become part of the fabric of our daily lives. And yet it is often seen as an impersonal force that is threatening to destroy identities and undermine nation-states. In this major new book, Jean-Franois Bayart offers a radically new account of globalization which challenges the way it is interpreted both by neo-liberals and by the anti-globalization movement. Bayart argues that globalization is something that we ourselves have created, and the nation-state is actually a product, and not of a victim, of this process. Far from being synonymous with alienation and social disintegration, globalization establishes transnational solidarities and networks which overlap with nation-states without necessarily undermining them. Globalization has also refashioned sexual identities, transforming, through the representation of female and male bodies in the media, in advertising and in the Internet, the way individuals in different parts of the world have learnt to recognize themselves as sexual subjects. It has created new cultures of consumption which stimulate new desires, new techniques and technologies of the body and new forms of tension and conflict. Drawing on Foucaults notions of governmentality and subjectivation, Bayart develops a rich and illuminating account of how the social relations constitutive of globalization produce new forms of subjectivity, new lifestyles and new moral subjects, from the colonisers and colonised subjects of nineteenth-century India and Africa to the spread of new kinds of transnational and ethnicized subjectivities and lifestyles today. Spanning two centuries and drawing on his deep knowledge of Africa and the Middle East, Bayart shows that, if globalization is our handiwork, its development and thus our history will be decided on the contested terrains where new ways of life, new modes of consumption and new types of struggle are being invented. |
Contents
Two Centuries of Globalization The Changing Scale of State and Capitalism | 1 |
The State A Product of Globalization | 30 |
The Social Foundations of Globalization | 83 |
Globalization and Political Subjectivation The Imperial Moment 18301960 | 126 |
Globalization and Political Subjectivation The NeoLiberal Period 19802004 | 163 |
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activities Adelkhah Africa Algeria American Angola anti-globalization Asia Bayart body California Press Cambridge University Press capitalism change of scale China Christian civil society colonial Congo constitutive consumption contemporary countries Critique internationale domination economy emigration Empire ethical Europe European evergetic example extraversion fact Fariba Adelkhah Fayard Foucault France French frontier Globalisation guerre Hibou historical human type Ibid identity immigration imperial institutions International Herald Tribune Iran Iranun Islamic Ivory Coast Karthala labour latter Le Figaro Le Monde liberalization Libération lifestyles London Mami Wata material culture Max Weber merchandise Modern modes Monde moral subjects movement nation-state neo-liberal networks NGOs nineteenth century Nonetheless organizations Paris particular political Politique africaine practices processes of globalization processes of subjectivation production regional relations religious Revolution scout sexual social société sovereignty sub-Saharan subjectivation techniques thanks tion trade trans transformation transnational violence western