I agree, it does tend to be a bit vaguely optimistic, but I don't know
that there is necessarily anything wrong with broad metanarratives,
particularly at a time when people on the bottom of the pile tend be
isolated, and often opposed to each other. A broad narrative about
justice or working class solidarity provides a pretext for talking
about groups of people who share common interests. At some level, the
idea that I could not coordinate a narrative with disparate
populations, itself, becomes a metanarrative. And, a debilitating
one.
I do think that the capacity for people to bridge these pockets of
humanity is powerful and explosive. NGOs are perfectly positioned to
provide accounts provided academics, legislators, artists, and
everyday people are willing to listen and help. (I know a lot of
farmers and union workers who are very careful about buying fair trade
goods. On the other hand, I know a lot of farmers and union workers
who think fair trade is a bunch of liberal, socialist nonsense. So I
think we really need narratives that can compete with the paranoid,
even jingoistic, attitudes towards trade).
A perfect example of success can be found in the recent successes that
student activists have had in working with NGOs in Honduras against
the anti-union practices of Russell Athletics.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4367/pstudents_wont_sweat_it_p
It can't solve everything. But on a practical level, I believe that
this type of solidarity is possible, and becomes more and more
effective the more it is engaged in. If I can get together with
somebody in Detroit and agree to use a particular currency in a
particular business network, it is possible for me to work with
someone in another country to have a positive impact on a particular
transnational network... the only real difference is how the network
is organized geographically.
Peace!
Davin
On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III
edi...@intertheory.org wrote:
Can't say I'm particularly moved by this.'yes, we can'...was ascliché
then as it is now, no? The real question no one cares to answer in this
regard is: yes, we can do what exactly?! For example, the local currency
movement offers a specific answer to a particular problem...but the broad
sweeping metanarratives of global emancipation read more like political
speeches than anything else, it seems to me...
nick
Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org
- Original Message
From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com
To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 6:33:50 PM
Subject: [-empyre-] A strange bit of luck
I was reading a book today and stumbled across a reference to Arjun
Appadurai's Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.
I found a copy from Appadurai's Globalization (Duke UP, 2001) and
started reading.
First, I was kind of bummed and embarrassed that I hadn't read it
before. But after getting over that, I was taken aback by the
relevance of this article to the discussions we are having here.
Everything from our crises of meaning, to the use of academic
language, challenges to neoliberalism, the academic research
marketplace, the problems with runaway financial institutions but
most importantly, Appadurai offers some constructive suggestions to
academics on how to facilitate globalization from below.
I won't break down Appadurai's argument here. It is widely available
(I found a copy of the article online). I expect that most here have
already read it. It's much more readable than anything I could write.
It is worth the time if this is something you are interested in. But
I will plunk down a giant quote, just to give you a sense of the scope
of his article:
Such an account [of globalization from above and below] would belong
to a broader effort to understand the variety of projects that fall
under the rubric of globalization, and it would also recognize that
the word globalization, and words like freedom, choice, and justice,
are not inevitably the property of the state-capital nexus. To take up
this sort of study involves, for the social sciences, a serious
commitment to the study of globalization from below, its institutions,
its horizons, and its vocabularies. For those more concerned with the
work of culture, it means stepping back from those obsessions and
abstractions that constitute our own professional practice to
seriously consider the problems of the global everyday. In this
exercise, the many existing forms of Marxist critique are a valuable
starting point, but they too must be willing to suspend their inner
certainty about understanding world histories in advance. In all these
instances, academics from the privileged institutions of the West (and
the North) must be prepared to reconsider, in the manner I have
pointed to, their conventions about world knowledge and about the
protocols
