Global subjects : a political critique of globalization / Jean-François Bayart ; translated by Andrew Brown.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bayart, Jean-François.

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Globalization.

Globalization--Political aspects.

Physical Description:

xi, 373 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2007.

Summary:

Taking the plane or sending an email: 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 nationstates. In this major new book, Jean-Francois 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 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 on 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 Foucault's 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 colonizers and colonized 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, then 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:

Preface: Yours Globally viii

1 Two Centuries of Globalization: The Changing Scale of State and Capitalism 1

The limits of globalization 3

Globalization: a concept and an event 6

The foundational nineteenth century 14

Globalization: two or three things that we know about it 24

2 The State: A Product of Globalization 30

Dead man's reprieve 33

The privatization of states: hybridization and straddling 41

The transnational production of national memories 48

Frontiers, smuggling and state-formation 52

A very national 'international civil society' 58

Transnational crime in the service of the state 67

The transnational ferment: the latest proofs 72

Globalization: the motor of state-formation 76

3 The Social Foundations of Globalization 83

Transnational historical fields 83

The global web of social relations 102

Globalization as networking? 115

4 Globalization and Political Subjectivation: The Imperial Moment (1830-1960) 126

A question of method 126

Colonization as experience of subjectivation 130

Extraversion and coercion in imperial subjectivation 147

5 Globalization and Political Subjectivation: The Neo-Liberal Period (1980-2004) 163

Global social institutions and political subjectivation 164

The diffuse social practices of global subjectivation 171

'Human types' of globalization: main roles and American stars 177

'Human types' of globalization from below: the importance of bit players 185

Globalization, nation-state and individuation 197

6 The Global Techniques of the Body 209

Merchandise and subjectivation 210

The globalization and appropriation of merchandise 216

Merchandise and the reinvention of difference 224

Merchandise and political subjectivation 230

Globalization in movement 234

The globalization of gestures 242

The senses of globalization 251

The world in movement 254

The global political techniques of the body 262

Conclusion: When Waiting is an Urgent Matter 269

Global Godot 269

Globalization as a liminal condition 277

Plenum and void in global governmentality 287.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780745636672

0745636675

0745636683

9780745636689

OCLC:

145388602