Against “Global Citizenship”?

Please note that in the title of this post I am putting “global citizenship” in quotation marks, in part because it’s unclear to me what the phrase means exactly, and in part because it’s equally unclear to me what it could mean to be for it or against it. Hence the question mark.

What is clear is that university administrations across England, the United States, and Canada are jumping on the bandwagon of this concept, funneling money into programs that promote it, and using it as advertising to pull in top students and grant money. For instance, the University of British Columbia has recently started a “global citizens project,” but, interestingly, the executive summary that outlines the goals of that project admits to being unable to define what global citizenship is… and admits the concept’s lack of any determinate meaning precisely in the section where one might expect a definition, the section subtitled “the meaning of global citizenship.” Instead what it does say with certainty is that even though they don’t really know what the concept means, they all agree that they are “excited” about it and want their university to “demonstrate leadership” by fostering it. As I think about this global-citizenship bandwagon, what seems to me to be the case is that once a concept has been repeated enough times and has captured enough imaginations, then everyone is forced into having a relationship to it somehow — either as fans or as critics, as insiders or as outsiders.

On the one hand, I can see the motivation behind the idea. The growing power of multinational corporations since the 1960s, the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, and the international deregulation of certain commodity markets alongside the new technologies such as the internet has led universities to want to prepare their students for the transnational movement of capital, commodities, culture, people, and information. In addition, many see the concept of global citizenship as a call to an ethics of responsibility – to do something to ameliorate the negative effects of global capitalism in other nations such as sweat shop labor, the on-going slave trade, disease epidemics, and the disruption of local cultures and ecologies that leads to war and famine. There is also the sense that certain problems such as global warming, disease, and terrorism can only be solved if all the world’s nations cooperate.

But on the other hand, there is something a little vacuous and misleading about the concept. What is citizenship? One is a citizen because one participates somehow in the governance of a community. In the liberal formulation of citizenship in terms of rights, one has the right to vote, own property, form associations, speak out, etc. In older forms of citizenship in Europe and the American colonies, political power was based in land ownership. And in some African countries, political power was partly based on the size of one’s household, including wives, children, servants, etc. Historically, not everyone has had the rights of a citizen. For instance, in the United States, women were not guaranteed the right to own property until the mid-nineteenth century in most states or the right to vote until 1920, and African Americans did not get the right to vote until 1870 with the 15th amendment (or really until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act.)  So, if we are actually all global citizens, then it seems that we are all severely disenfranchised because we don’t vote for a “global government” or appear to have any official means of political agency at all, except through our national government (i.e., our national government’s participation in the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization.)

Thinking about it historically, it is somewhat curious that as soon as we finally achieved full enfranchisement for all adults within the United States, we then began to do two things simultaneously: (1) imagine our citizenship beyond the boundaries of the nation, and (2) start building a big wall between us and Mexico (because apparently one has to live on this side of the border in order to be a global citizen.) And it is also somewhat curious because in many of the former colonies of those European nation states, people are still struggling to gain full enfranchisement and political power. What does it mean that as soon as the former colonies in the third-world became politically independent of the first-world (as so many of them did in the 1940s – 1970s), then the people of the first-world people began talking of global citizenship? Is global citizenship a form of neo-colonialism? Might the concept be the ideological mystification of a new form of colonialism in the postmodern, postindustrial, high-tech “knowledge-based” economy?

In fact, if we consider the global NGOs (non-governmental organizations) through which “global citizens” perform their ethical responsibilities towards peoples in other nations, then we might ask ourselves whether these NGOs unintentionally (or intentionally in some cases) undermine the nation-based forms of enfranchisement in the countries they claim to be helping. In other words, what happens when a group of people in Kenya or Guatemala look to a foreign-based non-governmental organization to gain political power and financial support for their local infrastructure instead of to its local government? Is this what global citizenship is? Moreover, consider that in many of the former colonies, such as Kenya’s, the government has to pay between 10 and 30% of its tax revenue to service its debt to multinational banks based in New York, London, and Tokyo — a debt these new nation states incurred as part of the deal brokered for political independence from Europe. At the same time, the governments of the U.S., Great Britain, and Japan funnel money back to those former colonies through NGOs in the form of foreign aid. The USAID dollars provide jobs for thousands of idealistic college students and young “global citizens” in the United States — that much is obvious – but a lot of that money also often comes back to the United States by supporting subsidized agriculture and industries. In other words, because it is U.S. agriculture and U.S. technology that is being used to develop the third-world country, the aid dollars end up doing more to develop the first world than the third.

So, what is a global citizen?

As someone who studies 18th-century literature, I can’t help but look back to the past for earlier examples and ask whether there is anything new about this notion of global citizenship. Over three-hundred years ago, back in 1690, a Puritan minister in Boston, Cotton Mather, preached (and later published) a sermon telling his congregation that they were “citizens of the world,” not citizens of England. He meant two things by this remark. First, that they had a mission to convert the whole world to their form of Christianity. They were God’s chosen, and eventually the whole world would be under their Holy dominion. Second, that they were not subject to the laws of England, whose King James II was revoking their charter and putting them under the jurisdiction of a royal governor for the first time. By 1690, Boston was completely dependent on the transatlantic trade networks that England’s navy had to protect (and a lot of pirates were using American ports such as Boston), so arguably, James II’s decision had a point. But against James II, Cotton Mather encouraged his congregation to imagine that they were above the law. I am troubled by the hubris of first meaning and the anarchic, extra-legal sense of self entitlement in the second meaning.

Fast forward to last year, July 24, in a speech in Berlin, Germany, presidential candidate Barack Obama appealed to the concept of “global citizenship” to advance our common humanity and to abide by the rule of international law. In response to that speech, the radical far-right in the United States has criticized Obama and compared him to Adolph Hitler for advocating an imperialist “new world order.” (These reactionaries seem to forget that the “new world order” was a favorite concept of Bush and Cheney and conservative think tanks, whose agenda was, arguably, imperialist in the old-fashioned militaristic way.)

Although few would take seriously the position of this YouTube video that Obama is Hitler or Darth Vader (since the position is both ignorant and insane), there is a kernel of truth within the anxiety it expresses. If we are all global citizens, then that assumes a single form of global governance. What is that form? An empire? A new form of Empire with a capital “E” (as Negri and Hardt suggest in their book by that title…. And as a side note, in the YouTube video above, are we now seeing a curious appropriation of radical leftist theory by the radical right for completely different ends?)

One cautionary lesson that we can take away from Cotton Mather’s sermon is that Protestant Christianity, Catholic Christianity, and Islam all have one thing in common; they all imagine themselves as reformers of the whole world, not just of one piece of it, and their ideology of reformation has historically gone hand-in-hand with the violent conquest, subjugation, and extermination of peoples. (The Catholic Spanish government killed more Native Americans in the name of Christ than the Nazi’s did Jews in the Holocaust.) Although Obama articulates global citizenship in terms of tolerance, respect, and dialogue, I think we must always be cautious about terms that gleefully celebrate a tolerant unity without also recognizing struggle and disparity. Tolerating cultural difference is all well and good, but not if one’s pretentions at tolerance are an ideological smokescreen or cover-up for not honestly addressing disparities in wealth and power.

But, against everything I’ve just written, what if we look at global citizenship another way by looking at another historical example. About 80 years after Cotton Mather’s speech, in 1760, the poet Oliver Goldsmith wrote a novel entitled Citizen of the World, in the form of a series of letters composed by a Chinese merchant living in London for his friends back home in China. The letters enabled a form of satire so that Goldsmith could expose the hypocrisies of England through the naive observations of this foreigner. His misunderstanding of what he sees is meant to lead the English reader towards a greater understanding of his own unreasonable biases, prejudices, etc. What Goldsmith gives us is an ironic sense of global citizenship – an ironic sense that is essential for reason and enlightenment. And likewise, this is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s point when he concludes the “The Custom House Sketch” that prefaces his classic novel The Scarlet Letter with the phrase, “I am a citizen of somewhere else.” His point was simply to express frustration with the politics of Salem, Massachusetts, and to establish a point of critical distance from which he could evaluate his home.

In conclusion, I come back to my earlier statement that the repetition of a concept seems to somehow legitimate it and give it power despite its incoherence. Twenty years ago, not too many people were talking about globalization, global citizenship, and global education. Now they are on the lips of every college administrator, entrepreneur, and advertising executive. It’s hard for someone like me to avoid it. To be for or against global citizenship seems to me beside the point. We live in the world we live in. But, as Goldsmith’s satire teaches us, to ignore the concept’s ironies seems to me to be unethical. And to be satisfied with it as a useful concept for articulating a worldview or an ethos seems just plain lazy.

Since I’m not satisfied with it, I suppose I ought to ask myself, what might be a better concept for imagining an ethical relation to the world? What about the old concept of the “human” from which we get the disciplines of humanities within which I work? One problem with the concept of the human is that it lacks a sense of relatedness to the environment. As some argue, we now live in a post-humanist age (though my fellow blogger Dr. J has critically assessed the notion of post-humanism to propose instead a “weak humanism“.)

Hmmmm… what about “dude“? As Jeff Bridges famously says in the movie The Big Lebowski, ”the dude abides.”

the loco local glocal

Recently, I was teaching a little introduction to the concept of globalization in my first-year-writing seminar, and one of the students said he was still a bit fuzzy on the concept of “glocal.” To explain this word, I started telling them about an essay I had just read by a student in one of my other classes about a small village in Africa whose economy is based on tourists who want to learn about a traditional African culture. In other words, the economy of this small village far away from any major city is intensely global, but the cultural tradition it supports is intensely local. Similarly, I could have my students read one of my previous blog posts here about the Masai market I visited in Kenya. This dynamic dialectic between local culture and global economy is what I wanted my students to pay attention to, because mainstream journalism usually represents culture inaccurately in static, essentialist terms.

What I realized when I left the classroom is that I had located the “glocal” in the third world. This was, perhaps, a mistake of mine, since my students may leave the classroom thinking that glocality is something that happens elsewhere. But we can also see the glocal down the road in any American town. If you walk into your average Wal-Mart, you will see men and women buying up clothing, guns, and other commodities that are all part of an intensely felt local American identity. The most extreme examples, I suppose, are cowboy boots, country music, hunting equipment (often worn indoors when they aren’t even hunting), and Harley-Davidson motorcycle stuff (not the actual motorcycles, but T-shirts, vests, and badges with Harley logos that all present the feeling of “American.”) Ironically, everything sold in Wal-Mart is made in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, El Salvador, and other countries, not in the U.S.A. Wal-Mart is one of the largest and most ruthless multinational corporations in the world, but it is precisely the low prices it offers that enable people to buy so many expressions of “local” country culture.

The thing to notice here is this. The more that the Wal-Mart economy globalizes and moves factories and capital all around the world, the more working-class Americans react to the uncertainties of global economics by grasping onto what they feel is a distinctly “American” culture. I mean, seriously, who needs cowboy boots? This American culture and the commodification of American patriotism is illusory, of course, and is often made-up. There’s nothing especially traditional about the kind of country music that gets played on the radio in the mid-West, because it sounds more like 80s pop and 60s rock than authentic 40s country, but I often hear Minnesotans blasting pop music about the hills of Arkansas. Ironically, Wal-Mart’s headquarters is in Arkansas, so maybe that’s oddly appropriate, though I doubt most of the people sporting conferate flags and blasting “country” pop in their pickup trucks in central Minnesota are aware of that. What they are doing is affirming a somewhat racist attachment to their “roots,” even though they are (paradoxically) expressing their roots through a globally produced commodity culture. In a sense, their self-expression is an unconscious attempt to resist the negative effects of global capitalism (job losses, low wages, etc.), but is clearly an attempt that will fail to achieve much of anything except a vacuous pride and an insidious racism. So, in conclusion, the glocal is local – it’s right here, all the time — and it is sometimes a bit crazy (or loco, as the many Mexican-Americans who live and work down the street from the Wal-Mart in my town might say in Spanish.)

On the flip side, we can raise a reverse critique of the fake cosmopolitanism of the liberal elite, who love their Japanese sushi, their Indian yoga, their Australian wines, and their boutique coffees from Ethiopia, Brazil, and Sumatra (pretending they can taste the difference between the various coffee beans even though the roasting process affects the flavor more than its location.) This too is a cultural expression, an effort to fabricate an identity out of the many globally produced commodities. In contrast to the invention of an intensely local “country” identity, this is the invention of an intensely global “cosmopolitan” identity. The university tends to endorse this cosmpolitan identity because it believes students will be better prepared to succeed in a dynamic, global economy. However, this identity is just as fabricated (almost pre-fabricated) as the “county” one.

In my view, the real question is how to truly confront the global economy, resist its evils, build on its goods, and work towards a more just and equitable society. It seems to me that the glocal nature of postmodern cultural identities is often more a symptom of our capitalist economy’s paradoxes (like a runny nose is a symptom of the common cold virus) than it is a viable culture that might enable people to ethically engage with the world in which they live.

Nairobi Diaries 9: the Ethics of Aid and the Catholic Church

Two obvious understatements: (1) Kenya has been seriously affected by HIV, and the Catholic Church does quite a lot of AIDS relief work there; (2) the Catholic church is officially against the use of condoms and many of the other things that social workers in Africa think need to be done to address HIV properly. Contradiction? Problem? A valid disagreement about what works best? Or maybe just an effective division of labor?

I ask this question (and don’t expect me to answer it) in light of Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s provocative statement on a segment of NPR’s Speaking of Faith in December 2008 entitled “The Ethics of Aid.” His host Krista Tippet was surprised and baffled that he’d rather white people in Europe and the United States stop giving aid to Africa — that no aid was better than misguided aid. He compares the 21st-century desire to help Africa to the 19th-century desire to colonize it. His biggest criticism is directed at those Westerners who seem to want to save their own souls and alleviate their guilt by donating something — something that ends up being temporary and soon forgotten by the donor. Such ineffective programs help the Westerner imagine themselves as saviors of the poor Africans who — in this imagination — can’t save themselves. However, as far as I know, Wainaina hasn’t said anything specifically about the Catholic Church or any of the programs I witnessed, and I am curious about what he would say. CRS’s programs aren’t temporary fly-by-night, feel-good charities, and the staff of CRS are mostly Africans themselves working with local organizations and culture. After all, about 33% of Kenyans are Catholics.

As several of my earlier Nairobi Diaries mentioned before, much of my trip was about this situation. Whether in the background or in the foreground, both HIV and the Catholic church were very much present. Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is one of the largest non-governmental organizations doing AIDS relief there. Most of CRS’s budget for AIDS relief comes not from the church itself but from the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) set up by President George Bush in 2003 — which is to say, it comes from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). PEPFAR has been much praised for the widespread distribution of antiretroviral therapy (ART) medications free of charge to the poor and needy around the world. Many non-governmental organizations, both religious such as CRS and non-religious, have collaborated effectively with international agencies and national governments all over the world to make this happen. However, what has been controversial for a long time about both PEPFAR and the Catholic Church’s involvement in AIDS relief  is the conservative ”family values” agenda that severely hampers aid workers in their efforts to do what they think they should to address the real roots of the problem. See [here], for just one example of this criticism. Some worry that such efforts may just prolong the problem. I personally wonder whether PEPFAR creates a dependency in Africa on ART so that the corporations that manufacture it can continue to rake in money from the American taxpayer (though admittedly I have no idea if these companies are making a profit off it or not.) I also couldn’t help but wonder if the evangelical presence of the Catholic and protestant churches in Kenya were not being deliberately strengthened by PEPFAR dollars, and I wondered what would happen if the U.S. government allowed such aid to support HIV programs organized by socialist or Muslim organizations. (And I think I need to emphasize something about USAID, because a friend of mine doubted me – I saw USAID signs all over rural Kenya,  including at the Day of the African Child events that I attended.)

In any case, the biggest criticism of PEPFAR and USAID is that the money comes with strings attached. In the case of CRS, the money seems to be tied to identity politics; for example, when I asked one CRS worker about the difficulty of fighting AIDS within the limits of U.S. government and papal policy, she implied that their identity as a Catholic institution was part of what made them effective and ought not be compromised.

In particular, Pope Benedict XVI is somewhat notorious for stating during his first visit to Africa that (against all evidence to the contrary) “the problem [of AIDS] cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics: on the contrary, they increase it.” For the full text of that statement see [here], and for just a couple of reactions, see [here] and [here]. Naturally, the African Bishops fully endorse the Pope’s position as you can see [here]; what else could they do? While I was in Kenya, I wondered whether this policy was adhered to by those who had to work with HIV cases everyday. And I wondered this several times out loud. Do the CRS social workers strictly follow papal decrees? It’s impossible to know for sure what the answer to that question is… but… when we were interviewing a poor farmer with HIV who received assistance from CRS, and he proudly told both us and his case worker that he now used condoms. (I was afraid to ask how he was able to afford them, considering that he couldn’t even afford a tin roof for his mud home without CRS assistance.)

Interestingly, the Pope’s comment about condoms was said in passing during an interview, not during an official speech. His speeches given in Africa never made any recommendations about sexual practice. Catholic TV’s coverage of the Pope’s visit focused entirely on the ethics of reconciliation in the context of violent civil conflict.

I think liberal media such as the Huffington Post  have made too much of the condom comment and done so in a rather unsophisticated way, when you consider the issue in the context of regional violence, systemic poverty, government corruption, human trafficking, child labor, etc.  And of course, this is exactly the context that the Pope was addressing, so if we are to evauate the Pope’s overall mission, we need to think more broadly about the his emphasis on personal and religious ethics as a solution to the various problems in Africa — problems that everyone living in Africa recognizes to be extremely complex, in part because Africa is far, far, far more diverse than the average politician in America or Europe seems to realize.

So, for instance, in his first speech ever delivered in Africa, after detailing the horrors of regional violence and human trafficking, the Pope said,

At a time of global food shortages, financial turmoil, and disturbing patterns of climate change, Africa suffers disproportionately: more and more of her people are falling prey to hunger, poverty, and disease. They cry out for reconciliation, justice and peace, and that is what the Church offers them. Not new forms of economic or political oppression, but the glorious freedom of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:21). Not the imposition of cultural models that ignore the rights of the unborn, but the pure healing water of the Gospel of life. Not bitter interethnic or interreligious rivalry, but the righteousness, peace and joy of God’s kingdom, so aptly described by Pope Paul VI as the civilization of love.

Obviously he is not giving technocratic solutions but searching for guiding principles… but hold on a second…. Am I reading this incorrectly or is the Pope’s solution to child slavery and ethnic violence really that we ban abortions? And exactly how are “righteousness” and the “Gospel of life” going to address the global problems he lists? My knee-jerk reaction is to critique the Pope via another theologian, Reinhold Neihbur, whose famous book Moral Man and Immoral Society argues in a Marxist sort of way that individual morality (such as the Pope seems to be speaking of) cannot solve systemic, social problems.

But the Pope’s thinking might be a bit more complex. Later, right after I came back from Kenya a little over a month ago, he delivered his third Encyclical “Charity in Truth” that focuses on the ethics of global capitalism and suggests that the logic of the market only works if there is a moral consensus guiding it, and of course there isn’t any such consensus, and in a “fallen world” such as ours, there never will be, implying that regulations and global governance is perhaps necessary. I would agree with him there, except that he also seems to me to be implying that the Vatican might be a good candidate for governing the globe. [Here] is a somewhat incoherent response to that encyclical by People for Peace in Africa whom we met on my trip and whom I mentioned in Nairbi Dairies 2. And [here] and [here] are a couple other summaries because I definitely don’t have time to read the whole thing — yo, it’s 144 pages!

One of the theoretically interesting upshots seems to be his notion that capitalism may be moving into a new phase beyond the simple profit motive, beyond simple commercial value, and towards a realization that social welfare and ethical human relations are increasingly a part of the way the economic system measures value. This almost sounds like Negri and Hardt’s Marxist manifesto for the 21st century in their books Empire and Multitude, except without the many social antagonisms (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) that Hardt and Negri and countless other theorists of globalization recognize as basic to the capitalist world system. Their books argue that an economy increasingly based on information systems, human services, and social capital (and not just financial capital and commodities) will transform itself — a sort of “democracy from below” — almost (but not quite) the way the Pope seems to imagine because of the ethical relations immanent in social capital. So, maybe the Pope and Bush are right that, when thinking of aid (i.e., charity) and solutions to HIV, ethics should come first…. But then that begs the question of what kind of ethics are we talking about here?

At the end of the day, however, what concerns me can be summed up in these two photographs that I took. The first photograph on the left is of a Bishop’s house in a small diocese. We had lunch with the Bishop in the house. It was the largest and most opulent structure I saw my entire three days driving all around that diocese. The second photograph is a street corner of a nearby town. The motorcycles are basically taxis, which have become popular all over Africa because they are fuel efficient and oil is too expensive. It’s clear that the Catholic church is powerful in Kenya, since it owns a lot of the most expensive land…. And so I repeat, what are the ethics of aid here?

In addition to that kind of disparity, I can’t help but remain sceptical of a church that requires Africans to adopt European names in order to be baptised and that still officially and adamantly promotes an image of Jesus as a white man — yes, I asked about that while I was there, and no, Jesus obviously wasn’t a white European – and still seems to be waging an ideological battle against protestantism, Islam, and secularism not only at the level of the Vatican but also precisely at the grassroots level of CRS itself.

In conclusion, I have no conclusion, only questions, but for a really good novel about ethical ambiguity, family, and the Catholic Church in Nigeria that I just finished yesterday, check out Chimananda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus.

Nairobi Diaries 8: the Glocal Maasai Market

 Ooooh, so many pretty colors!!! 

I gotta admit, I’m a bit proud of this photograph I took of the Maasai Market in downtown Nairobi. Isn’t it pretty? We went there one morning after visiting the National Museum and the memorial to the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassay, which is also downtown not far from the market. It was a rare moment of classic tourism for our trip, and a couple members of our group were very excited about spending all their money on statuettes, jewelry, and decorated cloth. The Maasai Market’s very reason-for-being is to satisfy the desire of tourists — desire for what, I’m not really sure. For mementos of their time in Kenya? To own some objects with the aura of authenticity? Hmmm… I must admit, this kind of shopping has never been my cup of tea, and quite probably “I just don’t get it”…. Take me to a bookstore or a swank restaurant — now those are things I can get into… and so I spent most of my time in the market taking photos of my colleagues as they tried their best to bargain. I had quite a lot of fun in my own way.

And here are the two things I noticed as I walked from stall after stall after stall of trinkets — (1) the repetition and (2) the insistant claim about every object’s authenticity. I think I saw exactly the same print or statuette about thirty different times in ten different locations, and each time the salesman tried to convince me that this was handmade by a member of his family. Maybe they were, but my intuition told me that in some cases there was probably more than just a little mass-production going on. I’d be interested in an economic and/or cultural study of this market, and it appears that someone else is interested too since a quick google search got me this syllabus here and this scholarly article here. My favorite “authentic” Maasai wrap (or shuka), was the one with Barack Obama’s face on it.  A couple days earlier, at a supermarket, I saw a Maasai woman wearing such an Obama-adorned shuka, so I guess they actually are authentic and not just for tourists.

The Maasai are only 2% of the population of Kenya (in comparison to the Kikuyu who are 22%, the Luhya 14%, the Luo 13%, the Kalenjin 12%, etc.), but they are the Kenyan ethnic group most famous to the outside world, perhaps because of their unusual ear piercings, their fame as warriors, and — as a nomadic culture — their refusal to integrate into the modern world. As professor Leslie Rabine has noted [here] in her book The Global Circulation of African Fashion, what the Maasai are most famous for is simply for having “kept their culture.”  

Except maybe they have integrated into the modern world after all — into what economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein calls the “modern capitalist world system” — by adapting their culture to the rapidly changing Kenyan economy, population growth, and land scarcity. Just as Saudi Arabia’s economy is based on oil, so too the Maasai contribute to the Kenyan GDP by selling their own authenticity, exoticism, and rebel spirit to the world. In other words, paradoxically, they have adapted to the global marketplace by refusing to adapt.

As I have discussed in a previous blog post about Oromo hip hop (as well as in my forthcoming article on globalization theory in the new James Bond movie), such cultural exchange is an example of what some theorists call “glocalization” — a neologism that combines two antithetical concepts, the global and the local. The word was originally coined in the Japanese business community as dochakuka, meaning the adaptation of mass produced, global products to local environments and/or the adaptation of local products to the global market, but it has been picked up by sociologists and literary critics to conceptualize the dialectical nature of globalization. In other words, because the word neatly combines antitheses (local being the opposite of global), it seems useful for exploring the strange, contradictory, and dialectical nature of capitalism. In this case, it would seem to illustrate Fredric Jameson’s argument in this essay here that globalization does not simply intensify sameness (a.k.a. McDonaldization); it also, and at the same time, intensifies difference (i.e., the Maasai Market).

Okay, that’s nice, but so what? Well, the “so what?” is precisely the question that the concept is supposed to focus our attention on. In other words, the point is not to say hooray “glocalization” exists, woot! woot! Because concepts don’t exist. Rather, concepts focus our attention on questions about the relations among things that do exist. So, a number of research questions might follow from my conceptualization of this market experience. How do we understand a culture such as the Maasai as modern or not modern in relation to the capitalist world market? What is the causal chain that led to the Maasai developing in such a way and other ethnic groups developing in different ways? Can we say that the Maasai culture is simply authentic, indigenous, and/or pre-modern when it seems to be so powerfully affected by a postmodern European, American, and Asian consumer culture? Economically speaking, how do we assess the value of any of the objects, and psychologically speaking, why do we want them? Is the global market good for providing a means for the Maasai to survive as a culture in the McDonaldizing world, or does it trap them in a vicious cycle of undevelopment and poverty?

The Suits and Trappings of Shanti; or, The Pain of Disco

If you like Bollywood movies — with all the singing, dancing, costumes, and scenary — you’ll love Om Shanti Om, produced in 2006. I just watched it yesterday. One of my colleagues screens a Bollywood film every semester for her friends, followed by a lot of delicious food and things that go with food… such as conversation. Usually, these films are like 3 hour music videos with predictable romantic plots, but Om Shanti Om is somewhat different than the usual Bollywood fare, because it is a parody of itself… and of the whole Bollywood film industry.

I’m blogging on this in part because my theory class just began reading The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee, which is an amusing novel that takes place in seventeenth-century New England, alludes multiple times to Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and then travels to the cost of India via the ships of the East India Companyat the very beginning of England’s mercantile and colonial project there.

What do these two texts have in common? Honestly, not much, except that I happen to be teaching one at roughly the same time as I watched the other, and both have something to do with India. Mostly, I just want an excuse to post up this YouTube video of a song from Om Shanti Om — “Dard-e-disco” — because I think it’s hilarious.  The chorus translates as “In my heart is the pain of disco, pain of disco, pain of disco.”

For a translation of the lyrics to the song, go this website here, and scroll down to “The Pain of Disco.”

But perhaps I can think of a more significant relation between the two texts. The ”Pain of Disco” scene in the movie reminded me of a passage in Holder of the World, which is just as much a “romance novel” as it is a “postcolonial” one. In this one passage, a fisherman on the Coromandel Coast of India witnesses an English man and woman riding horseback on the beach  and kissing in public. He is very excited and decides to move to Europe to experience what he imagines must be an exotic and liberating world “without rules.” Of course, at the time, Puritan New England, where the two characters came from, had just witnessed repressive witch trials, so it was hardly a liberated world without rules. But in seventeenth-century India, the sort of European one was likely to encounter would have been an outlaw. (Is it any different today? I don’t know.)  What I like about this passage is the way it flips the gaze — an Indian fantasizing wrongly about Europe in the same manner that the Europeans were at that time fantasizing about India (and the novel proceeds to allude to one of those fantasies: John Dryden’s 1675 play, Aureng-Zebe.)

And I guess I like how the movie Om Shanti Om also comments (very indirectly) on India’s relationship to America through this video and through the plot. In a sense, the movie is reversing the scopophilic gaze we got in Slumdog Millionaire, that I blogged on a few months ago [here]. So, basically, that’s the topic of my blog post today – how the novel Holder of the World and the movie Om Shanti Om both deconstruct the long,  historically convoluted, transnational relationship between East and West.

SPOILER ALERT: Seriouisly skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie and want to. The plot has two parts. Part one takes place inside the Bollywood of the 1970s, as a young man named Om struggling to become a famous actor falls in love with a rising young starlet named Shanti — the star of a movie fittingly titled Dreamy Girl. Om eventually discovers that Shanti is not only secretly married to the producer but also pregnant with his child. The producer fears this might interfere with the success of his Bollywood film company, so he decides to kill her and hence becomes the arch-villain of the story. When our hero Om finds out, he tries to save Shanti and also dies. So ends part one. Part two is thirty years later. Our hero has been reincarnated as the son of the most successful Bollywood actor — something like the Bollywood version of Charlie Sheen, son of Martin Sheen, or Michael Douglass, son of Kirk Douglass. Anyway, his name is still Om, but at first our reincarnated hero is a spoiled, self-centered brat (like Charlie Sheen). This all changes when he accidentally visits the scene of his and Shanti’s death. There, he is psychically merged with his previous self. His two identities become united, and he remembers the crime that he witnessed. For the rest of the movie, he attempts to catch the villain the same way Hamlet tried to catch his uncle in Shakespeare’s play — by reproducing the crime in art form. Coincidentally, the villain has just recently returned from America, where he has been making millions of dollars as a film producer for the past thirty years — ever since that fated day of his criminal act. As in Hamlet, Om’s efforts fail because the woman he hires to be Shanti can not convincingly play the role, but fortunately for our sense of poetic justice, the real ghost of Shanti (not just her “suits and trappings”) appears and gets her revenge.

Although the villain’s detour in America is a minor part of the plot, it is significant. It  reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (published 2001, just a month or so before 9/11)  in which America is a place of refuge for a character who has committed crimes in his home country, and hence “America” psychically and symbolically takes on all sorts of strange, convoluted, and contradictory connotations that you might imagine it would take for a character who is running from his past and toward an indeterminate future. In the case of Om Shanti Om, consider that this movie is a parody of Bollywood, and the fact that the evil film producer would flee Bollywood because of his crime and go to Hollywood (which doesn’t just rhyme with Bollywood, right?) seems more than a little bit suggestive. And what it seems to me to be suggesting is something about the transnational nature of the culture industry itself.

But what?

As I mentioned in my blog about Slumdog Millionaire, the real question one should be asking about it is not “what does this say about India” (which is what the mainstream media was asking), but rather “what does this movie say about Europeans and Americans?” Similarly, Om Shanti Om and its self-consciously silly video on “The Pain of Disco” suggests not something about American disco or Hollwyood, but about how India feels about its relationship to the American culture industry — perhaps at the heart of this relationship is both a dream and a crime.

Found in Tranference

There are two inspirations for this post. First, an acquaintance of mine circulated on one of those “online social networks“ a YouTube clip of this music video “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” by the band Camera Obscura, in which the boy and the girl dance through the shopping district of Shibuya in Tokyo for no sensible reason at all. Second, I’m going to be leading a three-week study-abroad trip in Japan this May, and since I don’t really have anything to blog about this week, I thought I’d blog about something that relates to my upcoming trip… even if the music video doesn’t really relate to my trip… or relate to anything at all.

Except maybe it does…. I’m going to try to say something immensely clever by the end of this post. What that will be, I don’t know yet. I hope you’re as excited and shaking with anticipation as I am about it. Anyway, here’s the music video, which my aforementioned acquaintance from the unnamed online social network claimed would be an “optical seducation.”

Oh, oh, so fun, so fun, indeed — a seductive frolic through color and 60’s kitsch. I’d never heard of the band Camera Obscura before, but because of the location in Shibuya, I was reminded of the movie, Lost in Translation. And if you haven’t seen this movie yet, you should. And if you don’t think you should, then it’s quite possible that you’ve got, um, you know… “issues.”

That movie came out in 2003, and the song about Lloyd came out in 2006, and so maybe the people in Camera Obscura saw the movie… but so what? Who cares that the synapses of my distrubed brain connected one thing with the other?

But here’s the thing — the thing of the two things. The two things are opposites. The music video is the reverse of the movie.

What? Is this the clever thing I promised?… Hold on.

The movie of course is about two characters — Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanson — who are “lost” even before they get to Japan, but who are even more lost in Japan where they don’t know the language or the culture. Obviously the whole “being lost” thing is a metaphor for how meaningless their lives had become before they even arrived on the scene. But they don’t realize their existential lostness until they encounter a literal lostness – similar to the TV show Lost.  (Except the literal lostness is actually the metaphorical vehical to explore their existential lostness.) Although the movie seems at first to be about their confrontation with the “other” foreign culture, we eventually realize that the real other is their own self.  I’ve written about the American fascination with Japanese otherness before [here]. Eventually Murray and Johanson become friends, come to like being in Japan… and find that their lives have meaning. In other words, they translate themselves. That is to say, it is their confrontation with otherness, with strangers, that allows them to reconcile themselves to their own internal otherness — to the fact that they had long before become strangers to themselves.

The music video “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” [lyrics]  would seem to be the total opposite. Instead of a confrontation with the other, the music video is fantasy escape into total otherness — the Shibuya skyline, the retro-60s clothing and furniture, the ecstacy, etc.  This is what Freud calls “transference” when you redirect your libidinal desires or feelings onto an idealized object. In this case, the idealized object is the metonymic symbolization of perfect happiness, and I’m using the word somewhat differently than Freud. For him, the object of transference was the doctor himself — the One who knows all,  the one who knows the secret cure. But the culture industry is in many ways a substitute doctor. And in the case of the music video, the singer longs to be the happy, skipping blond couple who seem to have some secret knowledge of the way to happiness. This is the solution to her identity, which is why she sings, ”I know you can stay a girl by holding a boy’s hand.” The knowledge of this secret happiness is key, especially since the singer clearly knows that she does not know it. And in a sense, she doesn’t want to BE them at all (because who would want to, really?); she just wants to know what they know. She is “ready to be heartbroken.”

This is the secret to happiness, she believes… a secret she wants but doesn’t really want… but of course the writers of the song don’t really believe that. They are playing the standard love narrative, which soons becomes uncanny and strange, when the couple skips past the allusion to Andy Warhol’s famously postmodern Brillo boxes and we discover how completely reproducable Lloyd is. Immediately after the Brillo/Lloyd boxes we enter a Hollywood cinemascape from a 50s musical. The “boy” is, like the Hollywood romantic musical, a fabrication — a substitute for another, a constructed thing that confers identity on the girl. There is no unique “him” that is needed. Any “him” will do.

So, on the one hand we have Lost in Translation, with its fearful confrontation with otherness that leads the characters out of their psychological feeling of void. And on the other hand, we have the music video, with its desire for otherness that reminds the singer (if not also us) that her life is not the idealized one — an other that seems to be not just difference, but the big Other. The big Other with a capital O (according to Lacan) is the symbolic order that demands the subject not necessarily conform to it, but — at least — relate to IT somehow, whatever IT is, which of course we don’t really know because we only know that by holding the boy’s hand,  the girl gets some kind of status conferred upon her.

So, I’m almost done, amost done trying to sound clever. So, here’s the thing: in a sense, the music video is the flip side of the movie. What does this dialectic between two opposites teach us? Search me, I’ve lost myself.

Theorizing Spaces and the ICC

My father just told me about this new blog he heard about, called Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa, and I am interested in this blog for two reasons: one, I work with Oromo-Americans, and two, I happen to be going on a faculty development trip to Kenya in June, and the organizer/leader of this trip happens to study humanitarianism in Africa (though I have no idea whether he’s heard of this blog or would agree or disagree with the arguments put forth in it.) Its latest post is about the International Criminal Court’s issuance of an arrest warrent four days ago for Omar Al Bashir, the president of Sudan, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The blogger begins by observing that the 7-year-old ICC has so far only been willing to override the soverignty of a nation in Africa (and never anywhere else.) There is a troubling irony here. The United States hypocritically refuses to be held accountable to the ICC at the same time that it argues that all other nations should be held accountable. In contrast, the African nations all signed on to the ICC in hopes that the rule of law would protect them, but their voices are rarely heeded compared to the strong voice of the U.S. Hence, the ICC has become yet another instrument of U.S. and European neo-colonial control. What’s interesting about this mechanism of control, besides America’s all-too-painfully-obvious hypocrisy, is that the African nations willingly subjected themselves to it. Moreover, the ICC would seem to repeat some of the early 18th and 19th century examples of colonial morality when the Europeans imagined themselves as being obligated in some sort of Christian way to help the poor Africans even though it was the Europeans themselves who caused the problems for Africa in the first place (i.e., conquest, slavery, etc.).  The blogger concludes that African nations should reject the ICC, and he does so even though he fully recognizes Sudananese government’s terrible deeds.

I’d like to add a literary poststructuralist side to that blogger’s postcolonial argument. There is something curious with the European sense of space. On the one hand, geopolitical spaces are rigidly defined. Africa is Africa, and Europe is Europe — culturally and politically distinct. What happens in Africa is (according to this spatial logic) a problem with the African culture or with the African leaders, who should be held responsible for the tragedies there (even though their leaders are almost always partially subject to a confusing mixture of organizations with divergent agendas such as the International Monetary Fund, the United States, mineral and agricultural corportations (i.e., oil, coffee, cotton), various non-governmental organizations, etc.)

On the other hand, and at the same time, both the ICC and many of the humanitarian organizations imagine themselves as space-less… as utopically transcending all geopolitical and cultural locations. This is the same kind of utopian logic put forward by cosmopolitans, citizens of the world, and global citizens (who advocate for such lovely things as peace and democracy but oddly seem to forget that one’s legal rights as a citizen are guaranteed by a concrete, constituted government not by an abstract ideal.)  By inhabiting such a non-place, the ICC and other such global citizen organizations purify themselves from complicity with evil. But as Zizek has pointed out in his recent book Violence, many of the global institutions manage a systemic violence that produces mass famine, drought, and disease, but this systemic violence is rarely discussed or brought before the courts because there is no single event to report on and no single action to bring to trial. While the ICC is nowhere (nowhere specifically), systemic violence is (by definition) everywhere, and it’s that kind of violence that is often the underlying cause of local “crimes against humanity” (a phrase which seems to be deployed as a legal euphemism for almost-but-not-quite genocide.)

In other words, the question we should be asking as theorists is not simply whether or not the ICC should have issued the warrant on Omar Al Bashir, but why it hasn’t issued warrants for the president of every member state. And since many of these member states are democratic, perhaps the ICC should really be issuing warrants to arrest the people who voted for those presidents (i.e., you and me.)

I admit that I’m getting a bit wingnutty, and I also admit that the Darfur crisis is not something I know much about, except what I hear from time to time in the news. And before anyone starts throwing bloggy-cyber-stones at me, I must add that I really, really don’t mean to suggest that Omar Al Bashir is innocent or that all African leaders should be let off the hook just because we know the extent to which Africa’s problems are in part caused by colonial and neo-colonial mechanisms of control. To the contrary.

And I definitely don’t mean to suggest at all that we should not taking the Darfur crisis seriously. I do take it seriously, as do I take the famine in Guatemala (which was sparked by a coup d’etat organized by the United States), as do I take the millions who have died in the Congo (a situation sparked by the assassination of Congo’s president… also by the United States) . . . . as do I take the millions who have died or suffered all around but never make the headline news.

Such concern motivates the many hours I spend working with (not for – notice the difference in preposition) the Oromo, whom I’ve blogged about before here and here  — a people who suffer because Ethiopia’s political alliance with the United States actually fosters crimes against humanity. Ironically, the United States has repeatedly taken the moral high ground when it asks the Ethiopian government to cease such actions just as the UN and ICC asks Sudan to cease such actions, but then at the same time the United States pressures Ethiopia to invade Somalia and to protect its capital investments, etc.

One could also argue against me and say, well, geez, what use it is to deconstruct the spatial order of the ICC? We must do something! After all, people are dying there! And without such a spatial order (or “world order” or “geopolitical order”), we have no grounds for ethical action or political agency! Against that statement, I would say this: in addition to thinking we must do something to help them over there about localized episodic violence, we might also think about what we are doing all the time over here that is complicit with globalized systemic violence. As we begin to learn about so-called “others” and other cultures, we should also start with a questioning of ourselves, of our own place in this spatial order, and of the degree to which the spatial order as it has been legally constituted protects our privileged position within it and inoculates us from culpability. If we think about this more globally, in other words, we as individuals might be able to work with the African governments and other African organizations more constructively.

So far, what I’m saying may sound all too “poly-sci” and not “lit” (and I’m a literature professor by training), but imagine writing a novel or memoir or journalistic piece about this situation. What are you going to include? How are you going to connect the dots? Here, I find that the form of the novel has incredible value because of its unique ability to connect personal lived experience with geopolitical concerns and its ability to highly the nuances of contradictory and paradoxical situations.

How to Write about Africa

I just re-read Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay, “How to Write about Africa” for the second time. It was published in the journal Granta in 2005. Since then, Wainaina has been profiled in the special issue of Vanity Fair magazine about Africa (edited by Bono!) two years ago and appeared as a guest on Krista Tippet’s show Speaking of Faith last December, where he shocked the poor, idealistic Tippet by pointing out that he’d often rather westerners do nothing to help Africa than all the stupid, misguided somethings that they do. He is almost as fearful of guilty white liberals as he is of avaricious neoliberals from London and militant neocons from Washington D.C. (and that’s saying something, because those mo-fo’s are scary-ass… you know what I’m saying?)

Anyway, Wainaina’s essay wonderfully exposes the way white westerners have represented Africa (or mis-represented… or in Lacanian terms, misrecognized, meconnaissance, because of their own psychological issues), and I’ve decided to use it in my class tomorrow (and wish I had used it in my class last week) on “representation.” So, I don’t have much to say in my blog today except “You got the link; now read it!!!”

And moreover, I now want to assert that every teacher of classes about race, history, African studies, Asian studies, Latin American studies, geography, international relations, peace studies, postcolonial literature, intercultural competency (whatever that is), etc., etc., should begin their classes with it… not only as a means of fostering a healthy skepticism among the students, but also and even more importantly to remind themselves not to be stupid teachers. (I often need this reminder myself.)

Even More Globalization Cinema: Duplicity

So…uh… yah, my addiction to globalization cinema continues — this time with Duplicity, starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. That makes three globalization thrillers for Clive, first Children of Men back in 2005, and now two more, practically within a month of each other. As you may recall, I blogged on The International exactly five weeks ago [here]. And a couple years ago, our theory pal  Slavoj Žižek talked about Children of Men in the context of global capitalism, and you can watch the YouTube of the clip which appeared on the DVD special features [here]. And, by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, Children of Men is pretty damn good. And by the way, can you believe that there is already a journal dedicated to this guy? Žižek Studies. Very tacky, in my opinion, to create a journal about someone still alive, but nobody asked me… and maybe nobody asked Žižek. 

So, apparently, with three movies in rapid succession, Clive Owen has somehow become something like the spokesperson for this new genre that I am calling the globalization thriller, beating out the prettier but less articulate Daniel Craig, who only has the two Bond films to his globo-thriller credit, unless you count his not-so-memorable role in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Perhaps it’s Clive’s clever-sounding British accent, or maybe it’s his permanent, five-o’clock-shadow scruffiness that seems to vaguely symbolize the shadowy ”new world order” of globalization, as if globalization must be represented by a character who is simultaneously civilized (in that imperialistic British way) and scruffy (also in that imperialistic British way — since empire building is never actually that civilized and is always actually brutally chaotic and… ruggedly unshaven.)

My question is this: how to analyze this movie? (And I guess I ask this question because apparently I’m obsessed with globalization thrillers and maybe should write a book on the subject… if only I had the time… or were even more obsessed than I pretend to be.) On the one hand, we can analyze it the way we were taught to analyze poems in high school — to find the meaning. So…

… even though the story is told in a disjointed, deliberately confusing way, the plot is actually straightforward. An American CIA agent (Julia Roberts) and a British MI6 agent (Clive Owen) decide to leave their government jobs and become spies for rival cosmetics corporations. The metaphorical/allegorical concept of the movie is obvious but nevertheless well conceived and artfully done. Like an earlier movie starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the spy world is a metaphor for their romantic relationship… or, maybe their romantic relationship is a metaphor for the spy world. It’s hard to tell which is the metaphor and which is the meaning, but in any case, the directors take considerable effort to make one express the other — to make the standard conventional plot structures of the romantic comedy parallel the standard conventional plot structures of the spy thriller.

So, the two lovers/spies find it hard to trust each other, because… uh… you know…  they are spies/lovers, and everyone knows what lovers/spies/spies/lovers are like, especially when one is a metaphor for the other….

Hold on, I’m confusing myself.

Uh… did I mention that they don’t trust each other?… And did I mention that, despite their lack of trust, or perhaps precisely because of it, they have secretly teamed up (because they are secret agents, after all… and secret lovers) to steal the new secret cosmetic formula and sell it on the global market and become rich, rich, rich, to live out their days in secret-lover-agent bliss in one of those gorgeous global locations…. Where exactly? The particular location hardly matters, as over the course of the movie, they are doing their secret-agent-lover business in posh-picture-postcard locations such as Rome, Miami, The Bajamas, New York, and Zurich. And any one cosmetically beautiful (pun intended) location could be substituted for any other cosmetically beautiful location in the genre of the global thriller, so long as there is something cosmetically classic like Italian architecture and/or something decadent and unshaven (metaphorically speaking) like endless white beaches, cosmopolitan martinis, and high stakes gambling.

Spoiler Alert: as it turns out, in the end, they learn to trust each other because they discover they really are in love (awwww), and AND AND, they learn that love is all they need, just as the Beatles promised us, which they learn when they find themselves suddenly poor… duped by they very same corporation they sought to dupe. And we learn that there never was any secret cosmetic formula for curing baldness, because apparently that symbol for male virility (a lion’s mane of Sampsonite hair) isn’t necessary when what you really value is at home, waiting for you (awwww.)

So, the moral of the story is that the Beatles were right, all we need is love… lesson learned. This is the allegory… yawn.

But, on the other hand, isn’t it more interesting to read this movie metonymically (instead of metaphorically) — to chase the chain of signifiers across the cultural landscape of the postmodern twenty-first century? Isn’t the more interesting question, why now? Why at this precise moment in the spring of 2009 is Hollywood giving us this movie about spies for multinational corporations? Okay, admittedly, the answer to this may be all too obvious, given that we’re all experiencing the economic recession and given that we’re all hearing global corporate scandal after global corporate scandal on the news. Why else would the script writers include a lengthy monologue by the CEO explaining how human nature may have gone into genetic recession (pun intended), but the multinational corporation has taken mankind’s place in the evolutionary order… no longer are individual genius and moral fortitude the seats of invention; rather groups of human beings incorporating themselves are…?… Gag, OK, I admit it, maybe the metonymic reading isn’t so muy interesante either. 

Perhaps the really interesting thing to do here is put the metaphorical reading in conversation with the metonymic reading… a conversation we might call a dialectic if we want to sound real fancy-pantys. After all, according to Jacques Lacan, we create metaphors to explain our existence, and we chase metonymies to fill in our lack, our feeling of void.

Damn, I’m confusing myself again…. No, wait… here it goes, I can do this.

What does the lover/spy metaphor have to do with the metonymic context of global capitalism and its void? What indeed? The very lesson that the romantic story distracts us from is that at the end of the day, the cosmetic company actually had no real product. (It is a cosmetic company, after all, get it?) And apparently, even though real corporations are supposed to be built on “trust” (both in the moral sense and in the banking sense of the word), this one is built on “duplicity.” It spent millions of dollars spinning the simulation (or simulacrum, if we want to sound fancy-pantsy in a postmodernist sort of way) of its economic potential, all the while trying to outwit the other company. And at the end of the day, what they actually had… and what we in the audience are left with is… nothing… nothing but the love between Julia Roberts and Clive Owens… and really, not even that, because all we really have is the image of that love, and a group of capitalist conspirators chuckling voyeristically (like the movie’s audience itself) at a clandestine videotape of Roberts and Owen lovingly play-acting their duplicity on their cheap futon mattress on the floor of a decrepit apartment.

More Globalization Cinema: The International

Those of you poor saps who read my blog regularly may remember back last November when I wrote about “Globalization Theory in the New James Bond film Quantum of Solace.” What I noticed there is that the new Bond was different from the old Bond because the way people today conceptualize the world has changed. But the new Bond is certainly not unique, as so many films today seem to be responding to a vaguely understood economic and social phenomenon popularly known as globalization.  For example, consider the last year’s versions of The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man, in which the superheros find themselves in the ghettos of Brazile and the mountains of Afghanistan fighting againt a globalized, corporate military industrial complex. This isn’t the kind of superhero movie I grew up with; something  out there has obviously changed. But what?

And of course, many university instructors are now teaching classes about globalization through such films as Dirty Pretty Things, Babel, Lord of War, Blood Diamond, Syriana, and Children of Men. There is even a new guide book on The Cinema of Globalization. Hollywood seems to be reading the journalism of Thomas Friedman and Naomi Klein about globalization, as well as such sensationalistic memoirs as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, if not also the academic theories about globalization such as Saskia Sassen’s Globalization and Its Discontents and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire.

So, of course, I couldn’t resist going to see the new movie starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, The International, about a multinational bank that attempts to buy and sell missiles and manipulate the economy of war. I wanted to see if it would do what I predicted in my blog on Bond that all suspense thrillers about globalization would do…. and lo! It did.

Thing one: in the new suspense thriller, the evil organization is always part of a network of legimitimate and illigitimate organizations. This is what globalization theorists tend to call the “network” form. So, no longer is the good guy agent operating on behalf of a national government opposed to a nefarious crime syndicate. Now, the nation state is unwittingly part of a larger global network of legal and illegal activities that crisscross national borders. And in The International, Clive Owen’s character, Interpol agent Louis Salinger travels around the world to prove the nefarious deeds of this bank (just as all suspense thriller characters jump around the world so easily these days, as if they were Hayden Christiansen’s character in Jumper.) As he does so, he discovers how difficult it will ever be to prosecute this bank on acount of how enmeshed its nefarious deeds are in the global network. Of course, whereas in the real world this network is a complex chaotic mess, in the cinematic world the dark side of the network is personified. In this case, it is the evil banker, and the movie is obviously capitalizing (pun intended) on recent popular frustration with the many banking scandals. While banks collapse due to corrupt practices and governments scramble to bail them out, ordinary people lose jobs and starve. So, it’s certainly not the least bit surprising that a movie about an evil bank would appear in theaters at this particular moment in history.

Thing two: as Negri and Hardt argue in Empire, there is no longer anything outside Empire. What they mean by this is that in the old days, individual nation states had imperial ambitions to control more and more territory and competed with each other, but much of that territory remained outside their direct influence. Today, however, although nation states and smaller tribal communities still exist, they are all part of a single socio-economic structure that Negri and Hardt call Empire. So, in The International, banks and arms dealers are selling weapons to both sides of any political conflict. It doesn’t matter which political side of the fence you are on. It’s all part of the same global economy.

Thing three: in contrast to yesterday’s way of looking at international relations, or relations between nations, in today’s way of looking at things we analyze the relation of the local to the global, as in the environmentalist slogan, think globallay, act locally. Clearly the global economy transforms local cultures, often turning those cultures into commodities that can be sold. This dialectic between the global and the local has been called by theorists glocalisation. And in The International, local political conflicts proliferate in the background as effects of the evil multinatinal bank’s effort to benefit from the arms trade.

Thing four: because there is no longer an outside to Empire, the moral dilemma of global suspense thrillers is how can the good guy confront an evil that is part of the very same system (or network of relations) as the good guy. As the movie tells us, how can we go after a multinational bank that is protected by the very system of justice that would prosecute it? And how can an Interpol agent do any good “lost in the complexities of international law?” Of course, as with the new James Bond, the agent can either abide by the principles of law and order or can forego those principles and become a rogue agent. But, unlike the fantasy world of Bond, Clive Owen in The International finds he can’t operate outside the system. So, following one of the many fortune cookie maxims that saturate the dialogue of the movie, he realizes that when there is no way out, he must go further in.

Thing five: part of this opposition between a supposedly ineffective international law and the undulating, extra-legal, network form of global relations is an opposition we see in globalization theory. Some globalization theorists argue for the importance for international law, regulation, and transparency for preventing corporate abuses and war. Others argue that the legal system only protects the most egregious forms of economic exploitation, and instead values the multitude that resists such exploitation through its extra-legal connectivity. And indeed, in The International, the good guys are always circumventing protocols and resisting the evil bankers because of personal bonds — what Negri and Hardt call “affect.”