Global Community?: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Exchanges - Hardcover

Henrik Enroth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783484721 ISBN 13: 9781783484720

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015

Synopsis

In the wake of globalization, the humanities and social sciences have explored the existence and the possibilities of human community on a global scale. But these investigations have been developed within separate academic disciplines, with little exchange of ideas across disciplinary boundaries. This book draws together a variety of perspectives to offer an interdisciplinary, and critical, examination of global community past and present. The volume opens with a contribution by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's most renowned scholars in the humanities, then follows up with original contributions by established and promising young researchers from across the humanities and the social sciences. The chapters provide conceptual, normative and empirical investigations of global community, examining it through the lenses of postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, world literature, transnational networks, and global ethics. The book contributes to a renewed debate about the past, present and future of global community, allowing for a broader and deeper understanding of these timely phenomena across disciplinary boundaries.

About this title

About the Author

Henrik Enroth is an Associate Professor at Linnaeus University. Douglas Brommesson is an Associate Professor at Lund University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Global Community?

Transnational and Transdisciplinary Exchanges

By Henrik Enroth, Douglas Brommesson

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Henrik Enroth, Douglas Brommesson Brommesson and Contributors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-472-0

Contents

Preface, 
Introduction: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Exchanges Henrik Enroth and Douglas Brommesson, 
1 Global? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 
2 Narratives of Global Political Space: Globalization Theory or Historical Sociology and Civilizational Analysis Martin Hall, 
3 Medieval World Society Meets R2P: Moral and Legal Personality in Thomas Aquinas Douglas Brommesson, 
4 Global Community as a Response to the Cosmopolitan Solidarity Problem Luke Ulas, 
5 Creating a Collaborative Community: Problems and Possibilities of Collaborative Autobiographical Writing in Jonathan Morgan's Finding Mr Madini Jenny Siméus, 
6 Community in Fragments: Reading Relation in the Fragments of Heraclitus Carrie Giunta, 
7 Virtual Religious Communities: Old Wine in New Wineskins? Jørgen Straarup, 
8 The "Spirit of Internationalism" in the Prewar Women's Movement Susan Hinely, 
9 Community? Henrik Enroth, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
About the Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Global?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The real title of the book that I published in 2012 is An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalizability. In the end of the book this secret is revealed. That to me is more important than globalization: that nearly everything is globalizable, medicine and poison. Yet it is also true that only capital and data globalize. Everything else is damage control. If we catch up epistemically with this situation, we will have just a couple of global languages, and a world governance, undoubtedly pernicious and feudal in its workings, which will operate not in a nation, not in a political way, but in a cosmopolitical way. When we emphasize ideal global communities we begin to sense that there is a mismatch between nation-state and world governance. The answer to that is not notions of community, however. They take us back to somewhat primitive social contracts subsumed under a financialized global economy.

The global histories that we project today are usually international histories. A group of us have started a project involving Africa and Asia, variously called "Radiating Globality" or "Old Histories, New Geographies," which tries to undo this tendency. I hope you will be able to read some of these efforts in the coming years. Today I ask you to look back in another direction as well.

The tacit globalizer before the globe was ever thought of is reproductive heteronormativity. The word hetero here is not the opposite of homo but the opposite of auto. Everything, including capital, rises in this difference between the auto and the hetero. This is a much larger globalizer. If one could, in fact, begin to think of plotting such a history, which cannot be fully done because it goes beyond the idea of agency, it would be different from international histories of people traveling, or from world system theories which think that economic systems automatically mean cultural systems.

Part of the work of the "Radiating Globality" group is to understand the relationship between my hometown Kolkata and the Chinese city of Kunming. They have traded since the eighth century. We are trying to reestablish what this might mean in the making of global histories. As for "world literature," it aims for a kind of cosmopolitan

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783484721
• ISBN 13: 9781783484720
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Henrik Enroth, Douglas Brommesson