Storia e teoria della globalizzazione [155126]
Laurea Magistrale in Studi Europei e
Internazionali
a.a. 2010/2011
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
•
focuses on cultural theories of globalization, in particular feminist
and postcolonial
•
surveys key cultural debates on globalization concerning transnationalism, interculturality,
cosmopolitanism, and emerging notions of global subjectivity and citizenship
•
aims at defining the keywords and presenting the
main issues in the cultural debate on globalization in order to foster
critical approaches to modes of thinking about the present context.
REQUIREMENTS AND
EVALUATION
•
Students are expected to articulate their critical positions through oral
presentations as well as written assignments
•
Evaluation criteria:
1. attendance and active
participation (20% of final grade)
2. three short essays (500 words) on
assigned topics are due during classes (40% of final grade)
3. the final paper (2,000 words) provides
the basis for
4. the final oral exam (40% of final
grade)
READINGS
•
Articles and essays by various authors will be distributed in class.
•
Arjun Appadurai, ed. Globalization.
Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003.
•
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism.
New York:
Palgrave, 2004.
•
Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? London: Seagull Books,
2007.
•
Mina Karavanta and Nina
Morgan, Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating
Humanism and the Global Hybrid. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
FOCUS: GLOBAL SUBJECTS
AND COMMUNITIES
The course "Global
Subjects and Communities" focuses on cultural representations of the
contradictions produced by considering the global as the site of human
associations: on the one hand the global increasingly fosters national
culture, and on the other it makes national identity less viable. It
addresses issues captured by provocative questions raised in the popular
arena such as: Is globalization a revamping of Americanization? Is multiculturalism
bad for women? Is the question of race meaningful in the global context?
We will consider diverse positions as articulated by theorists including
Giorgio Agamben, Arjun Appadurai, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Leela Gandhi, Edouard Glissant,
Inderpal Grewal, Donna Haraway,
Revathi Krishnaswami,
Walter Mignolo, Susan Moller
Okin, Donald Pease, R. Radhakrishnan, Edward Said, Saskia Sassen, Elaine Scarry, Joan W. Scott, and Gayatri
C. Spivak.
Seminars are designed to invite students to reflect upon the politics of the
humanities, the representation of the human, and the definition of human
rights in the global age.
SEMINARS
•
The course is partly shared with students in the Laurea
Magistrale in Letterature
Euroamericane, course Lingua e Letterature
Angloamericane (1st and 2nd joint years), First
Part, and students in the Laurea Magistrale in Filosofia, course
Studi di Genere.
•
Students are strongly encouraged to share with the group their areas
of expertise and articulate the issues proposed for discussion from specific
points of view—International Studies, Gender Studies, Philosophy, and
American Studies.
SYLLABUS OUTLINE
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 4
Introduction to the course. Reading
and paper assignments.
Lecture # 1 "Why Theory?"
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 9
Lecture # 2 "New American Studies: from Americanization to
Globalization"
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 11
Lecture # 3 "Gender Studies: From Gender Trouble to Transnational
Feminisms"
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 16
Seminar # 1: Is Globalization Equal To Americanization?
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 18
Seminar # 2: Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism?
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 23
Seminar # 3: Multiculturalism or Feminism?
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 25:
Lecture # 4: "Planetary Feminist Subjectivity"
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 30
Seminar # 5: Is Race a Global Issue?
THURSDAY DECEMBER 2:
Lecture # 5 by Prof. Mina Karavanta,
University of Athens: "Reconstellating
Humanism and the Global Hybrid"
TUESDAY DECEMBER 7
Seminar # 6: Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Creolization?
THURSDAY DECEMBER 9
Seminar # 7: Can the Subaltern Speak? Who is Listening?
TUESDAY DECEMBER 14
Final discussion: Globalization,
Democracy, Difference
READINGS ASSIGNMENTS
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NOV 16: Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State?
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NOV 18: Edward Said, Humanism and
Democratic Criticism.
•
DEC 2: Mina Karavanta and
Nina Morgan, Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating
Humanism and the Global Hybrid.
•
DEC 9: Arjun Appadurai,
Globalization.
PAPERS ASSIGNMENTS
SHORT PAPERS ARE DUE:
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NOV 16
•
NOV 30
•
DEC 9
FINAL PAPER IS DUE:
•
JAN 20
INTRODUCTORY LECTURES:
OUTLINE
WHY THEORY?
Source: R. Radhakrishnan,
“Theory Democracy and the Public Intellectual,” PMLA 125.3, 2010: 785-94.
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What is the politics of theory today?
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Is theory merely self-reflexive?
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Can theory have a referent—reality, the workd,
history, experience?
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Can self-reflexive thinking negotiate its rigor with the need to say
something about something?
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Theory is deemed capable of epistemological resolutions of truth and
knowledge and radical demystifications and critiques of reality
•
What does theory say?
•
What does theory say about reality?
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Theory should both validate the instrumentality of of
reason and problematize it through critique
•
Theory needs the logic of practical application but it is not
restricted by the economy of the application. It must
resist vulgarization by formulaic application.
Jacques
Derrida (“The Principle of Reason,” Diacritics 13:3, 1983: 3-20)
claims:
•
The purpose of theory is to think through itself as a binding
precondition of thoery’s ability to think about
the world
•
Thus theory must be modal and worldly at the same time
•
How much theory is needed?
•
Can theory make its points without technical language?
Edward
Said has taken on the issue of the worldiness of
theory with passion in order to valorize the academic
critic as public intellectual.
•
Said invites professors who have regrettably become formulaic
professionals to stop “professing” and engage instead in
wall-to-wall discourses (The World, the Text, and the Critic)
•
Said invokes an order of complexity that is accessible so as to
constitute the demos of democracy. In Humanism
and Democratic Criticism he contends:
•
humanism is capable of critiquing itself from within and therefore
there is no need to become posthuman
•
we need a symbiotic articulation between the scholarly practice of the
humanities and the performance of democratic criticism
•
Where does Said stand between populism and high culture?
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The image on Said’s book (a book with
a ticket “ADMIT ALL” inside) has a double function: it returns
the book to worldiness and commits the world to
multilateral secular representation
•
The admission is not a benefaction to the multitude by a few
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Said advocates a worldiness that is to be
achieved inside the book
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the book without the ADMIT ALL ticket is just a book
•
the ticket without the book has nowhere to go
•
Radhakrishnan asks:
•
What makes a book profound, complex? How is the complexity of the
world related to the complexity of literature and philosophy, theory and
criticism?
•
Said asks:
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What language to use in the work of resistance? What is bad or good
writing? My simple answer is simply to avoid jargon that alienates a
potentially wide constituency.
•
The issue is language and its ability to constitute communities. A
broad sense of community is in contrast with specialized communities built on
narrow commonalities.
•
The challenge is how to hold on to the complexity of literature,
philosophy, politics and still make sense to the
many.
•
Said distinguishes between two kinds of complexity: one necessary and
organic to experience, and another gratuituous and
ostentatious. It all comes down to language. Is theory the same language as
literature?
•
Not so simple: not every user of difficult syntax is an Adorno; not every user of simple language is a Hemingway.
There is no pre-given form of content and content of form.
•
Said endorses democratic clarity instead:
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Humanism should be a form of disclosure, not of secrecy or religious
illumination. Expertise has gotten out of control to the extent that they
have become antidemocratic and
even anti-intellectual. At the
heart of what I have been calling the movement of resistance in humanism is
critique, and critique is always restlessly self-clarifying in search of
freedom, enlightenment, more agency
•
Theory should not be an esoteric performance by specialists who keep
the demos out to cultivate a mystique that refuses to be experienced by the
intelligence of the many, that is to say that is anti-intellectual.
•
Academic critics must return to the world through the text
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Thinking should never become a system of thought
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Radhakrishnan insists: Theory as system has occluded life and worldiness
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How can theory’s return to the world be practiced? What is the
relation between methodology and its object? What
counts as methodology?
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How to prevent epistemic violence whereby systematic thought forgets
the worldliness of the world?
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How to resist the usurpation of the critical process of knowledge
production by professional experts?
•
In philosophical terms, in the name of whom is the return to be
initiated?
•
Ranajit Guha, History
at the Limit of World-History:
•
The phenomenological objective is to make sure that the existential
tangles with the epistemological
•
The sociopolitical aim is to ensure that
this tangling will be democratic
•
Yet, not even in the name of Said’s
democratic criticism, is the relation between critical self-reflexivity and
the politics of representation transparent
•
A democracy that simply discharges theory as jargon is not worthwhile
in the long run
•
Theory has a double consciousness. In political
terms:
•
We want a President that is
smarter than us but we do not want
a Dictator
•
Multiple forms of knowing are needed; teachers need to learn from
students
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Who is an intellectual in a democracy?
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Foucault and Deleuze announced: representation
no longer exists
•
Gayatri C. Spivak
critiqued: representation has two valences—philosophical and political
•
Radhakrishnan argues: the mandate of theory is to perform
double-consciously between representation and post-representation
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Representation is flawed but it is what we have
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Why and when should language be simple and intelligible and when may
it be formallyu dense?
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When is language democratic and when elitist and exclusionary?
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The world is an open field in search of heterogeneous forms of semantic, ideological and aesthetic contestation and
play.
•
How can theory both redefine the meaning of accountability and be
accountable to the world? How can it pursue self-reflexivity and problematize representation beyond itself?
•
For the world to be intelligible, it has to be linguistic
in nature. The world is not a mystique nor an
impenetrable aura.
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Judith Butler speaks as a public intellectual: she articulates a
collective, democratic WE on a global-universal scale during times when
difference is degenerating into irrefragable identity politics and the one
world is being fragmented into incommensurable and mutually unyielding
functions
•
Butler is a rigorous theorist
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She uses the voice of theory as the human voice of a situated public
intellectual witnessing and experiencing universal loss, suffering, and
grief. She claims a we—tenuous and contradictory—as the ground
for her ethico-political generalizations
•
Psychoanalysis+Levinas’s ethics
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She combines in the same voice the accent of the general human condition
and the specialist register of theory, which has to work modally
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She refers to two models (psychoanalysis and ethics, Levinas) to coordinate into existence a WE that
transcends the historical WE.
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She identifies in loss and mourning the common ground that brings
people together—human condition
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How to make sense of this common condition? There are 3 subjects to
deal with:
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The general human subject subjected to loss
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The historical conditions under which particular subjects experience
loss
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The subject of a modal discourse
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How to make sense of this common condition?
•
There are 3 subjects to deal with:
•
The general human subject subjected to loss
•
The historical conditions under which particular subjects experience
loss
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The subject of a modal discourse
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Public intellectuals cannot bypass the politics of representation in a
world structured in violence
•
ethics refuses to engage with history, thus failing to address the
contradictions between ontological thinking and historico-political
praxis Public intellectuals cannot bypass the politics of representation in a
world structured in violence
•
ethics refuses to engage with history, thus failing to address the
contradictions between ontological thinking and historico-political
praxis
•
Yet writing for all has a danger: tautological affirmation of the WE
that we already know, of a banal democracy where both we and the all are the
function and result of an untheoretical,
commonsensical pre-packaging
•
The challenge theorists face is: how to line up the coordinates of their
theoretical model with the contradictory, heterogeneous and contingent
whereabouts of life, existence, reality?
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IS REALITY TO BE ADDRESSES IN THE LIGHT OF THEORY, OR SHOULD IT BE THE
OTHER WAY AROUND?
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SHOULDN’T THINKING, RATHER, BRAVELY OPEN UP THE SPACE IN
BETWEEN?
WORKSHOP: identify a
concept that best qualifies your area of inquiry on globalization:
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American Studies + Globalization
= plurality
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International
Studies + Globalization = overlapping
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Gender Studies + Globalization
= dignità
WORKSHOP. Reactions to
Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place
QUESTIONS from G. Spivak, A Critique
of Postcolonial Reason 1999
•
A critique of transnational globalization
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Defines the figure of the native informant
(from ethnography)
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Needed and foreclosed/expelled/erased; A blank on the text that only
the West can inscribe
•
TODAY the migrant and the
postcolonial masquerade as the native informant
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The poorest woman from the South today is the foreclosed native informant
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Production of counternarratives that make visible
the foreclosure of the subject whose lack of access to the position of
narrator is the condition of possibility of scientific, disciplinary European
knowledge of the cultures of others Production of counternarratives
that make visible the foreclosure of the subject whose lack of access to the
position of narrator is the condition of possibility of scientific,
disciplinary European knowledge of the cultures of others
•
Can the Subaltern Speak?
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Efforts to give the subaltern voice are open to dangers
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Sati, widow sacrifice in India,
a rite abolished by the British Empire
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WHITE MEN SAVING BROWN WOMEN FROM BROWN MEN
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The protection of woman becomes a signifier for a good society
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Foucault’s theoretical description of episteme
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CONSIDER for DISCUSSION: GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT & COLONIAL
CIVILIZING MISSION
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Imperialism and globalization use the image of the woman as object of protection from her
own kind
•
The need to acknowledge the role of violence also in the development
of knowledge
•
The paradox of knowing the limits of knowledge
•
The paradox of free choice. The danger of transcending the ethical:
not all soldiers die unwillingly; there are female suicide bombers.
•
Ritual defined as crime rather than patriarchy does not allow feminism
to criticize the episteme: the liberated Indian woman who no longer
self-sacrifices is still defined as wife of.
•
Sati simply means good wife (British version)
•
Between imperialism and patriarchy the woman disappears into a violent
displaced figuration of the Third World Woman caught between tradition and
modernization
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In globalization, the mechanism of aid is supported by the poorest
women of the South, who form the base of globe-girdling struggles (ecology,
resistance to population control), where the boundary between global and
local becomes indeterminate.
•
This is the ground of the emergence of the new subaltern
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DISCUSS NEGOTIABLE SOVEREIGNTY
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Where history is in the process of becoming
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Mythopoesis as practical politics not just philosophical
speculation
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We must always undo the opposition between philosophy and the
practical
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We need false pictures of the future to mobilize radical action
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The revolutionary moment is a moment of false promises
CONSIDER
THE READING
OF TEXT: The institutional production of literary texts constitutes one of the
most important means of
legitimating the dominant sociolopolitical
formation
Melville’s Moby-Dick
(1855)
•
Ignored till the 1920s
•
Declared a classic masterpiece after WWI (Puritan origin, Protestant ethics, Manifest Destiny: excessive text,
disturbing plurivocality, demystification of
American identity Centered on AHAB)
•
Accommodated after WWII and the Cold War (starting in the 1920s
Modernist revival: biographical critics celebrate the extravance
of form because it represents the essentially spiritual reality of American sociopolitical existence. Centered
on ISHMAEL)
•
And now? A globalized reading of the Pequod’s world? How to highlight the RELATIONSHIP
between AHAB and ISHMAEL rather than their opposition? And how to move beyond
the episteme that accommodates both and has served national identity so well?
•
New Americanists’ exilic reading transdisciplinary critical
practice taken from a global perspective. (complicity between Ishmael’s
Emersonian self-reliance and Ahab’s absolute
freedom)
•
Postcolonial multicultural nomadic errant
practice. SAID: independence produced more states but also more vagrants who exist between the old and the new, the
empire and the new state
•
Ishmael’s errant narative
as social praxis
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Transformation of American cultural discourse: achievements of Am
freedom through assimilation of the others
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Spiritual triumph
over social alienation
•
INTRODUCTORY LECTURES TO
SHORT PAPERS on BUTLER-SPIVAK’s Who Sings the Nation State? And on SAID’s Humanism
and Democratic Criticism
DISCUSSION: Gender and
globalization
Drawing from:
S. Moller
Okin’s Is
Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
R. W. Connell’s Masculinity and Globalization
consider the contested
and shifting nature of gender identity at the global as well as the local
level
How are different hegemonic
masculinities and subaltern femininities negotiated and resisted?
READING MATERIAL
From Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan, eds. Edward Said and Jacques
Derrida, Reconstellating Humanism and the Global
Hybrid (Cambridge,
2009)
SEE PHOTOCOPIES
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