Global Studies and Critical Practice
Touchstone Passages:
Due to Nationalism as the dominant paradigm since the 19th century, cultural achievements have been routinely claimed for nations, and culture has been “nationalized,” territorialized. A different historical record can be constructed based on the contributions to culture formation and diffusion by diasporas, migrants, strangers, brokers . . . A related project would be the history of metropolitan cultures, that is, a counter narrative to the narrative of imperial history. Such historical inquiries may show that hybridization has been taking place all along but has been concealed by religious, national, imperial, and civilizational chauvinisms. (Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture, 82).
Questions to Address:
1) How does the multi-perspectival framework of Global Studies help (or force) us to re-imagine cultural histories? How do we define artistic movements and traditions in this new framework, and how imagine their relation to each other?
2) How in particular do we re-imagine modernity in a global framework? What are the status of high, mass, and popular art in a global network of cultural exchange, a de-centered network of online cultural production, and a global arts market – is the “high, mass, popular” taxonomy adequate to a global context?
Responses
Brian Culver: Postnational Humanities and the Beatles
Afrodesia McCannon: Émile Mâle: A Cautionary Tale