Late Globalization Flavors and Stripes: Culture Theory Aspects

The multiple meanings and variants of the term “late globalization” arise from the fact that both components of this term – “late” as well as “globalization” – can take on different meanings depending on the context of use. In this post, I want to introduce the notion of “late globalization” as some culture theorists are beginning to interpret it (perhaps more accurately, “sense it”, since there is not much interpretation available yet).

To culture theorists, “globalization” has been happening for a very long time, even a couple of millennia if we take the early perilous journeys of Silk Road and similar merchant-adventurers, traveling long routes by long caravans or in very early sailing boats. With Europe’s explorers, merchants, and conquerors – facilitating by new technologies that came out of Europe, such as multi-mast sailing ships, steam ships, and powerful gunboats – the center of globalization efforts came to be located squarely in Europe, first southern Europe and later northern Europe. As we well know, for more than a century, Britannia ruled the waves and the sun never set on the British Empire. From late 19th century, the rise of America gradually shifted the center of globalization initiatives across the Atlantic into the United States, with the U.S. global dominance – the Pax Americana – reaching a zenith in the late 1960s. Since then, we are living in a steadily multi-polarizing world that is an arena for many contests in economic, military, and cultural terms.

Culture theorists – these folks are of course very different in their perspectives from international business theorists who mainly want to use “culture” as an explanatory and strategic concept – therefore have been interested in how the changes in globalization have shaped tastes, styles, aesthetics, and other elements that shape culture (and particularly popular culture, the culture with a small “c”, rather than Culture with a capital “c” or high culture). Culture theorists have been reflecting on for a while that globalization has accelerated cultural traffic across national boundaries.

Indeed, from the culture theory perspective (or at least the way I conceptualize it from the culture theory perspective), globalization has gone through a long life cycle – incipience in the early adventure-explorer days, growth in the long European phase of first merchant and later gunboat explorers, and a maturity phase that lasted through much of the 20th century, with American ascendance contested to some extend by Japan and Germany. In this sense, globalization is now likely in a late maturity phase, with the intensity of cultural traffic at an all-time high.

While he did not use the term “late globalization” explicitly, the influential work of Arjun Appadurai – recognizing the five cross-national interconnecting and intermingling “scapes” (ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes) – provided a first major window on what late globalization (in the “lifecycle of globalization” sense) looks and feels like. In the waning decade of the 20th century, Appadurai could sense the changing character of globalization – of late globalization, in my view – and penned the very influential essay “Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy” where he introduced his now-famous five “scapes”. Literary theorist Christian Moraru has gone a step beyond, and introduced the term “late globalization”, in a lifecycle-of-globalization sense, in his 2011 book “Cosmodernism: American narrative, late globalization, and the new cultural imaginary”. The work by Moraru is focused squarely on “late global” literary genres and styles. There is clearly a need to push the cultural lifecycle-of-globalization concept(s) of late globalization in several other disciplinary dimensions – economic, political, sociological and more. In our work at TBRP, we plan to do so, and will keep the readers here posted as we make further progress in our work, in this “TBRP Perspectives” space.

Nikhilesh Dholakia

Rhode Island, USA

July 12, 2015

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