Summary
The Duke political scientist whose essay on global capitalism Said quotes at length in “The Clash of Definitions”, the final essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, as the more accurate and persuasive account of the ground Samuel Huntington covers (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.539).
Details
- His essay appeared in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1994, at p.351 as quoted (PDF p.539).
- The situation created by global capitalism explains, in his account as quoted, the global motions of peoples and therefore cultures, the weakening of boundaries among societies and social categories, the replication inside societies of inequalities once associated with colonial differences, simultaneous homogenization and fragmentation within and across societies, the interpenetration of the global and the local, and the disorganization of a world conceived in terms of three worlds or nation-states (quoted PDF p.539).
- The managers of this world situation themselves concede their power to appropriate the local for the global, to admit different cultures into the realm of capital only to break them down and remake them for production and consumption, and to reconstitute subjectivities across national boundaries; those who do not respond — “four-fifths of the global population by the managers’ count” — need not be colonized but are simply marginalized, and “it is easier even than in the heyday of colonialism or modernization theory to say convincingly: It is their fault.” (quoted PDF p.539).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Samuel Huntington, Clash of civilizations, Edward Said