"Worlding" the discourse of Globalization: Power, Inequality, Identity.
Much of the discourse on globalization proceeds from the assumption that it refers to the accelerated movement of people, capital, fashions, ideas, commodities, and other entities across already-constituted borders and settled spaces. In other words, what is qualitiatively new about the events of the last few decades, to this perception, is largely a matter of speed and acceleration. In this paper, I argue that such a view on globalization is (a) deeply depoliticizing; (b) ahistorical and based on a politics of forgetting the material histories of the evolution of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism; (c ) unable to come to grips with the construction and reproduction of identity in late modern times; and, (d) incapable of centering questions of inequality and power in the contemporary world. In order to politicize the study of globalization, to bring to the center the questions of inequality and power, I submit that a re-reading of 'globalization' discourse through the theoretical lenses of three thinkers of the 20th century might be productive: Martin Heidegger, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak. All three of them have written in different ways about “worlding” - of the need to unpack the historical narratives that constitute every moment of the present as a crystallization of genealogies of oppression, inequality, and power. Using the works of these authors, my paper will argue a way of bringing a political edge to the sanitized and benignly capitalist-multiculturalist ethos that underlies much of the discourse on globalization.