In the incendiary opening lines of their Dialectic of Enlightenment , Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno observe how although “the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty,” “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (2002 [1944], 3). We begin this Introduction with this stark statement on the outcome of the enlightenment, not because we adhere to Horkheimer and Adorno’s gloomy teleologies, which now seem all too transparently overdetermined by the backdrop of exile, genocide, and global war. What interests us, in introducing this volume, is rather how the Dialectic’s grand narrative begins with an image of the earth. Through this image, we approach the disasters of “enlightenment,” which, for Horkheimer and Adorno, describes not just the eighteenth-century hegemony of positivist experimental science, but a deep history of instrumental rationality , culminating in capitalist regimes of enframing and exploiting people, places, and polities. The “earth” is not a neutral backcloth against which this history plays out. Instead, the “fully enlightened earth” can be construed as the specific conception of Earth produced by enlightenment, that is, the “wholly grasped and mathematized” globe (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 25, translation modified). 1 Indeed, the mapped modern globe encapsulates the different characteristics that the Dialectic imputes to instrumental rationality . It reduces nature to the “mere objectivity” of an inert surface; equalizes qualitative differences by asserting general fungibility and calculability; distances the viewing subject from earthbound objects , establishing its mastery over them; and constructs a framework for total knowledge, which curves back on itself in a global rotundity (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 3–42). Admittedly, Horkheimer and Adorno write of the “fully enlightened earth” and the “disenchantment of the world” without explicitly theorizing the spatialities of enlightenment. Extrapolating from their analysis, however, we would suggest that instrumental rationality reduces both world and earth—the specificity of which we go on to discuss—to the reified framework of a geometrically conceived globe (2002, 3).
Today, advertising and media especially are saturated by figures of the global, ranging from photographs of the Earth taken from spacecraft or its moon, through daily references to “globalization” or “global issues” in news broadcasting, to the global logos that brand transnational corporations. As Bronislaw Szerszynski has argued, such unobtrusive forms of global imagining have permeated quotidian culture so thoroughly in recent decades as to “constitute an unremarked, all-pervasive background to people’s lives … with the potential to reshape their sense of belonging” (2005, 166). Szerszynski uses the term “banal globalism ” to refer to the commonplace condition in which taken-for-granted imaginations of globalization —whether they relate to finance, environmentalism, news, or tourism—frame identities and experience in inconspicuous ways that escape conscious reflection (Szerszynski 2005, 165–167). 2 It is important to emphasize that Szerszynski does not invoke banality in the evaluative sense of inconsequential or trite. Rather, banality here signals how global images are so pervasive and familiar in contemporary culture as to evade scrutiny. While some banal global images are much more idiosyncratic than their commonplace character might first suggest (Ferdinand 2018b), most reinforce dominant ways of construing globalization and inhabiting the global. In the imagination of globality thus reproduced, the Earth is conceived as a neoliberal globe of frictionless circulation through which flows of commodities, communications, and communities move unimpeded by the constraints of time and geography; and as a calculable geode, available to measurement, management, and manipulation. In a manner consonant with Horkheimer and Adorno’s vision of calamitous totality, critical scholarship has tended to emphasize the deleterious effects of this now pervasive imagination of the global. As we go on to demonstrate below, critics have variously argued that dominant global imaginations estrange people from place; reduce the planet’s ecological and cultural diversity to an objectified, homogenous system; occasion visions of imperial conquest and mastery; and expedite the exploitation of peoples and environments.
Against this backdrop, Other Globes sets out to show how the prevailing vision of the capitalist and calculable globe represents only one among many possible ways in which the global has been—and might be—articulated. Although the volume draws extensively on scholarship critical of dominant global discourses, our intention is less to enlarge this critical mass than to highlight the abundance and variety of alternative imaginations of globalization and the global. Whether before the historical ascendance of the capitalist and calculable globe in the early modern period or at its fringes today, cultural practice brims with different, imaginative ways of narrating and representing the global. In the contemporary context of intensive capitalist globalization , ruthless geopolitics, and unabated environmental exploitation, these various “other globes” offer paths for thinking beyond the globality we have—paradigms for alternative relations among people, polities, and the planet. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume present a collection of case studies of diverse cultural imaginations of the globe, the earth, the world, and the planet in works of art, literature, performance, film, and music, emphasizing how they emerge or can be mobilized as counterpoints to hegemonic representations of globes and globalization. Derived from, among others, the disparate historical and cultural contexts of the Holy Roman Empire (Hess); late Medieval Brabant (Ferdinand); the colonial and postcolonial Philippines (Flores; Villaescusa-Illán); early twentieth-century Britain (Parsons); contemporary Puerto Rico (Hitchcock); occupied Palestine (Hitchcock); postcolonial South Africa (Ashcroft) and Chile (Radisoglu); and California (Tola), these alternative articulations of the global often contradict one another. Nonetheless, their diversity emphasizes how there is no single, transparent way in which to imagine globalization—no neutral or natural way to inhabit the global. A renewed cognizance of the rich multiplicity of global imaginations underlines the contingency and constructedness of the supposedly fully mapped and spanned modern globe , and interrupts the cultural work of naturalization through which dominant imaginations fade into the taken-for-granted background of everyday life.
The volume collects an archive of qualitatively different ways of conceiving and approaching the global. To avoid establishing new hierarchies among diverse global imaginations, it is largely organized chronologically. Though the counter-imaginations analyzed are specific to each case study and must be grasped on their own terms, overall they tend to emphasize relationality and heterogeneity, while challenging detached, dominative, and homogenizing global representations. Besides showing how they dispel the global’s dominant associations with transcendence, objectivity, and mastery, the contributions underline how “other globes” are themselves emplaced and entangled in the power and politics of globalization processes, and participate in shaping them. As a...