After Globalization
Blackwell Manifestos
1. Edition April 2011
258 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
Short Description
After Globalization offers a new way of thinking about globalization -- both what it was and how it still operates as a social narrative. In lively and unflinching prose, the authors argue that contemporary thought about the world is disabled by a fatal flaw: the inability to think "an after" to globalization. Examining the work of four popular thinkers (Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Paul Krugman and Naomi Klein) After Globalization re-animates a discussion and debate about globalization which seems to have been shelved since the recent financial crisis.
In lively and unflinching prose, Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman argue that contemporary thought about the world is disabled by a fatal flaw: the inability to think "an after" to globalization. After establishing seven theses (on education, morality, history, future, capitalism, nation, and common sense) that challenge the false promises that sustain this time-limit, After Globalization examines four popular thinkers (Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Paul Krugman and Naomi Klein) and how their work is dulled by these promises. Cazdyn and Szeman then speak to students from around the globe who are both unconvinced and uninterested in these promises and who understand the world very differently than the way it is popularly represented.
After Globalization argues that a true capacity to think an after to globalization is the very beginning of politics today.
A Précis: The Argument
Part I: The Afterlife of Globalization
Part II: The Limits of Liberalism
Part III: The Global Generation
Conclusion: "Oh, Don't Ask Why!"
Index
Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. He is co-editor of Cultural Theory: An Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell 2010), author of Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism and the Nation (2003) and co-author of Popular Culture: A User?s Guide (2nd. ed. 2009).