Globalization and the Discontents of Postcolonial Hybridity

Abstract

Globalization is a process of social transition that is under way. Though for some social scientists globalization is not new, it has gained momentum since the 1980s in academia. Robertson defines globalization as follows: “Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole…both concrete global interdependence and consciousness of the global whole” (1992: 8).

Though Robertson admits that the process of “compression” began in the Sixteenth century, he emphasizes that its intensification is a recent phenomenon. Nowadays global interdependency is clearly intense in terms of trade, military cooperation and cultural imperialism. Two years before Robertson gave his definition of globalization, Anthony Giddens had his:

Globalization can . . . be defined as the intensification of world-wide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Local transformation is as much a part of globalization as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space. (Giddens 64).

Unlike Robertson’s definition, Giddens’s emphasizes that globalization is not centered on metropolitan industrial cities, but it mainly focuses on the transformation of distant localities; hence, the global-local dichotomy. If we can conceive of an end to the globalizing process, then our globalized world will become a homogenous one world with one culture: a “small village” as some would like to call it. Others believe that this global world will not be harmoniously organized for there will be no unilateral organizing center, but many centers. The nation-state will definitely be eroded since the transnational companies and the World Bank will be the ones that decide the future of the world; borders between countries will virtually disappear.