The range of perspectives and original materials dealt with here highlights the renewed urgency of the struggle for cultural autonomy and voice within the context of globalization. Each author explores how the various processes at both the local and global levels intersect to create new discourses and debates around the "indigenization of knowledge." If a new wind of cultural decolonization is blowing through the Arab Middle East and is having profound impact on the lives of men and women, then we should expect a new scholarship to emerge in order to grasp it. This book is a contribution in that direction.
A key dimension concerns the issue of borders and boundaries. These are both real and imaginary (i.e., symbolic and metaphoric), hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. Among these borders are spatial ones that determine individuals' and communities' everyday location and place in the world--these include boundaries of class, gender, territory, and language. Each of these separations in turn has embedded in it, and rests on constructions of "imaginary" borders and boundaries. The real and imaginary do not exist as two disparate entities but are inextricably linked to each other in a dialectical move that simultaneously enables and disables movement and action.
Current re-visioning of globalization challenges past suppositions. Globalization is a new form of an ongoing process that took inception during the heyday of colonialism. It might serve as a descriptive term to articulate the current historical period, but it remains theoretically problematic and imprecise.
Situating Globalization picks up on the problematics of power and its dispersal and concentration. The bearers of these cultural flows seek legitimacy from their potential constituency by positing their language--cultural and religious--as local and therefore inherently in opposition to the hegemonic cultural knowledge that has seeped in from "outside" and led to disempowerment of local "peoples" and "knowledges." Bearers make no mention to this Islamist knowledge, of the "foreignness" of this idiom to many within the societies in question. Any attempt to contest their positioning and bearers of the indigenous results in charges of either betrayal or brainwashing.
Cynthia Nelson is professor of anthropology and dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. She is author of Doria Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart. Shahnaz Rouse is a member of its sociology faculty. Her research interests and publications cover agrarian transformation; social movements; the state, religion and gender identity.
