ABSTRACT
Globalisation is usually taken to refer, narrowly, to the deregulation of capitalist markets in the last decades of the twentieth century, or (more broadly) the result of new technologies of communication and transportation in the twentieth century, leading to people becoming increasingly interconnected across national borders. As Ulf Hannerz points out, however, the process may go through different phases, or even move backwards, involving different areas of the world in different ways. Preglobalisation and deglobalisation bring their own issues to bear on culture. Among those who found themselves forcibly globalised were the first black Americans. ‘The centuries of the transatlantic slave trade had been a long period of very traumatic globalization.’1
