ABSTRACT
Pursuant to the apparent advance of capitalist development, globalization seems everywhere with us today. Not only has it become a ubiquitous term of reference in academic discussion of contemporary conditions, from the rather obvious matters of economics to the more controversial topics of cultural production and practices, but it has also saturated media wavelengths and captured public imagination. While this remarkable infi ltration into our linguistic universe may paradoxically herald the term’s eventual descent into the dustbin of discursive fashion, its currency has important implications that we cannot afford to ignore. This is particularly the case for scholars interested in the question of development because globalization appears to have taken over precisely the discursive space that was once claimed by development studies. This displacement of development discourse is, in part, what I want to suggest by globalization as fi ction of development, which I will interrogate in this chapter with reference to narratives by and about overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).
