ABSTRACT
The film Local Hero in its execution conveyed all the warmth of its message, but what seemed most remarkable about it at the time was its romantic nostalgia for the concretely local against the abstractly global. What makes Local Hero seem less nostalgic is the emergence in the intervening decade of a concern with the local as the site of resistance to capital, and the location for imagining alternative possibilities for the future. This chapter explores the relationship between the emergence of a Global Capitalism and the emergence of concern with the local as a site of resistance and liberation. Consideration of this relationship is crucial to distinguishing a "critical localism" from localism as an ideological articulation of capitalism in its current phase. It suggests that the postmodern repudiation of Enlightenment metanarratives and the teleology of modernity has allowed the reemergence of the local as a site of resistance and the struggle for liberation.
