ABSTRACT
Many significant changes that have taken place in the curricula of most developing countries in decades past could be attributed to the twin metonymic conditions of greater internationalization of market economies and globalization of the cultural economy. Both late-capitalist realities define our current episteme-that seemingly positive unconscious that Michel Foucault has talked about-which enables us to order present history and form the conditions of what we come to regard as true. Particular to the more than 130 developing countries that account for at least 60% of the world population, the interpretive conditions of globalization and internationalization demand that these countries, despite their unstable resource capital (human and otherwise), deal with the challenges of postindustrialism of rich, developed nation-states. In this chapter, we prefer to use the term developing countries because it entrains a postcolonial critique about the problematic characterization often sessiled when the Three Worlds
as a taken-for-granted label. Ahmad
In the history of the present, such three-tiered typology seriously undermines the structure of complexity of participating in the international market. Most developing countries, in fact, participate in significant ways at varying degrees in the global condition of disorganized capitalism (Lash & Urry, 1987), which depend primarily on their economic status, of course. What is notable, as has been pointed out by present-day social theorists, are the emerging configurations that are, to a large extent, dictated by the logic of Appadurai’s (1999/1990) scapes (ideoscapes, finanscapes, ethnoscapes, technoscapes), which perhaps at some point in time will characterize the new global cultural economy that is rhizomatic in character (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense2 and whereby “’time’ has ceased, [and] ‘space’ has vanished”; McLuhan & Fiore, 1967, p. 63). We could as well have said rather succinctly the simultaneous virtualization and realization of Marshall McLuhan’s global village.
