ABSTRACT
As globalization confronts local traditions throughout the world, influencing all levels of social life, arguments concerning tensions and conflicts between global and local forces traverse contemporary theory. The term globalization is often used as a code word that stands for a tremendous diversity of issues and problems and that serves as a front for a variety of theoretical and political positions. The flow of products, culture, capital, and information is accompanied by flows of people and emigration. This book shows how the discourses of the global and the local transverse the fields of social theory, cultural studies, and politics, and the authors hope that the optics generated here will open up new perspectives within and between these domains. Translocal analysis understands the links between different locations to be unpredictable and contingent rather than representative of a single transnational condition or national identity.
