ABSTRACT
For many of us the idea of globalization has become such a naturalized fact of current times that what this process entails and the consequences to which it gives rise are constant accessories to our self-understandings of being in the world. But, of course, it is usually such ‘naturalized’ things that need the most careful and constant scrutiny. We, by and large, take as given that globalization is linked to the current workings of Late Capitalism which is, itself, a marauding extension of earlier processes of capitalism as enacted through exploration, trade, empire building, and modernization. Diagnosing the logic and consequences of this global condition has become an academic preoccupation, albeit one that has tended to be confined to the purview of certain styles of critical thinking. There is general agreement that globalization is marked by a peculiar set of transformations, many of which are explicitly spatial. We might begin with the new intensity of time-space compression. We might point to the new pace in the transnational flow of goods, information, people, and technologies. We might verify such transformations by focusing upon specific localities that have been changed or even produced by globalization. Such is the scale and scope of these transformations that Fredric Jameson famously called for a new cognitive mapping of the present. 1
