ABSTRACT
The global restructuring of the past two decades has involved local transformations of both economy and culture, the interconnections of which are the subject of numerous theoretical inquiries (Appadurai 1990; Harvey 1989; King 1991, 1993; Featherstone 1990). As nations become increasingly interdependent and economies and cultures articulate across formerly regulated borders, the processes constituting “citizens as ‘subjects’ (in both of Foucault’s sense of ‘subjection’—subject of and subjected to the nation)” begin to assume a more global dynamic (Hall 1993, 355; see also Bhabha 1990 and Clifford 1992). Strong as they are, however, these forces of globalization are always tempered by local places and people; they “do not, contrary to popular opinion, lead to simple homogenization; globalization also initiates a myriad of local interpretations and transformations” (Olds 1995, 2; see also Pred and Watts 1992). At the same time, the interconnections of the global and the local perform in reverse fashion as well. Local constructions of citizenship, appropriate cultural taste, democracy, the public sphere, the environment, and many other arenas are active in the production of larger dynamic forces such as capitalism and modernity-so much so, in fact, that abstract theories of modernity, which are usually predicated on Western notions and assumptions, neglect the context-dependent nature
of the beast and run the risk of reproducing the kinds of anemic geographies warned of by Sparke (1994) in his discussion of Robert Young’s White Mythologies.
