Introduction

In The Condition of Postmodernity (1992) David Harvey described the contemporary phenomenon of globalization as a process of “time-space compression.” In spite of Harvey’s title, which gestures towards temporality, much of the scholarship over the next two decades has focused on elaborating the “space” part of the equation. Typically globalization is imagined as bringing together distant places or as the spreading out of dominant practices from the center of the world system to its peripheries. Likewise, popular representations of globalization, both critical and celebratory, have tended to conceptualize it in spatial terms (for example, the global is frequently invoked in opposition to the local, conceived variously as a site of anti-cosmopolitan provincialism, or as the embodiment of authenticity and ecological integrity). Until recently, few critics have addressed globalization as a matter not just of space but also of time. This is the conversation to which this collection is addressed.2