Facing Globality

Description

  Woven around the notion of ‘globality’, the chapters in this volume explore its varied manifestations in contemporary India. However, rather than deploying the term in its conventional sense, the volume invests it with an altogether different meaning, designating it as the emergence of numerous Althusserian ‘conjunctures’: simultaneous yet uneven in spread, non-linear, location-specific, and indeterminate, blurring the difference between the ‘cause’ and the ‘caused’.    Globality is thus introduced not as a supplementary concept, but as an alternative to the essentialist and determinist conceptions of globalization found in mainstream theories. Thus informed, these chapters map the spread of globality in India across a wide range of areas: changing notions of modernity and national development; citizenship and cultural nationalism; popular expectations from civil society and state; ideological ambivalence and doublespeak of political parties; dilemmas of newly carved out federal states; role and status of new social movements; images of India in global forums; diasporic identity; and changing cinematic idiom, among others. Exploring these sites, the volume argues that none of these has been a passive recipient of ‘globalization processes’. Instead, active political agency is seen everywhere weaving what are described here as discourses of resistance, relocation, and reinvention