Introduction: Word, Sound, and Power

Abstract

Cultural Studies in the age of globalization is embedded in a network of transnational discourses that appear to privilege the cosmopolitan and devalue the currency of the local. Indeed, the culture-specific nature of these “global” discourses is not readily conceded. Globalization, that cunning euphemism for the old imperial politics of appropriation and exploitation, resonates differently across the globe even as an economic system. Globalization as an ideology of cultural homogenization is especially problematic for those peoples of the world who are collectively constituted as the ever-marginalized consumers of the waste products of metropolitan societies—whether outdated manufactured commodities, stale food, or cultural theories that have long outlived their sell-by date.³ Ubiquitous postmodernist conceptions of the self as a hybridized mass of displaced, free-floating, multiple signifiers are quite irrelevant in supposedly “postcolonial” societies where hardworking people struggle to articulate a coherent sense of identity in resistance to the destabilizing imperative of neocolonial social, economic, and political forces.