Speaking from the Margins: “Postmodernism,” Transnationalism, and the Imagining of Contemporary Indian Urbanity

Abstract

However we understand the nature of globalization — perhaps “the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson, 1992, p. 8) or “the stretching of similar economic, cultural and political activities across the globe” (Short and Kim, 1999, p. 3) — we must acknowledge that the term “global,” referring to the globe as such, is being used metaphorically rather than literally. We need hardly be reminded that three-fifths of the globe’s surface is water and much of the rest uninhabited or uninhabitable. And if the globe is a sphere, where are the margins? I can only think here of the concept of the noosphere, the layer of knowledge encircling the globe, a concept imagined half a century ago by French philosopher and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Alternatively, I would be quite happy to accept the notion of being, myself, on the margins of (the discourse on) globalization for, like many academics who jumped onto this rolling band wagon fifteen or more years ago, I am now, as I shall explain, constantly rethinking just what it means.

Acknowledgements: This chapter was given as a paper in the colloquium series “On the Margins Of Globalization” at the Global Affairs Institute, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, January 29, 1999. It developed from an earlier, and shorter, paper read at the University of Michigan, published in Hemalata Dandekar, ed., Cities, Space, and Globalization: An International Perspective, College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998. I am indebted to various members of the audiences for comments on these occasions and, especially, to Abidin Kusno and Lt. Col. C. B. Ramesh (retired) of Bangalore for their suggestions on earlier drafts.