Global Subjects: A Political Critique of GlobalizationISBN: 978-0-7456-3667-2
Hardcover
392 pages
February 2008, Polity
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Bayart argues that globalization is something that we ourselves
have created, and the nation-state is actually a product, and not
of a victim, of this process. Far from being synonymous with
alienation and social disintegration, globalization establishes
transnational solidarities and networks which overlap with
nation-states without necessarily undermining them. Globalization
has also refashioned sexual identities, transforming, through the
representation of female and male bodies in the media, in
advertising and in the Internet, the way individuals in different
parts of the world have learnt to recognize themselves as sexual
subjects. It has created new cultures of consumption which
stimulate new desires, new techniques and technologies of the body
and new forms of tension and conflict.
Drawing on Foucaults notions of governmentality and
subjectivation, Bayart develops a rich and illuminating account of
how the social relations constitutive of globalization produce new
forms of subjectivity, new lifestyles and new moral subjects, from
the colonisers and colonised subjects of nineteenth-century India
and Africa to the spread of new kinds of transnational and
ethnicized subjectivities and lifestyles today.
Spanning two centuries and drawing on his deep knowledge of Africa and the Middle East, Bayart shows that, if globalization is our handiwork, its development and thus our history will be decided on the contested terrains where new ways of life, new modes of consumption and new types of struggle are being invented.