Public Culture: Millennial Quartet II

This second instalment of Public Culture's Millennial Quartet seeks to intervene in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions of globalisation, which includes debates about what globalisation is and whether it is a meaningful term. The volume focuses in particular on the way that changing sites - local, regional, diasporic - are the scenes of emergent forms of sovereignty in which matters of style, sensibilities, and ethos articulates new legalities and new kinds of violence. Seeking an alternative to the dead-end debate between those who see globalisation as a phenomenon wholly without precedent, and those who see it simply as modernisation, imperialism or global capitalism with a new face, the contributors seek to illuminate how space and time are transforming each other in special ways in the present era. They examine how this complex transformation involves changes in the situation of the nation, the state, and the city. While exploring distinct regions - China, Africa South America, Europe - and representing different disciplines and genres - anthropology, literature, political science, sociology, music, cinema, photography - the contributors are concerned with both the political economy of location and the locations in which political economies are produced and transformed. A special strength of the collection is its concern with emergent styles of subjectivity, citizenship and mobilisation and with the transformations of state power through which market rationalities are distributed and embodied locally. Contributors include: Arjun Appadurai, Jerome Binde, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Leo Ching, Steven Field, Ralf D Hotchkiss, Wu Hung, Andreas Huyssen, Boubarcar Toure Mandemory, Achille Mbembe, Saskia Sassen, Fatu Kkande Senghor, Seteney Shami, Anna Tsing, and Zhang Zhen. Arjun Appadurai is Samuel N Harper Professor of anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago.