Globalization and
Academic Discourses

With the collaboration of distinguished specialists from a number of universities and from various Penn State academic departments, this seminar explores the phenomenon of globalization and the diverse discourses it has elicited within and among a number of academic disciplines. The seminar examines, especially, questions of culture, languages, fields, economies, narratives, human geographies, transnational networks, information technologies, and ethics.

JANUARY 9

Introduction and Prolepses
Background Readings:
Arjun Apadurai, "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination," Public Culture  12.1 (Winter 2000) 1-19 @:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v012/12.1appadurai.html Douglas Kellner, “Globalization and the Postmodern Turn,” @ http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/dk/GLOBPM.htm Janet Abu-Lughod, “Going Beyond Global Babble,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System. Ed. Anthony D. King.Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1997. 131–137.

JANUARY 16

Presenters: LORRAINE DOWLER and COLIN FLINT, Department of Geography, Penn State. The Geography of Globalization. Dorren Massey , Chapters 6, 7 & 10 of her Space, Place,  and Gender . Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1994; J. Duncan and N. Duncan,"(Re)REading the Landscape," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6 (1988): 117-126; James S. Duncan, "Landscape as a Signifying System," Chapter 2 of hisThe City As Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. N.Y.: Cambridge UP, 1990; Alan Hudson, "Offshoreness, Globalization and Sovereignty: A Postmodern Geo-political Economy? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 25, 2000. 269-283.

JANUARY 23

Presenter: DEBORAH STARR, Comp Lit and Jewish Studies, Penn State. Cosmopolitanism.Girls of Alexandria by Edwar al-Kharrat; Amanda Anderson, "Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity, " in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds. Minneapolis: U MinnP, 1998; David Harvey, "Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils," http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v012/12.2harvey.html?#authbio

JANUARY 30

Presenter: REINGARD NETHERSOLE, U.Witswatersrand and U. Pretoria, S.Africa. Ethical Dilemmas.  The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee; Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequence. Columbia University Press, 1998.

FEBRUARY 6

Presenter: MRINALINI SINHA, Department of History, Penn State. Historiography and Globalization. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe" and Chapter 1: "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History" from Dipesh Chakravarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), pp. 3- 46;  F. Cooper & A. L. Stoler, "Introduction: Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda" from F. Cooper & A. Stoler eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 1-58; Jerry Bentley, Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (American Historical Association: Essays in Global and Comparative History, 1996), pp. 1-34; Michael Geyer & Charles Bright, "World History in a Global Age," American Historical Review 100, 4, (Oct. 1995): 1034-1060.
 

FEBRUARY 13

Presenter: CATHY STEBLYK, Comp. Lit. and Japanese, Penn State. Imperial Mysteries.  Ohara Mariko. "Girl" (1984) trans. by A. Birnbaum. from Monkey Brain Sushi, ed. by Alfred Birnbaum, Tokyo, NY: Kodansha, 1991. pp 261-78.; Chapter 3.4 "Postmodernism, or the Informatization of Production" pp. 280-303 from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Empire.  Harvard UP, 2000; Leo Ching, "Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capital," Public Culture 12:1 (Winter 2000): 233-257.

FEBRUARY 20

Presenter: LIU KANG, Comp. Lit. and Chinese, Penn State. Alternate Globalizations: Yu Hua, "On the Road at Eighteen," pp.3-11, Yu Hua, The Past and Punishment (Honolulu: U. of Hawaii Press, 1996); and Liu Kang, "Is There an Alternative to Capitalist Globalization? The Debate about Modernity in China," pp.164-191, Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi eds.The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke UP, 1998); Zhang Zhen, "Mediating Time: The 'Rice Bowl of Youth' in Fin de Siècle Urban China," Public Culture 12:1 (Winter 2000): 93-113
 

FEBRUARY 27

Presenter: RONALD JUDY, U. of Pittsburgh. Globality and Intelligence. Antonio Gramsci, "Notebook 4 (1930-1932)," Prison Notebooks,  vol II, ed. Joseph Buttigieg (Columbia UP):  199-264; Ronald Judy, "Introduction:  On W. E. B. Du Bois and Hyperbolic Thinking" in  Sociology Hesitant: W. E. B. Du Bois's Dynamic Thinking, boundary 2, 27, no 3. (2000); W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (Universty of Mississippi Press: Jackson, 1995). Part I "The Exile" (pp 3-34).

MARCH 6:  SPRING BREAK

MARCH 13

Presenter: DAVID DAMROSCH, Columbia. Back to the Global Futures: National Internationalism and the Origins of Comparative Literature.Goethe, "World Literature" in Comparative Literature: The Early Years," co-edited by Hans-Joachim Schulz. Chapel Hill: published by UNC Press 1970; Hutcheson Macaulay  Posnett, "The Comparative Method" and "Relativity of Literature" in his book Comparative Literature.  N.Y.: Johnson Reprint Co., 1970; Rprt. 1886 ed. K. Paul, Trench, London.

MARCH 20

Presenter: THOMAS HALE, African, French, and Comparative Literature, Penn State. Postcolonial Ambiguities.
Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane.Trans. Katherine Woods. NY: Collier Books, 1969;1962; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind, chapter 1, "The Language of African Literature." Heinemann, 1981.

Presenter: KIDANE MENGISTEAB, African and African-American Studies, Penn State. Valentin Y. Mudimbé, “Save the African Continent,” Public Culture 5.1 (Winter 1992): 61-62; Ioan Davies, “Negotiating African Culture: Toward a Decolonization of the Fetish,” in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi eds.The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 125–145.

MARCH 27

Presenter: ROLAND GREENE, Stanford. The Globe, the World, and the Tempest: Shakespeare, The Tempest ; and from The Tempest and Its Travels,  ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), esp. the following essays: Crystal Bartolovich, "'Baseless Fabric': London as a World City," 13-26; Barbara A. Mowat, "'Knowing I Loved My Books': Reading The Tempest  Intertextually," 27-36; Roland Greene, "Island Logic," 138-45.

APRIL 3

Presenter: JONATHAN CULLER, Cornell. The Novel and the Nation Today: The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa; Doris Sommer, "About Face: The Talker Turns Toward Peru," in her book Proceed with Caution When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas,  Harvard University Press, 1999; and Benedict Anderson, "El Malhadado Pais," in his book The Spectre of Comparisons, Verso, 1998.
 

APRIL 10

Presenter: MIKE FEATHERSTONE, Nottingham, UK. Urban Dystopias. Neuromancer by William Gibson; Bukatman, S. 'Gibson's Typewriter' in M. Dery (ed) Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture  Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1993; M. Davis, Ecology of Fear.  London: Picador, 2000 - esp. chapter "Beyond Blade Runner"; M. Dear and S. Flusty, "Postmodern Urbanism and the Spatial Logic of Global Capitalism," in Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture. London: Sage, 1999. Chapter 1 of  The Years With Laura Díaz by Carlos Fuentes, translated by  Alfred Mac Adam. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

APRIL 17

Presenter: WLAD GODZICH, UC Santa Cruz. The Global Stage(d). Um crime delicado  by Sérgio Sant'Anna. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2nd ed., 1999;1997. Chapter 7 of Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, Culture.  David Held, et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

APRIL 24

TERMPAPER PRESENTATIONS

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