Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity
Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma
Excerpt Below:
The speed, intensity, and extent of contemporary global transformations challenge many of the assumptions that have guided the analysis of culture over the last several decades. Whereas an earlier generation of scholarship saw meaning and interpretation as the key problems for social and cultural analysis, the category of culture now seems to be playing catch-up to the economic processes that go beyond it. Economics owes its present appeal partly to the sense that it, as a discipline, has grasped that it is dynamics of circulation that are driving globalization— and thereby challenging traditional notions of language, culture, and nation.
Global Flows and the Politics of Circulation
Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma
Excerpt Below:
There is a rising tide of discontent about the implicatiosn of globalization, a disturbance audible to anyone willing to listen. Among even the most moderate moderates in places such as China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and southern Africa there is a growing, gnawing, and amorphous feeling of unease that there is something out there, something happening that is robbing people of a genuine semblance of control over their own destinies. They can see and feel the gyrations of their national currencies, the uncontrollable oscillations in the prices of commodities and capital, and the apparent powerlessness of their governments to influence the course of economic life - or even to understand the jet stream of circulatory forces unleashed by globalizing processes.