2005-2006 THEME:
GLOBALIZATION AND THE HUMANITIES

Congratulations to these Faculty Fellows, who were named in the spring of 2005. They will present papers at the Fellows Conference on March 24, 2006. For more information about the conference, click here!

Catherine Bogosian
Assistant Professor, History Department
Labor, Obligation and Empire: Public Works in Colonial French West Africa

Robert Burgoyne
Professor, English Department
Global Vernaculars: Film and Media Studies

Sarika Chandra
Assistant Professor, English Department
Dislocalism: Re-Assessing Americanism in the Age of Globalization

Beth Kangas
Lecturer, Anthropology Department
Valuing Life and Death in a Global World: Technological Medicine in Yemen and Arab Detroit

Richard Marback
Associate Professor, English Department
What Place the Taalmonument in the New South Africa? South African Language Policy and the Culture of Language

Gordon B. Neavill
Associate Professor, Library and Information Science
Scholarly Communication in the Global Digital Environment

Frederic Pearson
Director, Center for Peace and Conflict Studies
The Impact of Immigration Patterns in Local Community Schools

Anne Rothe
Assistant Professor, German and Slavic Studies
Constructing Post-Holocaust German Identities in Israel/Palestine, 1946-2004: An Oral History

Michael Scrivener
Professor, English Department
Habermas and the Cosmopolitan Ideal

Leon C. Wilson
Chair, Sociology Department
Western Media and Adolescent Development in Guyana

EXPLICATION:
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and the resulting “New World Order,” and the expansion of the global economy came new political and cultural frameworks for development, competition, and antagonism. Global economic, political, and cultural change has been relentless, and the humanities can offer frameworks for understanding what globalization means, its consequences, and its possibilities.

Drawing on work in transnational, poststructuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial literary and cultural theory over the preceding two decades, scholars who study globalization and its literary, aesthetic, and cultural implications have found new approaches to inquiry, representation, and expression. These multifaceted, interdisciplinary endeavors seek to create a global framework for literary and cultural analysis and to renew the project of critical theory as a result.

The imperative to “think globally, act locally” has repositioned specific disciplines in the humanities. Scholars are exploring from new perspectives the notions of philosophical universals; national and group identity; postmodern and postcolonial theory; diaspora, emigration, and minority cultures; the politics of language; psychoanalysis and trauma theory; and digital culture. In focusing discussion on the impact of globalization on the humanities at Wayne State, critics, scholars, and creative artists might ask,

• How do we rethink humanist universals in an age of global capitalism and cultural antagonism, and institutional change and transformation?
• What does the framework of globalization mean for the integrity of the nation state—in terms of the emergence of a dominant global superpower (the United States) or the proliferation of smaller nation states (the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc) or the creation of new societies.
• How does globalization expand and continue the processes of postmodern and postcolonial cultural change, and how might we understand new works of art and cultural products within its wider horizon?
• How does the new global economy foster cultural change through processes of emigration and cultural dispersion? - How can minority and indigenous cultures preserve their identities in the face of destructive economic rationalization and standardization?
• What does the global economy mean for the politics of language, particularly English as a global commercial and scientific language?
• How have the destructive antagonisms of global politics, after Rwanda, Kosovo, 9/11/2001, and Iraq, arguably led to a culture of trauma and the subsequent demand for global security?
• What new global order has been made possible by the internet, and how is the new global culture emerging in the domain of cyberspace?
• How can the humanities influence globalization and the forces that are reframing personhood internationally?
• How has the global context of gender changed as women come to the forefront or are pushed back in societies, such as Afghanistan?

All of these questions, and more, will be the focus of our inquiry into the current implications of globalization on humanities scholarship.