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标题：Review of Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Americanism
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作者：Sarika Chandra
期刊名称：Transnational Literature
电子版ISSN：1836-4845
出版年度：2012
卷号：5
期号：1
出版社：Flinders Humanities Research Centre
摘要：Emerging in the public sphere as early as the 1970s, the jargon of globalisation has now taken on the ubiquity of a ‘categorical imperative’ (2). Yet, as Sarika Chandra quite rightly points out ‘globalization can be made as theoretically precise and diverse in meaning as the context demands’ (4). For Chandra, explanations/justification/critiques of globalisation circulate around an idiom that has come to refer ‘to a radically new social, economic, and cultural reality in which all pre-existing, locally constituted practices and ideas have ceased to be viable’ (1). As a result, the doctrine of globalisation has become indivisibly fused with the ‘rhetoric of obsolescence’ (1). By representing all present conditions of cultural and economic production as outdated, such language confers obsolescence upon all that survives. Therefore, it becomes crucial for a wide range of social practices ‘to jettison – or appear to jettison – existing local, regional or even national models and methodologies and embrace purportedly more global paradigms’ (2). With Dislocalism, Sarika Chandra’s stated intent is to offer a critique of globalisation, a concept which she articulates as a process of discourse, as well as a real historical phenomenon. Acknowledging the extensive theoretical-critical contribution of radical thinkers such as: Harvey, Wallerstein, Jameson and Zizek, amongst others, Chandra positions her work within this existing reappraisal of ‘globalisation’s brave new world’ and its accompanying ‘metanarrative of free-market, high-tech driven universalisms’ (2). Having enabled her analysis on the basis of common terms, Chandra then brings her own specific meaning and connotation to the globalisation concept by inventing the neologism of ‘dislocalism’. Representing a ‘conceptual synthesis’, dislocalism acts as the shorthand which condenses what Chandra identifies as the deeply ambiguous strategies of globalisation whereby global and transnational practices are promoted whilst at the same time pre-existing local cultural and intellectual strategies are consolidated (4). In mediating her study, Chandra focuses on ‘America and Americanism’ which she deems as ‘globalisation’s unmistakeable national-ideological centre of gravity’ (4). To further advance her argument and expose globalisation’s oppositional, real world imperatives Chandra devises two different stresses for her neologism. On the one hand, to dislocalise – with the stress placed on the prefix – represents the drive to ‘displace the local in order to engage with the global’ (6). On the other hand, to dislocalise – with the stress placed on the noun – represents the investment that the local has in remaining localised and undissipated by the forces of globalisation. Chandra summarises the dual effects of dislocalism as ‘a move to supersede the local that is at the same time a form of stasis, a movement whose aim is also to remain in place’ (6).