The local and the global Globalization and Eth..DOC

From: Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, Edited by Anthony D. King, University of Minnesota Press, 1997 THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL: GLOBALIZATION AND ETHNICITY Stuart Hall The debate about globalization as a world process, and its consequences, has been going on now in a variety of different fields of intellectual work for some time. What I am going to try and do here is to map some of the shifting configurations of this question, of the local and the global, particularly in relation to culture and in relation to cultural politics. I am going to try to discover what is emerging and how different subject positions are being transformed or produced in the course of the unfolding of the new dialectics of global culture. I will sketch in this aspect towards the end of this first talk and develop it in the second when I shall address the question of new and old identities. The question of ethnicity spans the two talks. I am going to look at this from what might be thought of as a very privileged corner of the process, or rather, an unprivileged corner, a declining corner, that is, from the United Kingdom, and particularly, England. Certainly from the perspective of any historical account of English culture, globalization is far from a new process. Indeed, it is almost impossible to think about the formation of English society, or of the United Kingdom and all the things that give it a kind of privileged place in the historical narratives of the world, outside of the processes that we identify with globalization. So when we are talking about globalization in the present context, we are talking about some of the new forms, some of the new rhythms, some of the new impetuses in the globalizing process. For the moment, I do not want to define it more closely than that but I do want to suggest that it is located within a much longer history; we suffer increasingly from a process of historical