Colonial and Global Interfacings: Imperial Hegemonies and Democratizing Resistances
Editor: Gary Backhaus and John Murungi
Date Of Publication: 2007-10-01
Isbn13: 9781847182968
Isbn: 1-84718-296-8
How space is owned through practices of domination that emerged through colonialism and have been sustained through capitalist social relations in a 'post-colonial' context.

How Imperial power created, in Foucault's words, a 'boomerang effect' whereby the techniques developed to control and subjugate colonial subjects worked with such efficiency that they were imported back into Western societies to create new orders of control.

How while new social movements such as the Zapatistas have remapped the rural and developed new ways to challenge and transform politics, Western societies have sought to reconstruct the world order through economic processes and military strategy.

How the self-image of the West is shaped by its relationship with the 'Rest,' but also how the rest has found news ways of constructing identity that are now transforming the West as people, images, commodities, and meanings flow through the global economy.

The cases considered cover every continent, contrast the West with the East as well as the global North with the global South, and prompt us to take history seriously in the construction of the present. Addressing the current buzzwords that have spread from geography across the social sciences and the humanities, this book will appeal to researchers and practitioners fascinated by the connections between cultural representation, power, spatiality, and how the ways we have been thinking about the world are open to question.

Gary Backhaus currently is a Visiting Professor at Loyola College in Maryland. John Murungi is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. This is their sixth co-edited volume as collaborators.

"In this collection, Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring together researchers in a transdisciplinary project to understand 'geographicity' as a distinctive approach to spatiality that integrates theory and practice. Linking the global to the local and the abstract to the concrete, the contributors tackle key concepts such as ideology as a site for rethinking spatiality - considering cartography as a practice for producing space and for visualising the connections between culture, politics and economics on a global scale and across centuries. Key ideas in the geographical turn in social inquiry such as sovereignty, state, nation and civilisation are reassessed using discourses that are concern with space, borders, marginalization and the construction of identities that are provisional attempts to fix meaning in particular times and places. This collection brings together insights from geography, cultural theory, history, phenomenological and post-structuralist philosophies to address questions which dominate our times."

—Mark Smith, The Open University, Department of Politics and International Studies

"Is the term globalization merely an arbitrary assemblage of ideas, events and phenomena or is it an explanatory term that colligates evidence around theories that seek to explain how cultures around the world are changing in the modern age? Gary Backhaus and John Murungi have assembled and international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to answer this question. These scholars show how colonialization, a historical period, and globalization, a period we purportedly are already in, are parts of a historical meta-narrative bound together by space-time structurizations. Binding this book together is an overarching conviction that geographicity, the spatiality of all phenomena, is an essential and necessary component to any research. The lack of such a focus in Western society is indicative of its uprooted and mobile character. The geographical turn is an essential component of the International Association for the Study of Environment, Space and Place (http://www.towson.edu/iasesp/). Essays in this volume were specifically selected because they contribute to a larger geographical turn in research.

This innovative collection engages the social-spatial dialectic of colonial and global processes. It does so through addressing a wide range of topics, such as, how ideology and theodicy are mediated by cartography, how property and property rights play an important, if not unheralded role in globalization, and how space and the democracy of knowledge are mutual constituted. Case studies ground liminal processes by revealing their geographicity. For instance, authors’ engage the colonial feedback loop of torture and carcerality, how the rest globalizes the West, the global tensions of cultural identity and it’s (re)production, and the rise of Socialism in Africa. A brilliant study of the geopolitical forces facing our past, present and future, Colonial and Global Interfacings is required reading for anyone interested in globalization and it spatiality."

—Chris Lukinbeal, Assistant Professor, School of Geographical Sciences, Affiliate Professor, School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Associate Director, Master’s of Advance Study in Geographic Information Systems, Arizona State University

“Tracing the ways in which globalized activities are modifying the world, affecting the ways we think, the way space is conceptualized, the ideologies we develop – all of which lead us to wonder, as some authors do, whether ‘globalization’ is the word we need to use. What are these multiple effects, these unforeseen consequences and these fragmented results? In what places, in what cities, in what regions? Multiple approaches make this book worth investigating to learn how some of these questions are being approached and answered.”

— George Psathas, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Boston University

“This collection gathers ingenious interdisciplinary efforts to address the antinomies of globalization and its spatial organizations. The fragmentation of culture is examined in terms of the complex dialectics of the incommensurability of the subjective concrete expression of lived situations and the objective abstract constructs of social reality. This is required reading in light of critically analyzing the geopolitical assimilation of space and its appropriation through hegemonic global economics in an epoch marked by thoughtless technological tyrannies. This committed rethinking of the possibilities of surpassing the chaotic contradictions of globalization in terms of rooted local expressions of universalism is more welcome than ever.”

— Nader El-Bizri, University of Cambridge

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