Closing Reflections

In its energy and ambit, this volume mimics its unruly topic. The diverse essays on the relationships among creativity, cultural expression, and globalization frame a series of critical issues for artists, activists, scholars, and policy makers. These include the role of the creative imagination in the struggle to establish and defend senses of place within the uneven and shifting terrain of an evolving world-system; the rise of lateral, technologically-enabled networks for creative collaboration and community building; the eruption of intensively, self-consciously hybrid cultural forms, grounded in aesthetic and social codes that traverse imaginatively the frontiers of tradition and cosmopolitanism; and the problem of translation among discourses, genres and traditions, in which supposedly authoritative source texts are themselves revealed as provisional, particular, and ...