Introducing the Cultures and Globalization Series

Why Cultures and Globalization?

The world's cultures are broadly and deeply affected by globalization in ways that are still inadequately documented and understood. These impacts are at once unifying and divisive, liberating and corrosive, homogenizing and diversifying; they have become a truly central contemporary concern. Understandably, the interplay between cultures and globalization crystallizes both positive aspirations and negative anxieties, as it transforms patterns of sameness and difference across the world or modifies the ways in which cultural expression is created, represented, recognized, preserved or renewed (Wieviorka and Ohana 2001). This complex interplay has also contributed to generating new discourses of ‘culturalism’ that evoke the power of culture in domains as diverse as economic development, the fostering of citizenship and social cohesion, human security and the resolution or prevention of conflict. Yet ‘culture and globalization’ has become a discursive field that is all too often perceived and thought about – whether in negative or in positive terms – in ways that are simplificatory or illusive.

Clearly, there is a knowledge gap. The Cultures and Globalization series is designed to fill this gap, one that – we believe – has already become politically perilous, socially unsustainable and economically constraining. Achieving a better understanding of the relationships between globalization and cultural change is thus of much more than academic interest – it is important for many areas of policy and practice.

That globalization has a profound impact on culture, and that cultures shape globalization, may seem a truism. Yet the two-way interaction involves some of the most vexed and at the same time taken-for-granted questions of our time. It transforms previously stable forms of everyday life and of living together, of identity and belonging; of cultural expression including creative practice and entertainment. Highly diverse and uneven, the impacts of the globalization process on cultural life present unprecedented challenges to many traditional relationships as well, particularly between individuals on the one hand and ‘communities’, civil society and the nation on the other. What is more, they continue to transform the institutional roles of markets, governments, the non-profit sector and organized citizens' groups and movements.

Analyzing these relationships between globalization processes on the one hand and cultural patterns and developments on the other is the core objective of Cultures and Globalization. We seek to draw attention to changes in the world's cultures, and the policy implications they have, by providing an outlet for cutting-edge research, thinking and debate. Our hope is that this book will become a valued reference for the exploration of contemporary cultural issues from different perspectives – in the social sciences, in the arts and the humanities, as well as in policy-making circles – and that it will contribute to building bridges among them. As Fredric Jameson has pointed out: