Boekpublicatie Sudeep Dasgupta

2007
Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique
Sudeep Dasgupta (ed.), Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007.



In the wake of proliferating discourses around globalization and culture, some central questions around cultural politics have acquired a commonsensical and hegemonic character in contemporary intellectual discourse. The politics of difference, the possibilities of hybridity and the potential of multiple liminalities frame much discussion around the transnational dimensions of culture and post-identity politics. In this volume, the economic, political and social consequences of the focus on “culture” in contemporary theories of globalization are analyzed around the disparate fields of architecture and tourism, museum discourse and satellite television, diasporic cinema and sub-national theatre. The discourses of hybridity, diaspora, cultural difference and minoritization are critically interrogated and engaged with through close analyses of cultural objects and practices. The essays thus intervene in the debates around modernity, globalization and cultural politics, and the volume as a whole provides a critical constellation through which the complexity of transnational culture can be framed. Thinking through the particular, the essays  limn the absent universality of forms of capitalist globalization and the volume as a whole provides multiple perspectives from which to enter the singular modernity of our times in all its complexity.