News Highlights
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Globalization, Culture, and Power
The "enormous new possibilities and great dangers" of globalization were at the heart of the first international conference of the newly founded Anis K. Makdisi Program in Literature. At the conference, entitled "Globalization, Culture, and Power: An International Symposium," held in College Hall in mid-December, Lebanese and American university professors, literary critics, a writer, two artists, and an expert in global trade presented relevant papers in five separate sessions chaired by AUB professors and introduced by Provost Peter Heath. Two of the speakers, Saree Makdisi, professor of English at the University of Chicago, and Karim Makdisi, economic affairs officer at ESCWA in Beirut, are grandsons of Emeritus Professor Anis K. Makdisi, who taught Arabic literature at AUB from 1920 until his retirement in 1950.
Other speakers included three professors from Duke University in the United States: Frederick Jameson, professor of comparative literature and romance studies and a self-styled American intellectual; Susan Willis, associate professor of English, and Michael Hardt, associate professor of literature and romance studies. Richard Dienst, professor of English at Rutgers University, also delivered a paper; artists Tony Chakar and Bilal Khbeiz, and novelist Elias Khoury spoke in Arabic to the crowded hall equipped with facilities for simultaneous translation. |
Prof. Frederick Jameson. |
Most of the speakers sounded a grim note, sharing Michael Hardt's view of the great dangers of globalization." Jameson decried globalization as 'free-market capitalism which seeks to eradicate difference everywhere and to implant itself universally." Susan Willis evoked images of American differences flattened in exurbia. Her presentation, also emphasizing the ills of free-market capitalism, was rendered eerily mesmerizing by her soft spoken insistence on "the massive," "relentless uncertainty" created in "the gun crazy USA" by the sniper attacks in northern Virginia in October of last year.
Her examples of the growing ills of American society: financial scandals of big corporations, poor education, and the collapse of state budgets echoed Karim Makdisi's exposure of recent notorious cases of corporate control by big drug companies preventing development of inexpensive generic drugs; Monsanto's stranglehold on genetically modified plant seeds, and the Napster shared music files. |
Other speakers also criticized the global power of the United States. Professor Dienst, in a paper entitled "The Strategic Mobilization of the Public Sphere" sounded a grim and pessimistic note as he attacked American hegemony and criticized the current US administration for recognizing "no higher tribunal, no external obligations, and no geopolitical peers" [thus making itself] free to proclaim its goals, offer its agenda and issue its orders without putting any of its authority at risk."
Both Dienst and Michael Hardt emphasized the omnipresence of war in the global era, Hardt seeing "no escaping the global state of war" [which] erodes the distinction between war and peace such that we can no longer imagine or even hope for a real peace." Hardt was equally pessimistic about the possibilities of democracy in globalization: "the processes of globalization and the formation of Empire constantly reproduce divisions and inequalities of wealth and power in the world." |
Prof. Saree Makdisi. |
Despite the general pessimism and the dark views of the United States evoked by these speakers, a pessimism also reflected in the Arabic discourses of the three artists. Some did see cause for optimism: In his introductory remarks Saree Makdisi insisted that globalization is "first and foremost, a cultural process, one informing and underlying that most intimate site of cultural activity, namely the practice of everyday life." He stated that "the promise and hope of any real critique of globalization" involves becoming "better able to contest the economic, political, and cultural powers-that-be."
Professor Jameson called for new methods to combat capitalism, including the reconstruction of a new left, and Karim Makdisi revealed a ray of hope: the emergence of what he and Maxwell Castells call a "fourth world," a growing alliance of the disenfranchised and disconnected citizens of the world, who might eventually be able to reverse the growing tide of globalization. Dienst seemed cautiously optimistic in seeing "the emergence of a US-led neo-liberal capitalism or Empire as a decisively new logic of organization and control." Bilal Khbeiz pointed out certain benefits of the US-supported trend of globalization: improved access to both education and disease eradication. Michael Hardt suggested hope, similar to Jameson's new left and Makdisi's "fourth world," in the invention of "a new democracy, a democracy of the multitude for the global world."
Heading picture: Prof. Saree Makdisi lecturing at the conference.
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