BORDERLAND SELVES: RETHINKING IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY
GLOBAL/LOCAL ARTICULATIONS
Modern and postmodern theorists alike have consistently framed analyses of
globalization as involving a tension between two competing and apparently contradictory
perspectives: globalism and localism or, as others have similarly put it, between
"homogenizers" and "heterogenizers" (Featherstone and Lash, 1995), "worldism" and
"relativism" (Robertson, 1991), or between "economism" and "culturalism" (Wolff, 1991).
As such, arguments concerning the global/local tension, the conflict between global and
local processes, as well as about how to understand the formation of identities in this
context, traverse the contemporary theorizing of globalization.
Much of contemporary theories of globalization – of both modern and postmodern
emphasis – remain circumscribed within a binary logic by defining (and at the same time
concealing) global-local interdependence as a particular kind of relation that is ultimately
defined within a hierarchy, where one term is dominant, prior, or determinant; and the
opposite term is subordinate, secondary, and determined by its counterpart, and therefore,
defined within a model of causality that requires the production of global and local as binary
terms
i
. In this scenario then, possible understandings of existing asymmetrical relations; of
the relation between social actors and their conditions of existence (i.e., their economic,
political, cultural, and institutional environments), and of the ways in which identities are
produced, excluded and transformed; become reduced to an already naturalized set of
discursive constructs, and therefore to a very specific logic and order of reality. As Barbara
Abou-El-Haj (1991) has similarly put it “our ambitions to do equal justice to global and
local is limited at the outset by our failure to generate a comparative language beyond the set
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