This coming year's workshop will be organized around the problem of scale, understood as a mark of rupture. The rupture introduced by scale is sometimes that of movement, as when a cultural practice travels across space and gains, in that traveling, sudden access to a world of circulation that is many times larger than its originary context. The classic example here might be that of commodification, as when objects rich in local religious meaning begin to be exchanged within a world-wide aesthetic economy. Another kind of example would be the commodity status gained by transcribed oral texts that, in transcription, begin to circulate among an outward-spiraling readership (think here of Sojourner Truth's or Chief Joseph's words, or of Rigoberta Menchu's). Often, the rupture effected by movement across levels of scale is more a question of political power and less one of circulation. Local knowledges confront "expert" knowledges in incommensurate ways, depending on the scale of the forum in which that confrontation takes place. Think of the politics of something like "women's literacy," which appears as an unalloyed good when viewed through the lens of the World Bank but which can have local meanings that sometimes amount to nothing more than thinly-disguised political propaganda. Yet the violence of scale is also a productive violence. At a minimum, what we abbreviate as "the local" is produced by the intersection of different scales of economic power and knowledge-power. Neither "the local" nor "the global" can exist in separation. Economically and discursively, these are points determined by their mutual relationship. So too, one would not want to despair of the political possibility that creative ruptures from "the local" into "the global" will destabilize the arrogance of what is referred to by that localized phrase: "the Washington Consensus."

Fall 2003

Venue: History Lounge, 209 College Hall
Time: 4:30-6:30 PM

 

Spring 2004

AND

Rita Barnard, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

Venue: Penn Humanities Forum, 3619 Locust Walk
Time: 4:30-6:30 PM