Latitudinal Citizenship: Or, How Markets Stretch the Bounds of Governmentality
Aihwa Ong Paper Excerpt: Mobilities has become a new code word for grasping the global. But the language of mobilities – flows, deterritorializations, networks – has inadvertently distracted attention from how the fluidity of markets shapes a flexibility in modes of control. It is also surprising how little theorizations about globalization factor in alternative networks of capital and labor, or draw insights from Asian forms to rethink changing patterns of production and politics. Thus, mappings of “the rise of network society” still frame Asian networks as aberrant or regionally-bound models of contemporary global business. Meanwhile, assertions about an American Empire claim that the mobile multitudes of working people across the world can be subsumed under a united front to confront globalized capital. There is recognition that capital circulates and recirculates, but will recirculations back to Western sites take different forms, creating alternative spatialities of production and control? For instance, will transnational economies linking Asia and North America radically destabilize the relationship between national space and national citizenship? Specifically, will a de-territoritorialized form of citizenship pose significant challenges to territorialized citizenship? |