In Search of the Divide Between the Local and the Global

Conventionally, the local and the global are understood to be distinct cultural spaces. While the local is considered as a unitary site, and thus the location of home, the global is regarded as the other. However, in this era of globalization, it has become very difficult to maintain this distinction. There is a sense of the global in the local, and vice versa. Moreover, contrary to conventional assumptions, both the local and the global are actively transforming and being transformed by each other. It is therefore inaccurate to view the local as a passive player, either removed from global influence or waiting to be influenced by the global. Stuart Hall, in "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity" (1997), demonstrates the danger of viewing identities and places as "stable points of reference that were like that in the past, are now and ever shall be, still points in a turning world" (175). In his view, the locality turns with the rest of the world, and "goes through the eye of the needle of the other before it can construct itself" (174). In other words, every place is connected to another place. Hall has also noted globalization's role in "the erosion of the nation-state and the national identities that are associated with it" (177). Indeed, according to him, "different subject-positions are being transformed or produced in the course of the unfolding of the new dialectics of global culture" (173). It is not only Hall who sees a link between the local and the global.Bill Ashcroft, author of Post-Colonial Transformation (2001), has made a similar observation: "The diffusion of global influence makes the relationship between the local and the global all the more complex, because when we examine local cultures we find the presence of the global within the local to an extent that compels us to be very clear about our concept of the local" (215). Ashcroft's view that we can no longer look at the local in isolation from the global is persuasive; however, it is arguably compromised by its "top down" approach. That is, it wrongly suggests that the contest between the global and the local is one-way, and that it is only the local on the receiving end. In any case, the presence of the global in the local has implications for our perception of home, one of which is the difficulty of separating home from the world. There is a need to configure a global sense of home, so as to account for the threads of global culture and relations that interweave the fabric that we call home.In their introduction to Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (1999), Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere call for "an understanding of globalization that not only takes into account the rapid increase in mobility of people, goods, and images, but also the fact that, in many places, flow goes hand in hand with a closure of identities which often used to be much more fuzzy and permeable" (2). In other words, while some people seem open to globalization, others resist it by affirming what they consider as their endangered local identities. This resistance is based on the fear that globalization is cultural imperialism by any other name, and that in time it would consume the local cultures. While this fear is in some ways justified, it does not change the fact that "there are no absolute boundaries unaffected by global flows" (Meyer and Geschiere 5). Nevertheless, the local space is too complex and active to be erased by the global flows. As Henry Lefebvre, in The Production of Space (1991), puts it, "We are confronted not by one social space but by many - indeed, by an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces which we refer to generically as 'social space'. No space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local" (86). Nevertheless, globalization has an impact on the local, an impact that affects our understanding of home.In a similar vein, Arif Dirlik, in "The Global in the Local" (1996), shows the relationship between the local and the global by arguing that the boundaries of the local are open. …