Globalization And Postcolonial Studies

"Wie kommt es eigentlich, dass Basel in Besitz einer der wichtigsten ethnologischen Sammlungen Europas ist? Ein Historiker zeigt am Beispiel der Vettern Paul und Fritz Sarasin, wie die Schweiz profitiert hat von kolonialer Politik. Auch ohne eigene Kolonien zu besitzen.

Am Anfang stehen die beiden Vettern Sarasin: Beide dem reichen Basler Patriziat angehörend, beide Naturwissenschaftler und sich sehr verbunden auf eine Art und Weise, für die es in Basel im 19. Jahrhundert keinen Platz hatte. Jahrelang waren sie auf Reisen, forschten in Ceylon und Celebes und schickten von dort aus wahre Schätze nach Basel. Was nur möglich war dank ihres enormen privaten Reichtums und der Hilfe lokaler Kolonialbeamten, die ihre ganz eigenen Interessen verfolgten.

Der Historiker Bernhard Schär hat sich in seiner Dissertation «Tropenliebe» auf die Spuren der Sarasins gemacht und ein aufschlussreiches Bild der damaligen auch schweizerischen kolonialen Abhängigkeiten gezeichnet. Eine Sendung von Maya Brändli."

"There is a lively conversation in literary studies and literary theory about whether the novel is a worldwide phenomenon, or if it has important regional variants that amount to separate practices.

In this essay I use some of that literature to try to understand the discussions in art history about global art.

This document is a chapter in a work in progress. The part on the global novel is the last (fourth) part of this chapter. The first three parts were all posted separately. The three links just below this one on Academia are to earlier versions of the first three parts. I'm keeping them all online because they are on separate subjects -- they're separately tagged, and they might interest different readers. This version is the one that is kept up to date.

Please send all comments etc. via my website, www.jameselkins.com, or by Facebook."

This thesis is a study of the social organisation of time and space in a Pakistani village. The fieldwork was carried out in Jhokwala Village, Lodhran District through 2010. A rapid population growth in the second half of the last century resulted in an inadequate supply of agricultural land, leading to a gradual shift from an agricultural to the market economy. Many farmers are abandoning agriculture and entering wage labour. This combined with urbanisation, more pervasive telecommunication services, the media, and technological changes has affected shifts in the ways of perceiving and managing time and space. In this thesis, I examine generational changes in the village. There have been generational shifts in the types of calendars and the contexts for which they are used. Household organisation and composition have also undergone dramatic change as a consequence of economic transformations. Fundamental economic changes have included a number of shifts in how people engage with information technologies, the media, and urbanisation. These have resulted in a transformation of the physical layout of the village along with changes in the design and structure of places such as the mosque and the house. Such changes in the physical environment have also triggered a shift in the sociospatial relationships, which has resulted in negotiation of some social boundaries between different gender and social classes. I examine the ways in which changes in the social organisation of time and space are indicative of the pace, direction and mechanism of social change.

Lucy, a California free-spirit and Nichiren Buddhist, follows the sound of the panpipes to the Andes, seeking to find or create the ideal society of which they sing. In Peru and Bolivia she chews the sacred coca leaf, participates in indigenous ceremonies, starts a Fair Trade export company, and encounters U.S.-supported human rights abuses that lead to a life-or-death decision.

Accountability and quality assurance have become central discourses in higher education policy throughout the world. However, accountability and quality assurance involve power and control. Practices and ideas about quality developed in the Global North are spreading rapidly across the Global South leading to increased uniformity in the approaches to quality assurance. Given the significant asymmetries that divide Global North and Global South, this article maps inter-discursive relations among key texts that influence policy development on international quality in higher education and explores the applicability of colonial discourse as a perspective for understanding this increasing international convergence.

J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism analyzes how J.M. Coetzee's later fiction tests current understandings of the promises and pitfalls of cosmopolitanism. Drawing on postcolonial and gender studies, as well as affect theory, the book interrogates cosmopolitan philosophies in which feeling cosmopolitan is equated with being cosmopolitan. The study proposes that Coetzee's writing questions both the desirability and inevitability of purportedly cosmopolitan feelings. It offers an alternative model of cosmopolitanism that challenges the supposition that cosmopolitanism requires the propagation of openness to others, or the proliferation of multiple attachments.