A Fragmented Globality

Abstract

What, if anything, is truly new about our times? The routine answer to that question is globalization. But what is globalization? While the word “modernity” dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, globalization is a hundred years younger. Yet as a potential North Atlantic universal, globalization is already as murky as modernity. Like modernity, it cannot be all it claims to be. We have already seen that much of the newness it celebrates is fictitious and that this celebration silences much of world history.