Abstract
How can we develop contemporary concepts of globalization which understand its intricate association with modernity’s imperialisms? Perhaps the beginning of the answer lies in how we think about space: the final frontier. What imperialism means in the discourse of globalization can be seen in screen versions of science fiction. These regularly re-cycle a compelling trinity of familiar themes: the conquest of space, the alien invasion and the close encounter. Does it stretch the imagination too much to suggest that these scenarios of ‘otherness’ draw upon long-established motifs in the West’s imperial culture? These include Europe’s sixteenth-century invasion of the Americas; the nineteenth-century colonial conquest of India, Africa and the Pacific; and the twentieth-century Western nationalist opposition to ‘non-European’ immigration. Hollywood science fiction is one of the few areas in social life where the possibility of a single world consciousness is both assumed and procured. discourse of globalization, it seems to be underpinned by a distinctly European formation of imperialism which is disavowed1 and promoted by an evangelical faith in an apparently self-effacing universal liberalism.
Modern imperialism was so global and all-encompassing that virtually nothing escaped it; besides as I have said, the nineteenth-century contest over empire is still continuing today. Whether or not to look at the connections between cultural texts and imperialism is therefore to take a position in fact taken — either to study the connection in order to criticize it and think of alternatives for it, or not to study it in order to let it stand, unexamined and presumably unchanged.
(Edward Said, 1993, pp. 80–1)
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© 1999 British Sociological Association
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Hesse, B. (1999). Reviewing the Western Spectacle: Reflexive Globalization through the Black Diaspora. In: Brah, A., Hickman, M.J., an Ghaill, M.M. (eds) Global Futures. Explorations in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378537_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378537_7
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