Globalization and Religion: Identity and Power
INAES (Institute for North American and European Studies), University of Tehran
15-16 November 2005
Abstract
Circulation and Civilization: Rethinking Cultural Binarism in a Digital Age
Brian T. Edwards
University in Euaston, Illinois
bedwards@northwestern.eduBrian T. Edwards teaches English and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and is a 2005 Carnegie Scholar His book Morocco Bound: Disorienting Americas Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express was published by Duke University Press in October2005. His current research examines the circulation of American culture in North Africa and the Middle East.
The call for proposals identifies a series of features of globalization: the collapsing space and place, the creation of new communities, an expansion of consumer markets, and the conditions for a new set of international conflicts or clashes on ideological bases. The organizers also note that given the technologies that are integral to globalization (especially digital technologies), the globe may be the basis for religions and religious affiliations that had, in earlier epistemes, been organized under different spatial registers (e.g. the local). This reframes the question of global binarism – which is currently understood on religious and cultural grounds – in a fundamentally different register. By identifying the tensions inherent in the technologies of globalization and the formation of communities within globalization, we are able to rethink the problems of ossified understandings of culture and division in the contemporary world and the possibilities and problems of the new global reach of technologies, ideologies, and communication.
My paper takes this lead and considers the topic of “circulation” in relationship to contemporary (21st century) discourses of culture and “civilization.” My argument is that attention to the circulation of objects of meaning forces us to recognize not the solidity of the objects or meanings themselves, but the ways in which their movement itself is of primary importance, what Elizabeth Povinelli and Dilip Gaonkar (2003) call the “circulatory matrix.” Circulation is an integral feature of globalization, on both economic and cultural grounds. Circulation is on the first level the path the commodity undertakes within a global economy; today the commodity would be what Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma (2004) have identified as “risk” itself (noting the rapid and massive rise of the global market for financial derivatives). On the second level, circulation here identifies the path of traveling ideas and ideologies.
After identifying the conceptual benefits of attending to circulation, the object of my analysis will be competing interpretations (contemporary Iranian and American) of the meanings of American history. Recent official Iranian interpretations of the U.S. as an endeavor in religious freedom have been recast in a variety of fashions in the U.S. during the past decade. The Iranian interpretation of U.S. history has itself circulated back into the U.S., where it is itself recoded within Bush Administration rhetoric, and silently readopted by the U.S. state. This particular case is best understood within the logics of circulation and culture, and not merely as historical interpretation, because it demonstrates the ways in which what Arjun Appadurai (1994) identified as ideoscapes function in the realm of global politics and religion. The circulatory path of this interpretation is of especial interest because it defies the logic of cultural binarism (clash of civilizations) that it would otherwise seem to undergird.