Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: It could easily be argued that a central issue facing society today is one of geo-political boundaries and globalizations. In this paper, I will compare and contrast how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Arjun Appaduarai and George Ritzer would address this issue.
Hardt and Negri argue that what we are witnessing today, on both local and global levels, is a comprehensive transformation of human life in an unprecedented way. They call the new order that is being realized in front of our eyes through the geopolitical and economic globalization Empire. Although George Ritzer and Arjun Appadurai accept this transformation of human life, they look at this event from different perspectives. For Ritzer, the grobalization can explain “the processes in which growth imperatives (e.g., the need to increase sales and profits from one year to next year in order to keep stock prices high and growing) push organizations and nations to expand globally and to impose themselves on the local (xiii).” On the other hand, Appaduari argues that the globe has begun to spin in new ways and offers a theory of rupture “that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics and explores their joint effect on the work of imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity (3).”