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  • Manifesting Globalism
  • Graeme Stout (bio)
AFTER GLOBALIZATION BY ERIC CAZDYN AND IMRE SZEMAN John Wiley and Sons, 2011

After Globalization—part of Blackwell’s Manifestos Series—offers a unique approach to discussions of globalization, global culture, and our contemporary political and economic situation. Although in many ways lacking a sense of overall cohesion, the text offers a much-needed tonic to more than two decades of less-than-critical analyses of the concept of globalization itself. The text is divided into three main parts (along with an introductory précis and a conclusion) that, in their own individual ways, try to gauge the social and cultural status of globalization as a concept, a discourse, and the “limit of where we are and what is required to overcome these limits” (Cazdyn and Szeman, 5). As a whole, these three parts do not obviously work together in a coherent fashion. Perhaps this is the strength of Cazdyn and Szeman’s work in that it follows closely the goal of any manifesto that is not simply to offer a series of objectives and ideas, but to provoke (Lyon) through its rhetorical strategies and the force of its critique. This is where the urgency and potential of Szeman and Cazdyn’s text comes across. Insofar as it is composed of three divergent pieces, the first section of After Globalization offers a forthright and much-needed challenge to contemporary writers, thinkers, and global citizens to not only look beyond but also move beyond the confines of contemporary discourses of globalization. For, as the authors convincingly argue, globalization as a diagnostic and descriptive concept has been reduced to being a weak and subservient synonym for neoliberalism. As such globalization—as a rhetorical and ideological tool—offers only a series of limits that “are at the heart of our social imaginings—especially [End Page 238] when they function unconsciously” (6). The first section (“The Afterlife of Globalization”) is a justifiably confrontational text that points out the paucity of critical thought in contemporary political and economic debates. It is in this section that After Globalization offers its strongest contribution. Here we are called on to end fruitless speculation over the character of globalization and to begin to imagine alternatives to the limits of the neoliberal worldview: a worldview that permits no “beyond.”

In comparison to similar manifestos (those dealing with current political and theoretical issues and their futures) within Blackwell’s Manifestos series, After Globalization offers a more pointed critique of our cultural paralysis in the face of the neoliberal onslaught of the last thirty years. In three other examples, Leitch’s Living with Theory, Outhwaite’s The Future of Society, and Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism, one finds a more traditional approach that, at once, offers a thoroughgoing introduction to their respective areas of study alongside a critical intervention with the field of study. Unlike these texts, After Globalization opts for a more experimental approach to the topic at hand. It is in the first section of their work that Cazdyn and Szeman produce an insightful series of criticisms that, either in part or as a whole, will be invaluable to future writers, educators, and students. At the heart of this section is a strong critique of our current inability (perhaps also our unwillingness) to examine our global situation except through the conceptual language of neoliberal economics.

A work such as Hardt and Negri’s Declaration offers itself up for comparison with After Globalization, given its attempt to understand recent political events in (predominantly) the Middle East and North Africa as resistances to the inevitable march of globalization—a historical juncture where we no longer “trust the decisions and guidance of the ruling powers, lest even greater disasters befall us” but instead turn against established order and start to work toward an alternative. Like Declaration, Szeman and Cazdyn’s book seeks to understand the contemporary situation in which we find ourselves. Unlike Hardt and Negri, who start their analysis by denying that their work is a manifesto,1 Cazdyn and Szeman adopt a more self-critical and reflexive mode of writing that returns to the manifesto as a literary and philosophical form that seeks to...

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