Global Fragments: Latinamericanisms, Globalizations, and Critical Theory (review)

It was Eduardo Galeano that reminded us in Ser como Ellosthat it would not be to the advantage of those from below, those oppressed and excluded, to go on chasing the Western dream. As Galeano shows us in his succinct and direct way, ser como ellos, to be like them, means to abandon reason and humanity for the sake of a project that continues to destroy itself and most of what is around it. Today we think of the highest form of this destructive project as globalization. But the question then arises: How would one begin to think otherwise, from below? Eduardo Mendieta's Global Fragmentsoffers us a powerful and honest attempt and a call to take such a departure.

As the title indicates, Global Fragmentstakes up the issue of globalization in light of the fragments that compose today's world/s. Mendieta begins by differentiating between the unfolding of a hegemonic project of totalizing globalization (the apogee of modern capitalism) and the many different and unique issues that appear when one begins to be exposed to the worlds that today compose our sense of the human project. On the one hand one finds the totalizing history of a modern Western rationalism that sees itself as the delivery of truth and salvation for all humanity and which ultimately takes the form of corporate economic, political, and ultimately military actions of globalizing powers. On the other side of our broad global existences one finds our society's exposure to issues of human rights, feminism, ethnic rights, religious rights, and the concern for the poor and marginalized. The latter all point toward what Mendieta calls "a new global consciousness." Thus, the book opens by situating us over against hegemonic globalization and toward global consciousness (2). ¹

Mendieta's project takes its orientation out of critical theory. As he explains, his work sets out from Adorno's idea that totality may be critically challenged and dismantled by "convicting it of non identity with itself" (2). In other words, the book will make obvious that fragmented existence that composes our global world and that globalization will not acknowledge, and also it will show us that in not recognizing that fragmented global reality, modernity as globalization fails its own ideals of human freedom and dignity. Mendieta develops his negative critique by focusing on three conceptual fragments that frame the approach and conceptual space of the book. First, all images that frame the global situation are themselves only fragmentary: "There can be no total perspective on the global world" (3). Second, all things social, political, racial, and geohistorical and even the fragments of human consciousness we recognize today are the result or production of globalization. This is in the sense of an apparatus that constructs a specific epistemic space that serves its interests by inscribing human lives into specifically productive situations or images of themselves and their role in the world. In the case of continents, for example, Mendieta concludes: "Continents and subcontinents do not exist. . . . Yet, even if they do not exist in actuality, these geopolitical markers matter profoundly, because they become the means by which sectors of society are precisely excluded and written out of history, from the web of interdependence" (4).

The third theoretical element is the realization that ideas not only are historical but have geohistorical lives. The ideas and the thinkers of the modern philosophical tradition are products and victims of the development of globalization. Although this would suggest that all thinking is condemned to be a product of hegemonic totalizing, without any alternative for thinking our situation, Mendieta finds precisely here a point of entrance toward thinking the fragmented, for thinking from below and developing a global consciousness. Local ideas may have global effects, and Mendieta focuses on the fragmentary. It is the fragmentary character of thought that interests Mendieta, particularly the fragmentary manners of articulating existence that ultimately reflect the fragmentary character of globalization...