Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization

Afterword. The Global Village

Afterword: The Global Village The dominant small town in late capitalism has become a global image , a global form, and a global ideology. To appreciate the ideological force of the dominant small town, it is useful to move from Main Street, U.S.A. to another section of Disneyland: the ride “It’s a Small World.”1 This movement, I want to suggest, is from the small town imagined as the nation’s home to the small town imagined as the world’s home. As the United States developed into a global empire, the dominant small town became refigured as a global form that naturalized and exported U.S. narratives, values, and knowledge regimes throughout the violently uneven geographies of globalization. On the one hand, “It’s a Small World” may seem progressive in its celebration of cultural diversity, pluralism, and inclusivity. However, on closer inspection, the ride offers only the façade of diversity and a faux globalconsciousness.2 Itvisualizesglobalizationasanintimate,knowable community where everyone exists on an equal playing field and where everyone everywhere has an equal opportunity to pursue happiness. (In fact the ride imagines a world where everyone has already achieved a state of sustained happiness.) Despite the appearance of diversity, “It’s a Small World” presents globalization as comprising homologous spatial communities with homologous temporal patterns. In other words, what is happening in one community mirrors what is happening in all other communities throughout the world. Or we can say that spatial and cultural differences become translated into homologous small towns. The ride imagines globalization as a benevolent, harmonious, flattened world 160 / afterword in which all cultural practices and all social differences are subsumed into a singular imaginary. In Disney’s visualization of globalization, laboring bodies, spaces of poverty, and images of despair are nowhere to be seen. Of course, this is Disneyland, and perhaps we shouldn’t expect a family-friendly ride to be an honest look at global material conditions. However, “It’s a Small World” is not simply an innocuous ride with a catchy song. Rather the ride visualizes what has become one of the dominant metaphors used to “explain” globalization: the global village.3 The geography theorists and scholars Cindi Katz and Neil Smith note the ubiquity of spatial metaphors for describing social reality in late capitalism. Spatial metaphors are ubiquitous because space is assumed to be knowable and transparent, and hence can translate complex social formations and processes into something that can be easily grasped: “It is precisely . . . [the] apparent familiarity of space, the givenness of space, its fixity and inertness, that make a spatial grammar so fertile for metaphoric appropriation” (69).4 Because of this assumed fixity and knowability , spatial metaphors are used to secure and stabilize meaning. To explain globalization, the most pervasive spatial metaphor employed in the First World is the global village. The global village, I want to suggest, is the dominant small town repackaged for the latest chapter of global capitalism. “Global village” was first coined by the media theorist Marshal McLuhan in the 1960s to describe a world becoming more interconnected and intimate due to new media technologies.5 Gayatri Spivak argues that the global village imaginary is “colonialism’s newest trick” (330), and the literary scholar Sue-Im Lee elaborates that the global village has become “the dominant term for expressing a global coexistence altered by transnational commerce, migration, and culture” (“‘We Are” 316). One of the most prominent contemporary uses of the global village comes courtesy of the popular economics journalist Thomas Friedman. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Friedman describes the world as “tied together into a single globalized marketplace and village” (xvii).6 The global village ideologically transforms globalization from a contested and conflicted historical process into a fixed thing without any outside or alternative. Moreover the global village imagines the world as singular, unified, and flat. The global village operates as a master metaphor that defines and delimitsglobalizationacrossarangeofdiscourses.Consider,forexample, the following recent studies: An A-to Z Guide to Understanding Current afterword / 161 World Affairs by the anthropologist David Levinson and the environmental and women’s studies scholar Karen Christensen is framed by the title The Global Village Companion (1996); the telecommunications scholar Heather E. Hudson describes the conditions of the information age in her book From Rural Village to Global Village (2006); the historian Aleria Gennaro Lerda edited the collection Which “Global Village”?: Societies...