What Does Globalization Look Like?

Hamdi Ateya
     

The lecture hall in one of the newly built buildings at New York University was packed to the gills. The diverse crowd, including but not limited to graduate students and other academics had come to see a panel of guest speakers invited to discuss and reflect on the Museum of Modern Art’s 2006 show Without Boundary. There were three panelists from majority-Muslim countries, the curator of the show, and the host of the event. In the seat in front of me, there was a woman reading an article ripped from The New York Times and stapled in a binder, titled “What Does Islam Look Like?” It seemed that the woman was doing her “homework” just prior to the panel discussion. The article, which had been out for some time, was meant to give readers of the Times some answers to clichéd questions about art and artists in “The Muslim World” and to challenge the notion that Muslims are different from “Us.” In doing so, the writer managed to lower the volume of exoticism as much possible in order to make his point.

Right wingers have the loudest voices in the mainstream U.S. media when it comes to creating opinions on and representations of the so-called Muslim world, and they have influenced policy makers by their angry reactions to 9/11 and other events.  Yet shades of liberal thought dominate reactions in the cultural scene, with other voices trying to create a counterbalance to the Right, to create other representations of the Middle East or “The Muslim world”. They question Bernard Lewis’ clash of civilizations theory and follow other social critics to dig deeper for different answers. And these answers are intended to be thoughtful and complex, as opposed to the discourse of what they view to be the vulgar propagandists. But have time and market considerations allowed these efforts to be as thoughtful and complex as they are intended to be? What kinds of questions have arisen to challenge stereotyped perspectives on “The Muslim World?"Was it even possible, while rushing to sculpt an alternative position, to rephrase “The Muslim World”as a cultural/political term in order to reconfigure its implication?My questions are not directed at the politics of western art institutions and culture producers alone. They are also intended to call attention to the efforts of their counterparts in the so-called Muslim world – people and institutions that were ready to collaborate by offering their native voices and the legitimacy needed by the larger cultural scene.

When the panel was introduced, a special acknowledgement was given to a well-known name among the panelists. He has often been invited to different international art related events in the past five years. His name is usually on Western institutions’ lists when it comes to organizing a conference, an exhibit, a symposium, or any form of cultural representation in regard to the Muslim or Arab worlds. He started off by stating his concerns when it comes to having an academic audience. These concerns were mainly about the fact that academics may apply their scholarly examinations to a casual presentation. At first, I thought that he was humorously reflecting on the sense of anti-intellectualism that most Americans have, or that he just was gesturing to the spontaneous nature of his talk.  Then he proceeded to give his talk, which contained a collage of statements, such as:

--Muslim societies do not have a concept of public space
--The act of reading represented in artworks done by Muslim artists refers to the traditions of reading the Quran
--The head scarf is not the only sign of the oppression of Muslim women, but also the ways in which they sit, walk, and talk
--Islamic traditions do not allow individualism to develop in society
--Islamic traditions do not validate democratic concepts

I wondered:  does a casual presentation actually set up a platform for generalization and to reproduce stereotypes? If his presentational framework was meant to how interrelated concepts and ideas occur to him in a collage-like way, to what extent could the content of his talk itself be affected? In other words, was there any chance that opinionated statements could be rephrased to appear as if they are not opinions but rather “truth” about the so-called Muslim world?

I felt the tension in the lecture hall, and it seemed to me that the audience would not put up with such claims. During the short time left for questions and answers, I could tell from his responses that these claims had been repeatedly presented in other occasions and thatspontaneous presentation was just a style.  It was not actually spontaneous.

As part of the media’s general manipulation and simplification of terminologies for people to adopt and consume, the adjective “academic” has been pre-packaged with a connotation of lacking engagement with people and being dry. It is also often used in that sense in some forms of activism and in political campaigns, especially when the role of the intellectual in society is being discussed, or when activists or candidates are reaching out for popularity.  It is now extremely commonplace to see some public figures, politicians, and writers, using a pre-packaged discourse of what I would call “ignorantism,” or even more broadly of anti-intellectualism in general.  This mode of discourse is especially entertaining to some audiences.

Some weeks earlier, and in the same building but in a much larger lecture hall, there was a major debate between two guest speakers.  Thomas Friedman of The New York Times was presenting his new bestseller called The World is Flat.  He faced Joseph Stiglitz of Colombia University, who is also a chief economist at the World Bank, who was there to present the arguments of his book entitled Making Globalization Work. I went to attend this lecture one hour before it started in order to get a seat but the huge lecture hall was already full – a testament to the popularity of these two figures. At that time, I was working on a video project that, in part, deals with public figures as agents of culture in the socio-political scene, and Friedman was one of the figures that I was examining. Reading his works, and reading about him, in addition to watching hours of video and audio files of his talks and interviews, made me so interested to see him in action with a heavyweight scholar like Stiglitz. 

Friedman is the master of generalization when it comes to making an argument. He presents himself as a future visionary -- not as a futurist but rather as a presentist. His books, articles, and speeches are narratives composed of collage-like information tidbits that are made to appear as “facts” that cannot, in fact do not need to be questioned or checked. His writings are meant to express concerns regarding the effects of globalization on the world’s economy at large and on America in particular and to provide a prescription for American success in the global age. In doing so, he tells his readers that the time we live in is exciting, but that we have to know how keep up with it. At the same time, he constructs and indeed advocates a kind of American nationalism in the way in which he tells Americans that they have to win the battle of globalization against other countries.  Lately, he has expanded his area of expertise, which once focused only on the Middle East, to include India, China, and Russia.  He gives the impression that he is keeping up with the changes in these countries, and offers his vision about the future effects of unleashed technology and outsourcing on America, and emphasizing that these are not necessarily in “our” national interests.

In the debate-like set of lectures, there was not much disagreement between the debaters.  Rather, there were two styles of presenting the same concerns about globalization. Dr. Stiglitz stated in his “hard fact”-filled presentation that the global economic system is not fair to the poor and this would not help the cause of the powerful in the long run. He argued that something has to be done before the blind aspects of globalization’s performance lead the world to a dead end.  On the other side, Mr. Friedman cheered up the audience with his mosaic of story-like “facts,” calling attention – in contrast to Stiglitz -- to the full half of the glass. So, Friedman beamed, what seems unfair is just the way it is -- not to mention that the middle class will increase through the dynamics of this unfairness. In the end, Friedman encapsulated the debate and flattened the entire discussion when he gestured toward Stiglitz’s talk and exclaimed, “There is no sin in academia like optimism!” And that was when many in the audience really cheered up.

One wonders: if efforts of representation are caught up in the politics and dynamics of presentation, how can aspects of distortion in the presented or represented subject be diagnosed?  Especially when everyone, like the audience members who ran to the debate to catch a seat, and like readers of Friedman’s books in the airports, is so rushed? I mean by “distortion” when the subject is politicized, stereotyped, exoticized, or simplified. In other words, distortion occurs when a subject is highlighted in a manner that aims for accessibility. The problem is not only that this accessibility is the language of the dominant market, but it is also increasingly the language of the constructed dominant history.

 

 
 
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