Globalization as we know it today would be unimaginable without the revolution in information and communication technologies of the last thirty years. Yet have we achieved one world as the promotional hype for cellular and digital networks would have it? This collection of essays, Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization, explores the current state of communication and discourse in a globalized environment. The essays are united by an awareness that, whether understood technologically, economically, epistemologically, or culturally, globalization is a discursive field with discrepant assumptions, categories and conclusions. As such, globalization is double-edged, and complex. It can certainly enable the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful; in different contexts, or at different moments, it can also facilitate individual and collective agency. It is this doubleness, this complexity, that this collection seeks to bring into focus. This volume offers an interdisciplinary forum where technological, aesthetic, and ethical issues relating to globalization inhabit the same conceptual frame. Together the essays address the central issue of how the new knowledges of globalization are being articulated, and explore the cultural consequences and success of such communication and knowledge exchange.
About the Author: Samir Dayal is an Associate Professor, English at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts. He is the author of Resisting Modernity: Counternarratives of Nation and Masculinity and the editor, with an introduction, of Julia Kristeva's Crisis of the European Subject and several other books. He has published several articles and book chapters on cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and film and is completing a book on Indian cinema. Margueritte Murphy is an Associate Professor of English at Bentley College. She is author of A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (1992), and numerous essays in edited collections and journals, including Mosaic, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, American Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Studies in Romanticism (forthcoming). She is working on a study of nineteenth-century French political economy, aesthetics, and the art criticism and poetry of Baudelaire. Her current research interests include nineteenth-century consumer aesthetics, the Industrial Expositions of the July Monarchy, and everyday economic discourse in nineteenth-century France.