Page 99 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Gilroy, Paul (1956– ) Gilroy, who was born in Bethnal Green, London, was amongst
those who studied at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS). He is currently a Professor at Yale University (USA). Gilroy was
76 critical of the ‘culturalism’ at CCCS for its implicit British nationalism and was a
significant figure in bringing the categories of race and racialization to the fore in
cultural studies, via for example his study of race in the UK – There Ain’t No Black
in the Union Jack. Gilroy has challenged essentialist notions of race or ethnicity and
has written extensively about the ‘changing same ‘ of diaspora cultural identities
understood in terms of routes more than roots. Gilroy argues that black self-
identities and cultural expressions utilize a plurality of histories and that we should
think of identities as being in motion rather than existing as absolutes of nature or
culture. He has argued against the very idea of classifying people into ‘races’.
• Associated concepts Black Atlantic, diaspora, ethnicity, hegemony, identity,
ideology, race.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, Marxism, postcolonial theory.
• Reading Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic. London: Verso.

Globalization The concept of globalization refers us to the increasing multi-directional
economic, social, cultural and political connections that are forming across the
world and our awareness of them. Thus globalization involves the increased
compression of the world and our growing consciousness of those processes. The
compression of the world can be understood in terms of the expansionism of the
institutions of modernity while the reflexive intensification of consciousness of the
world can be perceived beneficially in cultural terms.
Globalization is constituted in part by planetary scale economic activity that is
creating an interconnected if uneven world economy. Thus, 200 transnational
corporations which produce between one-third and one-half of world output
constitute 50 per cent of the world’s largest economic units. In the financial sector
the collapse of the European Exchange Mechanism, Black Monday on the stock
exchange and the so-called ‘Asian economic meltdown’ of the 1990s have
demonstrated that states are at the mercy of the global money markets. The
emergence and growth of global economic activity are not entirely new but the
current phase, dating from the early 1970s, is marked by an acceleration of
time–space compression propelled by transnational companies’ search for new
sources of profit in the face of the crisis of Fordism. Thus, accelerated globalization
refers to a set of related economic activities understood as the practices of capitalism
in its ‘disorganized’ era.
Globalization is not just an economic matter but is also concerned with issues
of cultural meaning. While the values and meanings attached to place remain
significant, we are increasingly involved in networks that extend far beyond our
immediate physical locations. We are not yet a part of a world-state or unitary
world-culture but we can identify global cultural processes, of cultural integration
and disintegration, that are independent of inter-state relations. In particular,
cosmopolitanism is an aspect of day-to-day Western life as diverse and remote
cultures have become accessible, as signs and commodities, via our televisions,