THE GLOBAL IN THE LOCAL

ArifDirlik

About ten years ago, a movie called Local Hero (directed by Bill Forsyth) appeared on the screens of artsier movie theaters in the United States. The movie narrates the study of a friendly confrontation between a global oil company located in Houston, Texas, and a small town on the Scottish coast, which the corporation plans to buy out and to raze so that it may build a complex for its North Sea oil operations. The corporation seeks to bargain the townspeople out of their property—since, we are told, they are not mere Third World people who may simply be pushed out of the way. The locals, though excited by the promise of unimagined wealth, not only prove to be crafty negotiators, but in the end manage to humanize the initially very urban young company executive sent there to do the negotiating, as well as the tough but spacy owner of the company (played beautifully by Burt Lancaster), both of whom end up falling in love with the place and its inhabitants. The film ends with the ceo scrapping the planned oil complex in favor of building a research laboratory where refineries and docks were to have been. The locals win, the town wins, the environment wins, and the corporation is happy—except for the young executive who is shipped back mercilessly to Houston, and the jungle of urban life and global corporate operations, with only memories of what might have been.

The film in its execution conveyed all the warmth of its message, but what seemed most remarkable about it at the time was its romantic nostalgia for the concretely (and, therefore, humanely) local against the abstractly (and, therefore, dehumanizingly) global. In hindsight it seems romantic still, but somewhat less nostalgic. We know that the humanization of one corporate ceo does not add up to the humanization of capital, and we are even more aware than before that the salvaging of one local community from the ravages of capital does not stop the onslaught of capital on community. We have learned, if anything, that to save one community it may be necessary to destroy another.

What makes Local Hero seem less nostalgic is the emergence in the intervening decade of a concern with the local as the site of resistance to capital, and the location for imagining alternative possibilities for the future. Romantic the movie may have been, but within the context of what was to follow, its nostalgia for the local community appears as something more than a mere fabulation of a past irrevocably lost; it appears as a nostalgia that becomes an active ingredient in the formation of a contemporary discourse on the local which has rescued "fabulation" itself from the opprobrium of a more "realistic" time to render it into a principle for the reconstruction of the local. It would seem by the early nineties that local movements, or movements to save and reconstruct local societies, have emerged as the primary (if not the only) expressions of resistance to domination: from the tree-hugging women of the Chipko movement in Northern India to the women workers of the maquiladora industries of the United States-Mexican border, from indigenous people's movements seeking secession from colonialist states to the western Kansas counties that wish to secede from Kansas and the United States because they feel abused by their governments, local movements have emerged as a pervasive phenomenon of the contemporary world. These movements find resonance in radical social theory in the increasing frequency with which the term "local" appears in considerations of the present and the future of society globally. In this theorizing the "local" retains the concrete associations of the local community—as in Local Hero—but more as reference than as specific description (or prescription); the meaning (the very scope) of the local is subject otherwise to negotiation in accordance with those considerations.

I reflect on the "local" as a site both of promise and predicament. My primary concern is with the local as a site of promise and the social and ideological changes globally that have dynamized a radical rethinking of the local over the last decade. I am interested especially in the relationship between the emergence of a global capitalism and the emergence of concern with the local as a site of resistance and liberation. Consideration of this relationship is crucial, it seems to me, in distinguishing a "critical localism" from localism as an ideological articulation of capitalism in its current phase. Throughout, however, I try also to remain cognizant of the local as a site of predicament. In its promise of liberation, localism may also serve to disguise oppression and parochialism. It is indeed ironic that the local should emerge as a site of promise at a historical moment when localism of the most conventional kind has reemerged as the source of genocidal conflict around the world. The latter, too, must surely enter any consideration of the local as a site of resistance to and liberation from oppression. In either case, the local that is at issue here is not the "local" in any conventional or traditional sense, but a very contemporary "local" that serves as a site for the working out of the most fundamental contradictions of the age.

Rethinking the Local

It is too early, presently, to sort out the factors that have contributed to the ascendancy of a concern with the local over the last decade, and any such undertaking must of necessity be highly speculative. What the "local" implies in different contexts is highly uncertain. Suffice it to say here that a concern for the local seems to appear in the foreground in connection with certain social movements (chief among them ecological, women's, ethnic, and indigenous people's movements) and the intellectual repudiation of past ideologies (chief among them, for the sake of brevity here, the intellectual developments associated with postmodernism).

Why there should be a connection between the repudiation of past ideologies and the reemergence of the local as a concern is not very mysterious. Localism as an orientation in either a "traditional" or a modern sense has never...