Global?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The real title of the book that I published in 2012 is An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalizability. In the end of the book this secret is revealed. That to me is more important than globalization: that nearly everything is globalizable, medicine and poison. Yet it is also true that only capital and data globalize. Everything else is damage control. If we catch up epistemically with this situation, we will have just a couple of global languages, and a world governance, undoubtedly pernicious and feudal in its workings, which will operate not in a nation, not in a political way, but in a cosmopolitical way. When we emphasize ideal global communities we begin to sense that there is a mismatch between nation-state and world governance. The answer to that is not notions of community, however. They take us back to somewhat primitive social contracts subsumed under a financialized global economy.

The global histories that we project today are usually international histories. A group of us have started a project involving Africa and Asia, variously called "Radiating Globality" or "Old Histories, New Geographies," which tries to undo this tendency. I hope you will be able to read some of these efforts in the coming years. Today I ask you to look back in another direction as well.

The tacit globalizer before the globe was ever thought of is reproductive heteronormativity. The word hetero here is not the opposite of homo but the opposite of auto. Everything, including capital, rises in this difference between the auto and the hetero. This is a much larger globalizer. If one could, in fact, begin to think of plotting such a history, which cannot be fully done because it goes beyond the idea of agency, it would be different from international histories of people traveling, or from world system theories which think that economic systems automatically mean cultural systems.

Part of the work of the "Radiating Globality" group is to understand the relationship between my hometown Kolkata and the Chinese city of Kunming. They have traded since the eighth century. We are trying to reestablish what this might mean in the making of global histories. As for "world literature," it aims for a kind of cosmopolitan