Globalization,modernity,and capitalism: On Victor Roudometof's ‘How should we think about globalization in a postglobalization era?’

Abstract

Victor Roudometof's goal is to defend the analytical value of ‘globalization’ against declarations concerning its alleged obsolescence, and especially against theories that associate globalization with Eurocentric narratives of Western modernity. His aim is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of examining the interconnections between different world regions that go beyond conventional temporal frames. In this he succeeds well, but the article has some omissions and contradictions, whose consequences I address in my response. A central one of these is that Roudometof seems to subsume capitalism under modernity, or at the very least avoids integrating the unprecedented intensification of capitalist imperatives to his analysis of cultural globalization and global connectivity, which is particularly problematic in the present historical conjuncture.