Beyond Dichotomies examines literary texts, cultural production, and concrete local practices within the context of modernity and globalization by focusing on the ways in which some societies confront the complexity of cultures reflected in new forms of knowledge, narratives, and subjectivities. The contributors explore how particular societies negotiate the relations between the global and the local, and use a geographical, comparative perspective combined with an interdisciplinary approach to offer a diversity of views and illuminate the cultural impact of globalization on different societies around the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. These societies face complex questions regarding people's histories, identities, and cultures that embody the ambivalence, contradictions, and anxieties generated by the process of globalization. The contributors provide a compelling conclusion for a rethinking and reconfiguration of cultures and intercultural relations in today's global world in which dichotomized representations coexist with a discourse of globalization. --Back cover.

The perspective of the world: globalization then and now / Michel-Rolf Trouillot -- Modernity and periphery: toward a global and relational analysis / Mary Louise Pratt -- Beyond dichotomies: communicative action and cultural hegemony / Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze -- Mankind's proverbial imagination: critical perspectives on human universals as a global challenge / Meineke Schipper -- Bringing history back in: of diasporas, hybridities, places, and histories / Arif Dirlik -- The romance of Africa: three narratives by African-American women / Eileen Julien -- Ethnicity as otherness in British identity politics / Robert J.C. Young -- Reincarnating immigrant biography: on migration and transmigration / Akhil Gupta -- Warped speech: the politics of global translation / Emily Apter -- National identity and immigration: American polity, nativism, and the "alien" / Ali Behdad -- Richard Wright as a specular border intellectual: the politics of identification in Black power / Abdul JanMohamed -- Beyond Dichotomies: translation/transculturation and the colonial difference / Walter D. Mignolo, Freya Schiwy -- The unforeseeable diversity of the world / Edouard Glissant.