Global Babble. Review of "Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order" by Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney (eds).

Abstract

These days, every respectable academic needs to have a book about globalisation, on pain of death. In the 1990s the compulsory theme was citizenship; this decade, globalisation. Empire or imperialism remains the Marxist spin on globalisation. Some of the geopolitical analysis in "Implicating Empire" is astute, not least when it comes to detecting the limits of the earlier modern claims about the sacred sovereignty of nation states. This is an uneven collection: no surprises there. Its subject matter can be as hilarious as it is earnest. In one place, for example, one writer seriously quotes herself at length as an authority, which is taking even North American academic self-referentiality a little too far. The subject matter otherwise remains as pressing as it is ubiquitous.