The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

Figure 3. Unisphere, New York World’s Fair, 1964–65.

      Events such as the establishment of the UN, the World’s Fair, and the success of Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, which put man on the moon, together reflected a remarkable period in which a new global imaginary of mankind’s interconnectedness emerged and took on weight in the popular imagination, particularly in the United States. The growing environmental movement furthered this imaginary, spurred on by Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book Silent Spring and the 1969 Santa Barbara, California, oil spill. In response to the spill, an estimated 20 million Americans took to the streets in 1970 in defense of the global environment, celebrating the first Earth Day. This mass mobilization forced the US federal government to establish the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and helped launch Green Party politics in Australia and then Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Germany (Spretnak and Kapra 1986; Wall 2010).

      At the same moment that the UN Charter established a platform upon which to “maintain international peace and security,” however, the superpowers of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom were already mobilizing against the Soviet Union and setting up the conditions for the Cold War that posited capitalism against communism. Against the upbeat rhetoric of global inclusion that flourished in the latter half of the twentieth century, it is impossible to ignore the oppressive historical realities that underpinned and perhaps explain the desire for an optimistic global imaginary. The jubilant Unisphere imagery of the World’s Fair elided the fact that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated only five months before the world exposition opened. It also obscured the Cold War realities of the 1960s, which witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall (1961), mounting fears of nuclear warfare in incidents such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), looming and ongoing regional wars (Korea and Vietnam), and the USSR’s suppression of the liberation movement known as the Prague Spring (1968). In Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world, the 1960s witnessed extreme violence in response to liberation movements, deeply tainting the global optimism surrounding decolonization that flourished immediately after World War II. Self-determination was often accompanied by waves of oppression and brutality as ethnic and religious communities were artificially divided and cordoned off into new nation-states across Asia and Africa.

      In the wake of genocide and nuclear warfare, or what Eric Hobsbawm has called “total war,” the foundations of modern rationality were profoundly shaken within intellectual circles in this postwar era (Hobsbawm 1994). Many societies developed deep-seated anxieties about the failings of modernity’s promises of science, development, progress, democracy, and self-determination, which had dominated Euro-American thought since the Enlightenment. These anxieties manifested within twentieth-century European art and literature movements, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, that bridged the post-WWI and WWII periods, as well as in the existentialist, absurdist, and nihilist movements in philosophy and literature. Artists and intellectuals, many of whom had fled Europe for the United States in the late 1930s, grappled with the sensation that nothing was predictable, stable, or fixed in a world turned upside-down that had become in many ways unrecognizable.

      Within the Euro-American academy, leading intellectual figures began reaching out beyond the conventions of academic disciplines to explore a turbulent postwar period that had brought women into the labor force, released black and brown societies from colonial rule, and revealed the violence and depravity of ostensibly civilized European societies. As Immanuel Wallerstein notes, this was a period when the “centrist liberal geoculture that was holding the world-system together” was essentially undermined (Wallerstein 2004: x).

      Against rapidly shifting social and political contexts, scholars began “deconstructing” or questioning the basic assumptions underpinning modernity. Taken-for-granted categories of nationality, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity became sites of controversy, exploration, and experimentation. As a result, new intellectual conversations emerged between scholars from across the disciplines who were drawn together in a quest to understand enduring real-world problems at home and abroad—problems of racism, inequality, development, neocolonialism, and neoimperialism. Opportunities for dialogue among Third- and First-World scholars developed at the fringes of these conversations, introducing new ideas, alternative perspectives, and competing epistemologies into the Western academy that broadened its knowledge base and underscored its Eurocentric bias (Wallerstein 1996: 48).

      Pressures mounted for universities to look beyond their national borders as well as to reexamine domestic agendas and respond to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The decades that followed saw a proliferation of interdisciplinary programs on university campuses, including area, ethnic, women, gender, religious, and environmental studies (Ferguson 2012). Cultural, ethnic, and area studies programs ushered new conversations into universities. Some of these programs focused on non-Western regions, issues of race and class, and some on alternative viewpoints and voices of minority peoples. Among these programs, area studies represented an explicit effort to initiate new knowledge about non-Western countries and places.

      Within the United States the international studies programs were sponsored in large part by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, who worked collectively to support interdisciplinary area studies as a matter of public policy (Lagemann 1989; Chomsky et al. 1998; Ludden 2000; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002; Szanton 2004; Schäfer 2010). Under the Higher Education Act of 1965 and the introduction of Title VI grants, funding was made available to approximately 125 universities to support area studies, language studies, and education abroad programs, which were known as National Resource Center Programs. This resulted in a diverse number of academic units being developed, such as African Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, East Asian Studies, European Studies, and Pacific Studies. Together they reflected Cold War tensions and the United States’ expanding neocolonial reach and development aspirations into other parts of the world.

      In the United Kingdom Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall established Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 in an explicit attempt to grapple with issues of race, class, and power. Heavily influenced by socialist and Marxist thought, these social theorists