Introduction. Other Globes Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization

Contemporary media, politics, and culture are saturated by figures of the global and globalization. This Introduction emphasizes how many of these figures rest on a particular conception of the global. The editors term this “modern globalism,” within which the earth is grasped as a geometrical totality spanned by economic flows. Despite its prevalence today, modern globalism represents only one among many possible ways in which the global can be imagined; alternative global imaginations abound in the cultural past and at the peripheries of contemporary culture. These “other globes,” explored in the thirteen contributions that follow the Introduction, offer paths for thinking new relations between people, polities, and the planet. Laying the ground for the case studies, the Introduction unpacks alternative names for the global, exploring the cultural significance of earth, world, and planet; undertakes a genealogy of modern globalism, whose historical ascent marginalized other worldviews; and surveys critiques of modern globalism in Marxist, postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical theory.