[Reader-list] Fwd: Culture Cafe: The world was never flat

[Shilpa Phadke]

 Culture Cafe, CMCS,  invites you to a talk titled
The world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of empire
by
 Mona Domosh
Department of Geography, Dartmouth College


Date: 9th of September 2010
Time: 6 pm.
Place: Room 4, Main Campus, TISS, Mumbai

Abstract:

The world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of empire

Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The world is fl at was meant as a wake-up call to
those

in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its
political/economic state,

a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic ‘playing fi
eld’ in which the United

States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well
to raise fears about

North America’s future economic role. It also works in concretizing a
popular view of globalization,

a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unfl at processes
and practices. In this

paper I help deconstruct this view by fl eshing out the everyday ways through
which United States

expanded economically in its early (1890–1927) global empire. Based on
archival work in Argentina,

Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at
encounters between North

American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and
workers. Focusing

on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the
early global efforts of

select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and
messy ways in which

economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the
economic dominance

of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the
sheer complexity and

truly relational nature of United States’ expansion in the early twentieth
century.


About the Speaker:
Mona Domosh is a Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. Her talk today
is based on a large project that is investigating the practices of United
States-based global companies in the first quarter of the 20th century. Her
previous books include American Commodities  in an Age of Empire (2006),
Putting Women in Place (2001, co-written with Joni Seager), and Invented
Cities (1996).