Fernand
Braudel Center Newsletter No. 28
Activities,
2003-2004
September
2004
Trio of
Research Working Groups on "Crisis in the World-System: Options and
Possibilities".
The
three groups are nearing the end of their research phase and entering into the
writing phase. They have continued their links with the three collaborating institutions,
the Globalization and World Cities Research Group and Network (GaWC), whose
headquarters is at the Department of Geography, Loughborough University
(U.K.), and whose principal investigator in this project is Peter J. Taylor,
Co-Director of GaWC; the Centro de Estudios de Desarollo of the Universidad
Central de Venezuela (CENDES), whose principal investigator is Heinz R.
Sonntag, former Director of CENDES; and the Centre d'Analyse et
d'Intervention Sociologique (CADIS) at the École des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales in Paris, whose principal investigator is Michel Wieviorka,
Director of CADIS. They are the partners respectively of the RWGs on STCWE,
CSK, and WAM (see below). The next meeting of the FBC groups coordinators with
the leaders of the three collaborating group will be in Paris on Dec. 17-18, 2004.
a) RWG
Structural Trends in the Capitalist World-Economy (STCWE).
This
group has been comparing the rates of profit of leading industries at
precisely the moment when they are at their apogee. The hypothesis of the group
is that recent levels are below those of earlier levels. The leading industries
we have chosen are: shipbuilding, textiles, steel, petrochemicals,
automobiles, and computers. The GaWC group is doing a parallel study on
financial and business services in the recent era, to see whether the situation
in a service industry is different from that in an industrial product. For
each we are determining the period during which it was a leading product, and
analyzing decade by decade the costs of labor, inputs, and taxation, in order
to calculate profit levels.
b) Categories
of Social Knowledge.
This
group amplified its division of labor by adding India, Russia, the
German-speaking world, and the Kurdish cultural community to the
geographic/linguistic regions under investigation, which already included
France, the English-speaking world, southern Africa, the Ottoman
Empire/Turkey, and the Arab world. The project remains that of charting the
reciprocal influences, resistances and facilitations that were manifested in
articulation with the structures of governance and accumulation when the general
forms of Western knowledge production were introduced in particular Western
and non-Western contexts. The group plans to have individual drafts completed
for the upcoming academic year.
c) RWG Waves of Antisystemic Movements
(WAM).
The group has been completing final
drafts of its analysis of radical movements since 1760. This work has been
considerably assisted by a grant from the World Society Foundation that allowed
us to accelerate our work, particularly during June, July, and August.
Bi-weekly meetings on completed drafts in the fall semester produced full
drafts that chart world movement patterns in four key epochs: 1760-1848,
1848-1917, 1917-1968, 1968-2001. Small groups of faculty and graduate student
researchers, drawn from multiple departments, have presented to the group
successive drafts for each epoch, with discussions focusing upon both advancing
conceptions and indicators within each epoch and across epochs. A workshop
with external evaluators took place in March and evaluated all the completed drafts as a group, preparing for submission
to a publisher.
The Binghamton members of the
Coloniality Working Group continued the process of refocusing our collective
research so as to address particular recurring "gaps and tensions" in
our individual deployments of the concepts of coloniality and racial‑colonial
difference. We have reframed these as collaborative research questions and
themes which we reorganized in order to generate working papers over the course
of the next 3‑4 years. Among
other things, our goal is still to determine whether this initial effort at
collaborative research substantiates or not a thematically heterogeneous, yet
conceptually cogent and sufficiently alternative perspective on world‑historical
racial‑colonial difference (in terms of concerns and problematiques,
though not necessarily with respect to conclusions) which could be eventually
published as an
edited anthology in an academic press. Finally, the special issue of The New
Centennial Review, edited by Profs. Greg Thomas (Syracuse) and Scott
Michaelson (MSU) and containing 10 of the discussion papers presented at our
colloquia and conferences, is scheduled to come out in December of 2003.
The Fernand Braudel Center,
in collaboration with the Center for Integrative Research in Science and
Humanities, Aviv Bergman, director (Stanford University) and Grisé, Jean-Pierre
Dupuy, director (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris), has launched a 3-year project to
consist of three colloquia. They will bring together scholars from the natural
sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities to discuss the degree to
which questioning about nineteenth-century assumptions about knowledge in each
of these arenas has been congruent, if expressed in different langauge. The
colloquia will successively discuss determinism, reductionism, and dualism. We
have received a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation to enable the metings to
be held, successively at Stanford, Paris, and Bringhamton. Richard E. Lee,
Deputy Director of the FBC will act as Scientific Secretary. The first meeting
on determinism will take place at Stanford on Nov. 20-21, 2004.
The first lecture was given
on September 29, 2003 by Prof. Franco Moretti, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell
Professor of English Literature, Stanford University. His presentation was
entitled "Literature through a Long-Distance Lens: Evolutionary Theory and
World Systems Analysis." On September 20, 2004 the second lecture will be
given by Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Pennsylvania
State University, "The Left at War: Cultural Studies and Cultural Crisis
After September 11."
The Center has launched a
Fernand Braudel Center series with Paradgim Press. The first three books will
appear in 2004. They are:
(1) Immanuel Wallerstein,
ed., The Modern World-System in the Longue Durée. This is the fruit of the
25th Anniversary Conference of the FBC. The table of contents follows:
Introduction: Immanuel Wallerstein:
"Scholarship and Reality"
Part I. The Capitalist
World-Economy: From Past to Future
Samir Amin: "Globalism
or Apartheid on a Global Scale?"
Christopher Chase‑Dunn:
"Through the Obstacle(s) and on to Global Socialism"
Bart Tromp: "Europe: The
Asymptote of Political Integration"
Claudia von Werlhof:
"Using, Producing, and Replacing Life? Alchemy as Theory and Practice in
Capitalism"
Giovanni Arrighi:
"Hegemony and Antisystemic Movements"
Pablo González Casanova:
"Present Systemic Trends and Antisystemic Movements"
Marcel van der Linden:
"Proletarian Internationalism: A Long View and Some Speculations"
Part II. Structures of
Knowledge and Constructed Knowledge in the Modern World
Randall Collins: "Commonality
and Divergence of World Intellectual Structures in the Second Millennium
CE"
Mahmood Mamdani: "Africa
and African Studies"
Boaventura de Sousa Santos:
"A Critique of Lazy Reason: Against the Waste of Experience"
Janet L. Abu-Lughod:
"Continuing American Provincialism and the Rest of the World"
Maurice Aymard: "Does
One Represent Reality or Does One Explain It?"
Immanuel Wallerstein:
"The Scholarly Mainstream and Reality: Are We at a Turning-Point?"
Michel-Rolph Trouillot:
"The North Atlantic Universals"
(2) Richard Lee &
Immanuel Wallerstein, coords., Overcoming the "Two Cultures". This is the fruit of the
Research Working Group on the Structures of Knowledge. The table of contents
follows:
1) Richard E. Lee &
Immanuel Wallerstein, "Introduction: The Two Cultures"
Part I: The Historical
Construction of the Two Cultures
2) Boris Stremlin,
"Constructing Authority: The Rise of Science in the Modern World"
3) Eric Mielants, "Reaction
and Resistance: The Natural Sciences and the Humanities, 1789-1945"
4) Mauro Di Meglio, "The Social Sciences and Alternative Disciplinary
Models"
5) Mark Frezzo, "The
Ambivalent Role of Psychology and Psychoanalysis"
6) Ho-fung Hung,
"Orientalism and Area Studies: The Case of Sinology"
Part II: Contemporary
Challenges in and to the Structures of Knowledge
7) Richard E. Lee,
"Complexity Studies"
8) Norihisa Yamashita,
"Science Studies"
9) Biray Kolluoglu Kirli
& Deniz Yükseker, "The Cultural Turn in the Social Sciences and
Humanities"
10) Volkan Aytar & Ayse
Betül Çelik, "Gender: Feminisms and Women's Studies"
11) Agustín Lao-Montes,
"Regional Categories of Knowledge: Latin/o Americanisms"
12) Sunaryo,
"Environment and Ecology: Concepts and Movements"
13) Richard E. Lee. "The
'Culture Wars' and the 'Science Wars'"
14) Immanuel Wallerstein, "Conclusion?"
(3) Alternatives; The
United States Confronts the World, Immanuel Wallerstein, groups together some
Commentaries from our web site from 2001-2004 concerning Bush and the
world-system by Immanuel Wallerstein, with additional text.
PEWS XXIX, April 28-30, 2005,
Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, World-Systemic Crisis and Contending Political
Scenarios. Call for papers:
The current global condition
of widespread violence, enduring economic difficulties for both capital and
labor, and a vacuum of hegemony that is expressed in the adventurist war initiatives
of the U.S. imperial state, together indicate a secular crisis of the modern
world-system. Arguably, such crisis reveals the ultimate limits of the modern
world-system and points to the possibility of collective agency toward
constructing an entirely different global economic, political, and cultural order
of things. PEWS XXIX conference will be dedicated to analyze the political
dynamics of the current world-system and to explore the potential for systemic
change embedded in its political forms. With this goal in mind, the specificity
of the political in the late modern world-system will be discussed in relation
to its institutional settings and political fields (inter-state system, state
formations, imperialisms), and in terms of its main political battles as well
as forms of resistance (struggles and anti-systemic movements). This
examination of the politics of the late modern world-system from above and from
below will serve as a way of identifying and imagining the possible scenarios
for change embodied in the current condition of the world. This theoretical
practice of creating goals and conceiving alternative futures on the basis of a
careful analysis of the present is what Immanuel Wallerstein had called Utopistics.
The conference will begin with a plenary giving an overview of the politics of
the late modern world-system focusing on questions such as: the articulation of
the capitalist world-economy, institutions of global governance, and the
inter-state system; the crisis of U.S. hegemony and the drive to
empire-building; how systemic crisis relates to the rise of global violence and
the proliferation of religious and racial/ethnic strife; and how the relative
power (in relation to world-systemic forms of domination) of the subaltern
struggles and movements that are emerging as a new wave of antisystemic movements
can possibly build a more egalitarian, democratic, and decolonized
world-system. The opening plenary will be followed by panel discussions
organized around interconnected themes. The conference is open to a variety of
papers addressing its main subject, global crisis and the political scenarios
of the late modern world-system. Given the main theme we intend to focus on
various questions including: the relationship between world-hegemony, global
governance, and empire; comparing state formations in different world-regions
(Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Europe, East Asia) to get a clear picture
of the systemic patterns and local contradictions of the political
institutions of the late modern world-system; and analyzing if there exists a
new wave of antisystemic movements and what are their potential and
possibilities for systemic change. The conference will close with another
plenary session in which the question of the politics of the late modern
world-system and the possible scenarios for systemic change will be discuss in
light of the dialogue that occurred.
Send your proposals to
Agustin Lao-Montes <lao@soc.umass.edu> and/or Joya Misra
<misra@soc.umass.edu> or to either at the Sociology Department, University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003. The deadline to submit abstracts is
December 15, 2004.
PEWS XXVIII
PEWS XXVIII, "Latin@s in
the World-System," was organized by Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado
Torres, University of California, Berkeley. It was held on April 22-24, 2004.
The program follows:
Keynote Speakers
Aníbal Quijano, Peru
Enrique Dussel, Mexico
Immanuel Wallestein, USA
Session I: Democracy, the U.S. Empire and
Racial/Ethnic Relations in the 21st Century: Apartheid or Diversity?
Susanne Jonas, UC-Santa Cruz
Jim Cohen, Université de Paris-VIII
Tom Reifer, Univ. of
California, Riverside
Francis Pisani, journalist
Estela Rodriguez, Universidad de Barcelona
Session II: Indigenous Peoples and the
Decolonization of Land in the Americas
James Fenelon, California
State University at San Bernardino & Thomas D. Hall, DePaul University
Tirso Gonzales, Univ. of
California, Berkeley
Rufino Domingues, indigenous
activist
Aníbal Quijano, Binghamton
University
Michelle Tellez, Univ. of
California, Davis
Session III: Colonial/Racialized
Subjects, Border Zones and Paradigms in Chicano/Latino Studies
Rosa Linda Fregoso, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
Ramón Grosfoguel, Univ. of
California, Berkeley
Jose Palafox, Univ. of
California, Berkeley
Walter Mignolo, Duke
University
Mario Barrera, Univ. of
California, Berkeley
Session IV: Decolonization,
Afro-Latinos and the African Diaspora in the Capitalist World-System
Agustin Lao-Montes, Univ. of
Massachuswetts, Amherst
Lewis Gordon, Brown
University
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Univ. of California, Berkeley
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Universidade de Portugal at Coimbra
Jean Casimir, University of
Haiti
Session V: Decolonizing Spirituality
Roberto Hernandez, Univ. of
California, Berkeley
Laura Perez, Univ. of
California, Berkeley
Miguel Segovia, Brown
University
Santiago Slabodsky, Baylor
University
Aisha Beliso, Stanford
University
Session VI: Borderlands of Culture in
the World-System
Jose David Saldivar, Univ. of
California, Berkeley
Ramón Saldivar, Stanford
University
Gerald Torres, University of
Texas at Austin Law School
Kirsten Silva-Gruesa, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
Concluding Remarks
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Universidade de Portugal at Coimbra
Walter Mignolo, Duke
University
Tri-Campus Workshop on
Contentious Politics, Benita Roth, coordinator
Fred Rose, Pioneer Valley Project,
Springfield MA, "A Cultural Theory of Coalition Formation: Lessons from
the Labor, Peace, and Environmental Movements," Syracuse University,
September 20, 2003.
Gay Seidman, Univ. of
Wisconsin-Madison, "Deflated Citizenship: Labor Rights in a Global
Economy," Binghamton University, November 15, 2003.
Javier Auyero, Sociology,
SUNY-Stony Brook, "Food Riots in
Argentina: The Dynamics of Collective Violence," Binghamton
University, February 6, 2004.
John Markhoff, University of
Pittsburgh, "Contention and the Troubled History of Democracy,"
Binghamton University, April 30, 2004.
XXVII, 1, 2004
Hartmut Elsenhans, "On
the Development of World-Systems Studies"
Peter J. Taylor, "Homo
Geographicus: A Geohistorical Manifesto for Cities"
Steven Sherman, "Culture
and the Global Emancipatory Project"
XXVII, 2, 2004
Amiya Kumar Bagchi, "The
Axial Ages of the Capitalist World-System"
Andrea Komlosy, "State, Regions,
and Borders: Single Market Formation and Labor Migration in the Habsburg Monarchy,
1750-1918"
XXVII, 3, 2004
Russia and Siberia in the
World-System: German Perspectives
Martin Aust, "Rossia Siberica: Russian-Siberian History
Compared to Medieval Conquest and Modern Colonialism"
Hans-Heinrich Nolte,
"The Modern World-System and Area Studies: The Case of Russia"
Eva-Maria Stolberg, "The
Siberian Frontier and Russia's Position in World History: A Reply to Aust and
Nolte"
The Environment and World
History
Immanuel Wallerstein,
"The Ecology and the Economy: What Is Rational?"
Richard Wilk, "The
Extractive Economy: An Early Phase of the Globalization of Diet"
Marina Fischer-Kowalski,
Fridolin Krausman & Barbara Smetschka, "Modelling Scenarios of
Transport Across History from a Socio-Metabolic Perspective"
J. R. McNeill, "Yellow
Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in
the American Tropics,
1640-1830"
Ferruccio Brugnaro, A Poem:
"All Acquitted in Trial Over Petrochemical Dead"
Lee Ho-Young (Feb. 2004-Feb.
2005), Economics, Dong-A University, Busan, South Korea
Mellissa Ifill (Dec. 2003),
International Relations and Politics, Univ. of Sussex, UK
4-part series on “The U.S.,
the World, and 9-11.” Cosponsored with Sociology, History, Institute of Global
Cultural Studies, Harpur College Dean’s Office: Sept. 9, 2003 – Immanuel Wallerstein,
Director, FBC; Oct. 28, Herbert Bix, Sociology and History; Nov. 4, Donald
Quataert, History; Nov. 20, Ali Mazrui, Institute of Global Cultural Studies.
Oct. 8, 2003 - Gianfranco
Poggi, Sociology, University of Trento; author of The State: Its Nature,
Development & Prospects and Development of the Modern State spoke on
"Citizens and the State: A Retrospect."
Feb. 19, 2004 - Tariq Ali,
author of over a dozen books on world history and politics, three fiction
novels, is a film maker and currently serves as an editor of New Left Review.
He spoke on his latest book, Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq.
Mar. 22, 2004 – Caglar Keyder,
Sociology, Binghamton University, “Law and Legitimation in Empire.”
Apr. 16-17, 2004 – Symposium in Honor of Richard Trexler, “Public Life and Private Conduct: Changing Historical Perspectives across the Early Modern World.” Cosponsored with Harpur College Dean’s Office, Harpur College Speaker’s Fund, Alumni Relations Office, CEMERS, Convocations Committee, Bernardo Fund, History, Romance Languages, Art History, PIC, Glen G. Bartle Library.
Immanuel Wallerstein,
"Soft Multilateralism," from the Feb. 2, 2004 issue of The Nation.
Immanuel Wallerstein,
"Hail Britannia!," a review of Niall Ferguson, Empire, from
Yale Global Online, July 25, 2003.
Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Ecology and the
Economy: What is Rational?" paper delivered at Keynote Session of Conference,
"World System History and Global Environmental Change," Lund, Sweden,
19-22 September 2003.