Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University

Fernand Braudel Center Newsletter No. 29 Activities, 2004-2005 September 2005

I. Research Working Groups

1) Trio of Research Working Groups (RWG) on ACrisis 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 Ecole 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). Another meeting of the FBC group coordinators with the leaders of the three collaborating groups was held in Paris on Dec. 17-18, 2004. A product of this meeting is the Reference Paper for the International Forum on the Social Science-Policy Nexus, Richard E. Lee, William G. Martin, Heinz R. Sonntag, Peter J. Taylor, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Michel Wieviorka, Social Science and Social Policy: From National Dilemmas to Global Opportunities, Paris: UNESCO, 2005.

a) 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 (CSK).

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) Waves of Antisystemic Movements (WAM).

The group has been completing final drafts of its analysis of radical movements since 1760. This has been considerably assisted by a grant from the World Society Foundation that allowed work to be accelerated, 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, and 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, in preparation for submission to a publisher.

2) Cultural Forms of the Modern World-System (CFWS).

A new RWG was also founded this year, Cultural Forms of the Modern World-System (coord., R. E. Lee); it now has members from four different Binghamton University departments in the humanities and the social sciences (History, Comparative Literature, Sociology, GREAL). The research question this group is investigating is how forms of cultural expression (as seemingly disparate as literature, food production and consumption, film, architecture and city planning), specifically situated in time and space, are articulated with the long-term evolution of the fundamental economic and political structures of the modern world-system.

II. Coloniality

The Binghamton members of the Coloniality Working Group continued the process of refocusing their collective research so as to address particular recurring Agaps and tensions@ in individual deployments of the concepts of coloniality and racial‑colonial difference. These have been reframed as collaborative research questions and themes, and reorganized in order to generate working papers over the course of the next 3‑4 years. Among other things, the goal remains 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) that could eventually be published as an edited anthology in an academic press.

III.Gulbenkian Foundation Award

The Gulbenkian Foundation has given the center another award for a 3-year project to produce 3 books on AQuestioning 19th-Century Assumptions about Knowledge.@ A series of 3 colloquia will be held on the topics of determinism, reductionism, and dualism. These will be convened at Center for Integrative Research in Science and Humanities, Aviv Bergman, director (Stanford University), Grisé, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, director (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris), and the Fernand Braudel Center, Immanuel Wallerstein, director (Binghamton University). Richard E. Lee, Deputy Director, will act as Scientific Secretary. The first meeting on determinism took place at Stanford on Nov. 20-21, 2004. The second meeting on reductionism will be held in Paris on Dec. 16-17, 2005.

IV. Fernand Braudel Center Distinguished Lecture Series

The second lecture was given on September 20, 2004 by Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Pennsylvania State University, AThe Left at War: Cultural Studies and Cultural Crisis After September 11.@

V. Paradigm Press

The Center has launched a Fernand Braudel Center series with Paradigm Press. The first three books appeared in 2004. They are:

Whatever we mean by "Islam" has been transformed radically by the modern world‑system. Zones that were once part of the core of the "ancient world system(s)" ‑ with the Muslim world at its center ‑ were swallowed up whole in the nineteenth century, relegating the Mughal, Qajar, and Ottoman empires to the margins of a Western‑centric world, with "Islam" now residing at the losing end of this system, subordinated to European and American power, whereas previously it stood far ahead. World‑systems analysis has been a useful tool in coming to terms with the fact that the world is politically, economically, and culturally stratified, with race constituting the very epicenter of the stratification. Racism and underdevelopment, Orientalism and its residual "Other," the "West" and the "rest," the rise of Europe and the decline of southern civilizations were all a product of modernity, of a specific global social formation held together by power. The lens through which we have access to it is racially tainted, leading to an interpretation of a world where the "West" possesses some unique trait that legitimates its rise above the "rest," rendering the "Arab," the "Turk," and the "Muslim" racially or culturally inferior, unable to match those refined qualities that are believed to be the sole patrimony of the "West." The questions we wish to raise for this year=s PEWS conference are multiple: Is world‑systems analysis useful to understanding the present geopolitical conflicts between some sectors of the "Islamic" and "Western" world? How do we understand the impact of modernity on the gender and racial identities of the multiple Muslim communities around the world? How has the modern construction of nations and "peoplehood" informed and affected the conflicts that we now witness in such places as diverse as Cyprus, Palestine/Israel, India, Ethiopia, and the Sudan among others? Also, do the present crisis in historical capitalism and the failures of postcolonial antisystemic movements inform the current rise of Islamist movements? What has been the impact on "Islam" and on the rest of the world of the fact that there have been major migrations of Muslims to zones that, until the twentieth century, had few Muslims? Europe and the Americas in particular?

THEMES

1. Islam as an autonomous "civilization" versus Islam as part of a larger world civilization

For writers like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, Islam can be understood only (or best) through the lens of "cultural environment" and/or religious influences. These two writers argue that the present conflict between "the West" and "Islam" is due largely to the fact that these are two antithetical civilizations. Islam represents a cultural universe that is in essence anti‑modern and anti‑Western. Muslims, according to this narrative, are culturally indigestible to the modernist project. They have learned from their seventh‑century predecessors in Mecca and Medina traits and mentalities that are intrinsically anti‑modernist. How would a world‑systems analysis respond to this essentialist discourse? Is there an entity that we can identify as an Islamic civilization not simply as a belief system, but as a set of organizing structures (economic, cultural, and political) of a world system in its own right? To what extent can we speak of multiple "civilizations" within the framework of the modern world‑system?

2. Islam, Modernity, and the Restructuring of Racial and Gender Identities

Many of the conflicts that look religious in character, stemming from time‑immemorial, are actually a product of a very recent development. As the Islamic umma became disjointed both materially and politically in the nineteenth century, a drastic transformation in the non‑Muslim millets (ethnic and religious communities) broke up into smaller groups in which ethnic and religious affinity became outwardly the basis of identity. Modernity, in a sense, restructured every aspect of the Muslim world, from its class make‑up and trade patterns to its formal political structure. Religious, gender, and ethnic identities were especially impacted by this new reality. Papers in this section explore the consequences of the emergence of new identities and "peoplehood," specifically in terms of gender relations, "European" and Muslim relations, Arab/Muslim and Jewish relations, Turkish and Arab relations, Greek and Muslim relations, Kurdish and Arab relations, Coptic and Muslim relations, Sunni and Shiite relations, North African and Sub‑Saharan relations, Hindu and Muslim relations, or any other group relations affected by modernity.

3. Crisis of the Modern World‑System and Islamist Movements

Are contemporary Islamist movements an expression of a legitimacy crisis in the ideology of historical capitalism? Here we will investigate nationalist and Islamist discourses in the Middle East and elsewhere over the past two centuries to explore whether or not contemporary Islamist movements differ from earlier postcolonial movements. Some have argued that in the past the "Arab‑Islamic world" reproduced the discourse of progress by accepting "modernizing" discourses and state‑centered developmental projects. Nationalist discourses from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s generally accepted the challenge of "modernizing Islam," relegating the religion to the private sphere and creating a culturalist and racialized discourse in which "Islam" was understood as an obstacle to modernizing the subjects of the state. Islamists today, on the other hand, have chosen a completely new understanding of "progress." As such, this last phase seems to be a rejection by Islamists of the discourses coming from Western elites as well as those coming from the old antisystemic movements. As a result, by the late twentieth century the second wave of response to the West began to emerge, producing a radicalized version of Islamic identity characterized by what we may call the Islamization path. Can these current Islamist movements be understood as antisystemic? How do the current Islamist movements differ from past postcolonial movements?

4. Muslims as Minorities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America

The twentieth century has witnessed an important migration of Muslims from Asia and Africa to Europe and the Americas. Muslims have become large and growing minorities in these predominantly Christian countries. In many of these countries today, there is a major political discussion about the degree to which these Muslim immigrants (now often of the second and third generation) are being "integrated," or can be integrated, into these countries. The traditional questions about all immigrant groups have been accentuated by the geopolitical implications of the fact that we are talking here of Muslim populations. This has been accentuated by two things: (1) the reaffirmation of certain symbols of Islam (the headscarf for women, for example) by many Muslim groups, and (2) the fact that since September 11 Muslim populations have been linked by some politicians and some media to the issue of "terrorism." In Europe, in addition, this question is at the heart of the debate about the potential membership of Turkey in the European Union. How may we understand the issues surrounding "immigrants" in the current geopolitical context?

The conference will take place April 27-30, 2006 at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Send your 3 to 4 page proposals to Khaldoun Samman as an electronic attachment: samman@macalester.edu Or by mail:

Khaldoun Samman

Macalester College

Carnegie Hall 207

1600 Grand Avenue

Saint Paul, MN 55105‑1899

The deadline to submit proposals is December 15, 2005

2). XXIX Annual PEWS Conference

WORLD‑SYSTEMIC CRISIS AND CONTENDING POLITICAL SCENARIOS

29th Conference of the Political Economy of the World System (PEWS)

Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA)

University of Massachusetts at Amherst, April 14-15, 2005

Plenary Session I: Immanuel Wallerstein, Sociology, Yale University & Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University

Plenary Session II: Saskia Sassen, Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor, London School of Economics

Session I: Neoliberalism & Power

Chair: Joya Misra, Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Farshad Araghi, Mark Frezzo, and Marina Karides, Sociology, Florida Atlantic University. AFracturing the Consensus: The Decline of Neoliberal Doctrine, Keynesianism, and the Global Future@

Antonio Y. Vazquez Arroyo, Political Science, City University of New York. ANeoliberalism, Imperialism, and Liberal Democracy: An Essay of Juxtaposition@

Farid Samir Benavides Vanegas and Erika Marquez Montano, Political Science and Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. ALaw, Development, Neoliberalism, and the Coloniality of Power: A Post‑Occidentalist View@

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. AThe Road not (yet?) Taken: Lula's Administration at Two@

Antonio Carmona Baez, Political Science, University of Puerto Rico. AState Accommodation/ Resistance to Globalization in Cuba@

Session II: Empire, Imperial Discourses, and Global Hegemonies

Chair: Nerissa Balce, Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Bill Robinson, Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara. AThe Crisis of Global Capitalism and the Folly of Conventional Thinking on It@

Vijay Prashad, International Relations, Trinity College. AThe Assassination of the Third World@

Joan Cocks, Political Science, Mount Holyoke College. ABeyond Empire & the Nation State: Said & the Israeli‑Palestinian Conflict@

Santiago Slabdosky, Religious Studies, University of Toronto, Canada. ARe/Dis‑Placing Evil and the Project of Modern Re‑Colonization of Spiritualities from Immanuel Kant to George W. Bush@

Khaldoun Samman, Sociology, Macalester College. AIdentities in Times of Systemic Crisis: Orientalizing the Self in the Middle East@

Session III: The Politics of Global Institutions

Chair: Dan Clawson, Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Jennifer Bair, Sociology, Yale University. AFrom the UN CTC to the Global Compact: The Privatization of Politics in Global Civil Society@

József Böröcz, Sociology, Rutgers University and Institute for Political Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. AHow Size Matters: The EU as a Geopolitical Animal@

Mark Thomas, Sociology, York University, Canada. AWorking for Better Standards? Global Institutions, >Partnership Internationalism,= and Resistance@

Heikki Patomaki, International Relations, University of Helsinki, Finland. AGlobal Economic Decline: Future Crises, and Changes in Global Governance@

Heinz Sonntag, Sociology, University of Massachusetts and Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo, Universidad Central de Venezuela. ARegional Inter‑State Integrations in the Periphery: Obstacles or Vehicles of the Actual Globalization@

Enrique Dussel Ambrosini, Philosophy, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Anibal Quijano, Sociology, Binghamton University & Lima, Peru

Session IV: Historical Capitalism in Crisis? Contending Scenarios for Change Today

Chair: Randall Stokes, Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Minqi Li, Political Science, York University, Canada. ASecular Trends and Long Waves of the Profit Rate and its Determinants@

Matthew Mahutga and David Smith, Sociology, University of California at Irvine. AThe Structural Underpinnings of the Contemporary World‑System Crisis: Relating Changing Global Networks in the Late 20th Century to Contending Scenarios for Change Today@

Manuela Boatca, Sociology, Katholische Universität Eichstätt‑Ingolstadt, Germany. AThe Chance of Interregnum: Revisiting Past Solutions to Systemic Change@

Patricio Korzeniewicz, Sociology, University of Maryland and Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Argentina. AHistorical Patterns of Association in Latin America@

Denis O=Hearn, Sociology, Queens University‑Belfast, Northern Ireland. AThe Celtic Tiger and the Mayan Jaguar: Two Responses to World Inequality@

Session V: State, Nation, Region: Cartographies of Power and Contestation

Chair: Srirupa Roy, Political Science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Shelley Feldman, Development Sociology and Women=s Studies, Cornell University. AMobility versus Place‑making: Securing Rights and Voice in the Contemporary Conjuncture@

Fouad Makki, Sociology, Binghamton University. AWorld Time, National Space: Historical Temporality and the Nationalist Re‑enchantment of Space at the Horn of Africa@

Roman de la Campa, Spanish and Comparative Literature, State University of New York at Stonybrook. APost‑National Mapping and New City‑States in Latin America@

Daniel La Parra, Sociology, Universidad de Alicante, Spain. AMapping Interstate Relationships between Arab Countries: Content Analysis of National Arab News Agencies@

Kiran Asher and Timothy Currie, Geography, Clark University. AMobilizing and Contesting the Global Commons through Biodiversity Conservation Measures@

Session VI: A New Wave of Antisystemic Movements?

Chair: Millie Thayer, Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Christophe Aguiton, Paris, France. ANew Capitalism, Transformation of Social Movements, and New Technologies@

Barry Gills, University of Newcastle, United Kingdom. AAnswering Empire: Global Society, Alter‑Globalization, and the Global Justice Movement@

Ganesh Trichur, Global Studies, Saint Lawrence University. AEast Asian Futures and the Future of Global Democracy in the World‑System@

Liliana Cotto‑Morales, Sociology, University of Puerto Rico. AIs the Social Movement for Peace and Justice for Vieques and Puerto Rico an Anti‑Systemic Movement?@

Teivo Teivainen, Program on Democracy & Global Transformation, Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, Peru. ATransnational Activism Confronts Economism: New Politics of the World‑System@

Session VII: Homage to Gloria Anzaldua : New World Theater Performance, Readings, Testimonials

Session VIII: Race, Coloniality, Social Movements, and the World‑System

Chair: John Bracey, Afro‑American Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

James Fenelon, Sociology, California State University, San Bernardino & Thomas Hall, Sociology, Depauw University. AIndian, Black, and Irish: Empire, Racial Nationalism, Resistance, Resurgence, and Global Racism@

Ramon Grosfoguel, Ethnic Studies, University of California at Berkeley. AQue Tal Raza? Global Coloniality and Global Decolonization@

Kelvin Santiago‑Valles, Sociology, Binghamton University. AComparing Global Racial Regimes: The Belle Epoques of British and US Hegemony@

Nikhil Pal Singh, History, University of Washington. AThe Afterlife of Fascism@

Howard Winant, Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara. AConceptualizing World Racism & the New Global Wave of Social Movements@

Closing Session

Chair, Agustin Lao‑Montes, Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Closing Remarks:

Amrita Basu, Political Science and Women=s Studies, Amherst College and Director, Five College Women Studies Center

Catherine Walsh, Latin American Cultural Studies, Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Ecuador.

VIII. Review

XXVIII, 1, 2005

The Black World and the World-System

William G. Martin, Special Editor

William G. Martin, AIntroduction: Recapturing Black Worlds in Postliberal Times@

William G. Martin, AGlobal Movements Before >Globalization=: Black Movements as World-Historical Movements

Jeffrey D. Howison, A>Let Us Guide Our Own Destiny=: Rethinking the History of the Black Star Line@

Kelvin Santiago-Valles, AWorld-Historical Ties Among >Spontaneous= Slave Rebellions in the Atlantic@

Michael O. West, AGlobal Africa: The Emergence and Evolution of an Idea@

XXVIII, 2, 2005

Discussions of Knowledge

Hans Ulrich Obrist, AScience and Art: A Conversation with Ilya Prigogine@

Hans Ulrich Obrist, ALa science et l=art: Une conversation avec Ilya Prigogine@

Isabelle Stengers, AEvents and Histories of Knowledge@

Roberto Fernandez Retamar, AConocimiento, teoria y tension entre conocimiento local y universal@

Carlos A. Aguirre Rojas, AHegemonic Cultures and Subaltern Cultures: Between Dialogue and Conflict@

XXVIII, 3, 2005

Immanuel Wallerstein, ARemembering Andre Gunder Frank@

Franco Moretti, AWorld-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur@

Massimo De Angelis, AThe Political Economy of Global Neoliberal Governance@

Samir Amin, AChina, Market Socialism, and U.S. Hegemony@

Ismael Saz, AWas there Francoism in Spain? Impertinent Reflections on the Historic Place of the Dictatorship@

XXVIII, 4, 2005

In Honor of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho

Dale Tomich, AVitorino Magalhães Godinho: Atlantic History, World History@

Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, APortugal and the Making of the Atlantic World: Sugar Fleets and Gold Fleets, the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Centuries@

Rui Santos, AWith a Mind to Science: Theoretical Underpinnings of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho=s Historical Work@

Immanuel Wallerstein, AThe Discovery of the World-Economy@

Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, AVitorino Magalhães Godinho Curriculo@

IX. Visiting Research Associates

Lee Ho Young. Dept. of Economics, Dong-A University, Busan, South Korea.

Iftikhar Chowdhury. Dept. of Sociology, University of Chittagong, Chittagong, Bangladesh.

X. Public Lectures

Harpur College Workshop.

Tri-Campus Workshop on Contentious Politics, Benita Roth, coordinator

Javier Auyero, Sociology, SUNY-Stony Brook, AFood Riots in Argentina: The Dynamics of Collective Violence,@ February 6, 2004.

John Markhoff, University of Pittsburgh, AContention and the Troubled History of Democracy,@ April 30, 2004.

AFinal Solution@ Film Screening and discussion with director Rakesh Sharma, Oct. 26, 2004, co-sponsored with Asian and Asian American Studies, History, Sociology, Women=s Studies, Dean of Arts and Sciences.

Lisa Yun, English Dept., Binghamton University, AThe Trap of Freedom and the Legacy of Slavery: Los Chinos in Bondage and Emancipation,@ Mar. 7, 2005

Amira El Azhary Sonbol, Georgetown University, AHow Does the Islamic Shari=a Deal with Women=s Labor?@ April 29, 2005, co-sponsored with History, Sociology, Multicultural Resource Center, University Convocations Committee

Shelley Feldman, Cornell University, AGender and Law(s): Moral Regulation and Emergent Institutional Regimes under a Contested Neoliberalism,@ May 5, 2005

XI. Papers on the Web

AAfter Developmentalism and Globalization, What?@ by Immanuel Wallerstein, Social Forces, 83(3) March 2005.

AProtection Networks and Commodity Chains in the Capitalist World-Economy@ by Immanuel Wallerstein.

ASoft Multilateralism@ by Immanuel Wallerstein [from the February 2, 2004 issue of The Nation].

AThe dilemmas of open space: the future of the WSF@ by Immanuel Wallerstein. 'This is an electronic version of an article published in International Social Science Journal: complete citation information for the final version of the paper, as published in the print edition of International Social Science Journal, is available on the Blackwell Synergy online delivery service, accessible via the journal's website at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/issj or http://www.blackwell-synergy.com.

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