De-Coca-Colonization: Making the Globe from the Inside Out

From Japanese candy that claims to capture "the taste of old Scotland" to the marketing of Zapatista dolls in Southern California, De-Coca-Colonization takes on the cultural particularities and peculiarities of the everyday to construct an entirely fresh perspective on globalization. By looking at the diaspora of goods and peoples in our time, Steven Flusty shows that the process of globalization is hardly the one-world culture party imagined by neoliberal academics and politicians, who wrongly imagine a top-down process dominated by a monolithic economic machine. Globalization is, rather, a phenomenon in which multiple perspectives and cultural expressions interact, influence, inform, and contend with one another simultaneously -- where those who are locked out of traditional power structures create new and forceful "globalities" all their own. Taking us on a kaleidoscopic tour through the worlds of ordinary people and their deceptively prosaic commodities, Flusty argues that this little-g "globalization" is where much of the action that is transforming global social life is happening. So you'd better take note. Book jacket.

Steven Flusty is Assistant Professor of Geography at York University