What Politics is This Place? (Post)Glocal Politics in Latin America's Public Spaces

Abstract

The IASTE 2004 conference proposes that "postglobal is not an end to globalization but the emergence of a different kind of engagement that is sharply at odds with the visions of liberal, multicultural globalization. Here, both religious fundamentalism and imperial hegemony begin to emerge as the new forms of." Yet, there are other types of (post)globalizations (Sklair, 2002). And at least one such alternative form of global engagement is that which (desperately) holds on to the visions of a liberal, multicultural globalization in the politics of nation building, particularly as enacted in urban spaces. Focusing on this form, this paper interrogates the role of both traditional and post-traditional Latin American urban places in the present (post)glocal era, where the post-traditional is understood as a spatio-political repositioning that unsettles the historically developed relationships between places and meanings