The Crisis of Asian Globalization : Toward a Senism of the Left

Asian Crisis put globalization on trial, and helped to put politics back into development discourse. Not since the glory days of Third Worldism had politics held the developmental spotlight. This restoration owed much to Amartya Sen, whose work not only re-politicizes development discourse, but does so from within the inner sanctum of the world system. Though Senism is not ordinarily associated with radical critique, its egalitarian focus is loaded with oppositional content. It follows from Sen's axiom of "concurrence," as we term it, that democratization is central at all stages of development. In his view the Asian Crisis confirmed the high cost of undemocratic governance. While Asian exceptionalists hold that liberal democracy is not needed on the Rim, and indeed would be a hindrance, Sen foregrounds the instrumental as well as intrinsic value of the freedom factor in all real development. His outlook, moreover, is deeply rooted in Asian axiology. In lieu of the statist economism that monopolized the term "Asian values" during the "miracle" years, Sen proposes an "Eastern strategy" that draws on the deeper and more humane traditions of Asia. From this vantage it is obvious that development reaches far beyond the GDPism that dominates the standard discourse of growth. What has passed for development in much of Asia is mere profit-taking, and when the social and ecological costs of that taking are weighed in the balance, the result is often a net loss. Sen's focus on human capabilities points toward more sustainable development, but also collides with current power structures in the East and West alike. Senism, in short, is inherently oppositional, and can better serve the Left that the Right

A Poetics of Resistance: The Postmodern Ginsberg

The term postmodernism traces back to Irving Howe in the late 1950s, and gained currency with Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan in the 1960s (Huyssen 256). Since that time the term has lost much of its radical bite, and is often (as with Habermas) viewed as a conservative sheep in wolf's clothes. Huyssen contends that "the adversary and critical element in the notion of postmodernism can only be fully grasped if one takes the late 19508 as the starting point of a mapping of the postmodern" (267). The early career of Ginsberg bears this out. Ginsberg's personal transition from Beat withdrawal into the involved, critical climate of the 1960' s counter-culture coincided with his return from the Orient to a very different America. As Bruce Cook describes it, no one "talked much about the Beat Generation anymore, but that didn't mean that he and Kerouac and Corso and all the rest had gone unheeded. The Hippies and Yippies of the 1960s appropriated the Beat message and agenda and made them their own. They welcomed Allen Ginsberg as a guru ...