Portals of Globalization as lieux de mémoire

Synopsis

Research on global flows has always put emphasis on nodes and the possibility to exercise regulatory power at certain places that are central to the organization of the mobility of people, goods, capital, and cultural patterns. Authors like Saskia Sassen have even developed a whole theory around the notion of global cities, which may not only become the hubs of globalized capitalism but also the hotspots of current class confrontation. Such approaches are rather loosely and sometimes even only rhetorically related to interpretations of global processes, where the local and the global are the only poles remaining in a borderless world. There is no doubt that global processes play out at local level, but there is ample evidence that other spatial formats (both scales of territoriality and non-territorial ones) remain important as well, or even gain weight in the organization and control of global flows. What interests me in particular in this context, is the role and function of places where global flows arrive and depart, are channelled through, and leave their stamp not only in warehouses but also in the mindset of people. It seems to me a functionalist reductionism to see them only as command centres of capitalism (often in a good old Western-centric perspective located in the Global North). Instead, I propose to look at them as growing in numbers and variety, and to focus on their histories, which has left a cultural legacy and may explain the unevenness of our mental maps, when it comes to the remembrance of globalization and its effect on current global processes.

Biographical Note

Prof. Dr. Matthias Middell (SFB 1199 & Global and European Studies Institute, Leipzig University, Germany)
Matthias Middell is a professor of cultural history at Leipzig University as well as a speaker of the SFB 1199 and director of the Global and European Studies Institute at Leipzig University. He studied history earning his PhD from Leipzig University with his research focusing on the French Revolution. Since 2013, he has served as the director of the Graduate School Global and Area Studies in Leipzig and is currently the head of the Erasmus Mundus Global Studies Consortium. He teaches regularly at partner universities and co-supervises PhD candidates with colleagues from France, South Africa, and Ethiopia. His current research interests include the history of the French Revolution from a global perspective, history of cultural transfers around the world, and the role of space in the understanding of the current world being the result of long-lasting global connections.