Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (Cultural Front (Series).) (Paperback)

by Bruce Robbins (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Is global culture merely a pale and sinister reflection of capitalist globalization? Bruce Robbins responds to this and other questions in Feeling Global, a crucial document on nationalism, culturalism, and the role of intellectuals in the age of globalization.

Building on his previous work, Robbins here takes up the question of the status of international human rights. Robbins' conception of internationalism is driven not only by the imperatives of global human rights policy, but by an understanding of transnational cultures, thus linking practical policymaking to cultural politics at the expense of neither. Robbins' cultural criticism, in other words, affords us much more than an understanding of how culture "shapes our lives." Instead, Robbins shows, particularly in his discussions of Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Susan Sontag, Michael Walzer and others, how "culture" itself has become a term that blocks—for commentators on both the right and the left—serious engagement with the contemporary cosmopolitan ideal of a nonuniversalist discourse of human rights.

Rescuing "cosmopolitanism" itself from its connotations of leisured individuals loyal to no one and willing to sample all cultures at will, Feeling Global presents a compelling way to think about the ethical obligations of intellectuals at a time when their place in the new world order is profoundly uncertain.

About the Author

Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, and Culture and The Servant's Hand. He has also edited several collections, the latest of which is Cosmopolitics, with Pheng Cheah.

Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814775144
• ISBN-13: 978-0814775141
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #170,101 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mapping ethical/political entanglements of globalizing US, January 28, 2000

By	Rob Wilson (Honolulu and Santa Cruz) - See all my reviews

Mapping ethical and political entanglements and dilemmas of the globalizing US, "Feeling Global" articulates commitments to the liberal welfare-state at the same time it pushes outward towards modes of transnational solidarity in the struggle for human rights and democratized forms of culture. This is a brave, elegant, and timely book cognizant of global/local dialectics that are now pulling at the nation state and unravelling the paradoxes of liberal humanism. No "monarch-of-all-I-survey," Bruce Robbins yet hazards a wry perspective of cosmopolitan globailty and, chapter by chapter, articulates the paradoexes of feeling global yet remaining national in struggles and claims. The readings of English Patient, Kincaid, and the au pair postcolonial post-Bronte novels are worth the price of any cultural studies and hyper-literary admission. The chapters on his father's aerial military work in US army situate the claims of globalized vision within an ethical and political frame that has scale, balance, pungency, and wit. This is a fine addition to the cultural criticism of globalization, without the arrgonace or aridity of social science sway: NYU Press can be applauded for its "Cultural Front" series, and this suavely wrought synthesis of feeling global and national, being cosmopolitan yet entangled in American dirty roots.