Following on from Mark's previous post, it seems the new dictatorship of mega-corporations is finally putting the nation-state, explicitly, in its proper place:
Now, Starbucks has begun to pursue trademark rights for its Ethiopian coffees – Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harrar – despite those names describing geographic regions of Ethiopia that have been producing coffee for hundreds of years. The Ethiopian government has objected to this...
Before I attempt to bring some threads together, a bit of anecdotage, that may also prove illuminating about value and global communications.
A few years ago, at a time that I was working in Manchester, England, I happened to be in North Carolina for a conference. There I received an email from my friend Jean Franco, who taught for many years at Columbia (she is now emerita) and is one of Gayatri Spivak's closest friends. She'd just got back to the States from London and said she had "an immense favour to ask." Gayatri had phoned her from Hong Kong, "in a state of agitation," because she needed to get hold of a book by Tony Blair, The Third Way, in advance of her keynote at the British Sociological Association conference in Manchester at the weekend. It was now Wednesday. Jean passed along Gayatri's temporary email address in Hong Kong so we could make further arrangements.
Continue reading "Swadeshe pujyate raja vidyan sarvatra pujyate" »
Normally I do not use Long Sunday as a site to share my personal 
travel escapades. They are rather uninteresting and uninspired. But I have recently returned from a week long stay in Florida and I thought some of my experiences well suited for a post or two. I saw and heard a good many things that reflect obscene amounts of real estate development and generally meaningless but profitable hyperactivity. So the following is really more about economic development than my vacation.
You see, we Americans are very industrious. We build and destroy constantly (I think they call it “creative destruction“), Florida being an extreme microcosm of what is generally taking place through out the country.
Yesterday we went out to Joshua Tree. Heads full of U2 songs, we posed for album cover pictures. And snapped the last rays of the sun over the Cholla cacti that have found themselves just the right place in the sweeping bowl of the desert.
A national park, the place is managed with precision and your visit is guided and chaperoned by roadside exhibits, opportunities for learning. Much of the park is federally-sanctioned and mandated wilderness: a parcel of how we imagine the real. But the real is elsewhere.
Recent Comments