Wow! eBook
Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization
Author(s): John Muthyala (Author)
- Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
- Publication Date: 9 Aug. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 260 pages
- ISBN-10: 1611682487
- ISBN-13: 9781611682489
Book Description
Globalization is not the Americanization of the world, argues John Muthyala. Rather, it is an uneven social, cultural, economic, and political process in which the policies and aspirations of powerful nation-states are entangled with the interests of other empires, nation-states, and communities. Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization takes up a bold challenge, critiquing scholarship on American empire that views the United States as either an exceptional threat to the world or the only hope for the future. It does so in order to provincialize America, to understand it from outside the borders of nation and location, and from inside the global networks of trade, power, and culture. Using comparative frames of reference, the book makes its arguments by examining the work of a diverse range of writers including Arundhati Roy (War Talk, Power Politics), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran), and Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat). This is an original, complex, and often bracingly counterintuitive critique of the idea of American empire that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of globalization.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This book will be valuable in various disciplines. . . . [A] helpful survey. . . . Highly recommended.”– “Choice”
“This is a work of literary criticism that seeks to instill perspective into critiques of the United States and its global role. The author takes as his starting point three very simple propositions: that US history cannot be internationalized as world history, that people external to the United States are social actors with agency, and that globalization is not Americanization. . . . Muthyala’s book should help Americans rethink their place in the world and its history.”– “The Historian”
About the Author
JOHN MUTHYALA is an associate professor of English and department chair at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of Reworlding America: Myth, History, and Narrative.
