Critical Encounters Conversations in American Studies Series presents: Working Group on Globalization and Culture with Michael Denning.
In this collective presentation, the Working Group on Globalization and Culture explores the cultural meaning of two linked keywords of contemporary culture: currents and currencies. From the “hot money” of financial markets to the respective
accounts of cultural flow given by Raymond Williams and Arjun Appadurai, currents and currencies have become central to our stories and maps of globalization. Currents signal both the flow of ideas, moods, media, courses of events, inclinations in public opinion, and prevailing atmospheres, while also marking the temporality of the present, the transactional aspects of everyday life, and financialization of the planet. But beneath these flows of time, media, discourses, feelings and finance lie the bodies and movements of liquids, air, and energy from which these other meanings borrow their metaphoric energy — oceans, air streams, and electric circuits. The panel draws on a year-long collective research project to explore the socio-natural currents and currencies that circulate power and measure value globally, as well as their representation in visual
images and narratives. Collectively we ask how we understand the flows and circuits, the pulse of globalization, from
remittances to grey markets? How do we understand the cultural meanings of ocean currents as they shape steamship lines, container ships and the great canals? How might we think around ossifying “money talk” and jargon to better understand the complexities of monetary systems where currencies are undergoing monumental material, political, and social changes? We question what it means to be “current” or for ideologies and cultural movements to gain “currency.” Charting both a
sustained and expansive historiography of “currents” across the sciences and humanities opens further dialogue for the ways that crossings, crosscurrents, countercurrents, and other literal, metaphorical, and spatial flows are a central concern for
cultural studies.