Globalization and Culture: Global Melange - Softcover

Cultural change is all too frequently either overlooked entirely in discussions of globalization or dismissed with glib and misleading generalities about homogenization or clashing civilizations. Jan Nederveen Pieterse offers a perspective that is more complex, truer to the ever-shifting realities of twenty first-century life, and far more interesting. With this book, he establishes himself as a world-class thinker about the world.--Walter Truett Anderson, president, World Academy of Art and Science Critical, creative, and committed, Jan Nederveen Pieterse's Globalization and Culture is a work of highly impressive scholarship and rich imagination. Historically informed and theoretically wide-ranging, this is a reader-friendly 'must-read' for all interested in this immensely topical subject. The author's deep personal engagement with the notion of hybridization makes a substantial contribution to the literature.--Anthony D. King, Bartle Professor of Art History and of Sociology, State University of New York, Binghamton The discourse on cultural globalization is one of the best examples of itself: it is confusingly globalized. So we urgently need this enlightened unpacking of globalization by one of the pioneers of the debate Jan Nederveen Pieterse.--Ulrich Beck, Institut fur Soziologie, Germany Globalization and Culture is a significant contribution to a debate that is interdisciplinary, heated, and concerned with contemporary issues. Globalization produces cultural interaction, new permutations, and new differences which Nederveen Pieterse persuasively defends as part of the hybridization thesis. Whether one agrees with him or not (and I do), this book is essential reading for those who want an intelligent and lively guide to the debate about the effects of globalization on culture.--Keith Griffin, University of California, Riverside

Jan Nederveen Pieterse is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.