1998/01/01 by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Social Sciences · #Globalization and Cultural Identity
paper · doi:10.1086/492622
Eve Darian-Smith's review of my book is an excellent, engaging, thoughtful, and provocative essay, and I am happy for having provided the pretext for it. It raises several issues, all of them relevant. I shall concentrate on two of them, in my view the most important ones. The first issue concerns the character and epistemological location of the critical theory I propose in the book. According to Darian-Smith, my position, which I call oppositional postmodernism, is not sufficiently spelled out. The second issue concerns the conceptualization of globalization and the hierarchies of the world system. According to my reviewer, I accept all too acritically such modernist dichotomies as global/local, core/periphery, and North/South, thereby indicating my deeper ideological and moral leanings (Darian-Smith 1998, 115) at the cost of coherence and consistency with my epistemological concerns laid out in the first part of the book. Rather than responding intra-textually to these criticisms-that is to say, rather than resorting to passages in my book where Darian-Smith's criticisms may be said to be partially preempted, an easy strategy in the case of such a lengthy book-in this comment I will develop my position on the two issues I have singled out and let the reader grasp the project I undertake in the book and the direction of my current thinking.