De-coca-colonization: Postmodernity, the world city, and the everyday practices of global formation

We understand implicitly that globalization is big, and complex. It is, after all, a global thing. But beyond this, what exactly is globalization? Much popular and academic work over the past two decades has addressed this question, providing models of globalization predicated upon the dynamics of international trade and finance, ‘Western’ cultural diffusion, transnational sociology and neo-imperial political economics. But despite granting valuable insights, such models persistently tend to reify globalization as a higher-order phenomenon that structures the conditions of localized everyday life. Consequently, daily life's practitioners are confined to the role of recipients who either accommodate or resist.; Against such treatments of globalization as an analytical point of departure and an economic, political and cultural juggernaut, this dissertation investigates how ‘the global’ is socially constructed in the conjoined realms of both discourse and the material. Utilizing data ranging from the identity-formations of social collectives to built landscapes and individual artifacts, this dissertation deploys a toolkit of complementary methodologies (e.g. ethnographic participant/observation, landscape semiotics, material culture analysis) to narratively triangulate the stories of particular persons, things, and the locales they inhabit and interconnect. Through the specifics of their on-going spatial attenuation, such stories of interrelated human and non-human actors explicate globalization as specific, spatially located practices that inform globality from the ground up (or, more correctly, from the here outwards).; Further, this dissertation demonstrates in intimate detail how the increasing global attenuation of everyday life's emplaced social relations occurs predominantly in and through the sites of the ‘world cities,’ and so locates the practices of global formation at both the interpersonal and intra-urban intersections of inter-urban interactions. Thus, this dissertation delineates the mutually productive relationship of the practices of everyday life to the global as translated through (and by) the city. Such translated, globally formative relationships give rise to a plethora of co-present visions of the city and the world, and to divergent globalizations and world cities that coexist, cross-pollinate and contend with one another.