Producing the Global Imaginary:
Academic Knowledge, Globalization and the Making of the World
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Abstract
My dissertation examines how the concept of globalization has transformed the way social scientists think about the world.  I argue that while globalization is often studied as an empirical fact, it should instead be studied as a social imaginary produced within asymmetrical relations of academic knowledge production.  I develop this argument by diagnosing a set of contradictions and tensions within the globalization literature.  For example, scholars based in the U.S. and Europe typically claim that globalization is a universal trend—even while treating Africa and African states as anomalous.  I argue that Africa is often represented as “not globalized” because African scholars have been structurally excluded from the production of knowledge about globalization.  On the one hand, the U.S. academy is a key site for the mass production of knowledge about globalization—as exemplified by changes in research funding, the flourishing of Global Studies departments, and the proliferation of study abroad programs in colleges and universities across the country.  In contrast, African universities—including relatively resource-rich South African universities—are being remade into development institutions designed to respond to a world already imagined as “global.” 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Re-Worlding “the Global”

Part I: Diagnosing the Global

Prelude: Diagnosing the Academic Literature on Globalization

Chapter 1: Globalization as an Object of Knowledge

Chapter 2: Reading “the Global” in the Absence of Africa 

Chapter 3: “The Global” as an Imaginary

Part II: The Production of the Global Imaginary

Prelude: A Contrapuntal Method for Social Scientific Research

Chapter 4: The US Academy and the Production of “the Global”

Chapter 5: Becoming a “World-Class African University”: The Structural Transformation of Higher Education in South Africa

Excursus: Mahmood Mamdani and a Politics of Knowledge as Production

Conclusion: The Effects of Producing the Global Imaginary

Methodological Appendices

Introduction

Appendix I: Thinking Structural Causality in the Social Science

Appendix II: Reading Academic Knowledge as Production

Appendix III: Situating Althusser’s “Science” Within the Conjuncture of the University

Glossary

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