Globalization, cultural politics and identity politics

This article is an attempt to examine several theoretical frameworks on cultural globalization in connection with trans-national relations. The term of Globalization has become a key-word to describe the post-cold war and the post-hegemonic world, especially as regards the economic sphere of international relations. In comparison with the economic one, the cultural aspect of global process, for instance global homogenization, has hardly been analysed theoretically. In recent years, however, with the rapid increase of interests in causation and consequences of globalization innumerable works on the 'global' are offerd in various realms of social sciences. Thus this article considers political implications of cultural globalization and deals with a few of issues concerning with it as follows. First, cultural phenomena such as transculturation, acculturation, hybridization and so on, brought about by the global process, are examined in the context of world-system critics. Second, it is clarified that cultural globalization is closely related to the process of formation of collective social identities of diverse groups in the marginal, which must be understood with regard to its political significance. Third, it is pointed out that globalization does not erase difference and power from political life, but brings about new possibilities for cultural/ identity politics to enlarge the horizon of political thinking and action