In a 2001 essay introducing the already vast literature on globalization, Mauro Guillen asks, tongue partially in cheek, “Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble?” Guillen presents globalization as a problem rather than a stable and coherent field, as a paradox best approached indirectly, through the wide range of responses that it generates. How, he asks, can the process of global integration in the economic and cultural spheres be perceived simultaneously as a powerful force of modernization, a step toward an Americanized world, a mortal threat to existing ways of life and a mere rhetorical flourish or vacuous academic trend with few real- world consequences? How can globalization be viewed as the pathway to “boundless prosperity and consumer joy” (135), a formula for homogenization and inequality, and nothing at all?

Instead of accounting for the inherent contradictions in the literature on globalization, most scholars have focused on a particular subset of the field, managing those incongruities by excluding them from their frame of analysis and leaving the outliers for another discipline. In the intervening years, the contradictions have only multiplied, with an intensified version of technological utopianism and corresponding resistance movements now assuming a more prominent role in the cultural politics of globalization.

The primary problem with studies of world cinema or global media is not the images or industries in the foreground of that scholarship but, rather, the acceptance of a commonplace but unsustainable definition of the “world.” To consider the range of problems that fall under the rubric of globalization, we have to first address the foundational question formulated recently by Pheng Cheah, “What is a world?” A slight alteration of the perspective or analytical frame can distort that object beyond recognition, especially when the focus changes from the abstractions of mathematized financial markets or utopian internationalism to the concrete reality of skyscrapers, factory labor and environmental devastation. As John Urry argues, “The emergent global order is one of constant disorder and disequilibrium,” and its effects are “non- linear, large- scale, unpredictable and partially ungovernable” (2000, 208).