Jeanne Garane  (University of South Carolina)
From the Global to the Local: Oppositional Particularism in the Writing
of Abdourahman A. Waberi

In Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Marc Augé asserts that we live in a "supermodern excess of space" produced by globalization and a world shrunken by rapid transport and satellite images. Where for Frederic Jameson the inability to completely map the present world is almost tragic (as in his essay, "Cognitive Mapping"), what Augé calls "spatial excess" represents a change in parameters that allows us to undertake the study of "civilisations et cultures nouvelles . . . car nous vivons dans un monde que nous n'avons pas encore appris à regarder" (49). While globalization has been defined as the historic form in which space is currently being restructured and which threatens particular localities, a number of theorists agree that contrary to an expected homogenization of cultures, local particularities continue to be created or maintained. For instance, Michael Watts proposes that globalization, or "space-time compression" "implies less the erosion of place than a sensitivity to how location, identity, and community are refashioned in incompletely globalized sites" (64-65).

This paper will examine instances of oppositional particularity in the "incompletely globalized sites" that appear in the work of Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi, to show how spaces apparently appropriated and transformed by colonialism and globalization can be reappropriated through local signifying practices.