The local resists globalization from within and is not essentially political

Evidence

Strategies of différance are not able to inaugurate totally different forms of life (they do not work with the notion of a totalizing dialectical “overcoming”). They cannot conserve older, traditional ways of life intact. They operate best in what Homi Bhabha calls “the borderline time” of minorities (Bhabha 1997). However, différance does prevent any system from stabilizing itself as a fully sutured totality. It arises in the gaps and aporias, which constitute potential sites of resistance, intervention, and translation. Within these interstices lie the possibility of a disseminated set of vernacular modernities. … Culturally, these cannot frontally stem the tide of Westernizing techno-modernity. However, they continue to inflect, deflect, and “translate” its imperatives from below. They constitute the basis for a new kind of “localism” that is not self-sufficiently particular, but arises within, without being simply a simulacrum of, the global (Hall 1991). This “localism” is no mere residue of the past. It is something new—globalization’s accompanying shadow: what is left aside in globalization’s panoramic sweep but returns to trouble and disturb globalization’s cultural settlements. It is globalization’s “constitutive outside” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Butler 1993). Here we find the “return” of the particular and specific—of the specifically different—at the center of globalization’s universalist, panoptic aspiration to closure. … It has no fixed political inscription. It can be either progressive or regressive and fundamentalist—open or closed—in different contexts (Hall 1993). Its political thrust is determined not by its essential content (usually caricatured as “Tradition’s resistance to Modernity”), but by its articulation with other forces. … Only in such a context can we understand why what threatens to become the moment of the West’s global closure—the apotheosis of its global universalizing mission—is at the same time the moment of the West’s slow, uncertain, protracted decentering. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 323

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘constitutive outside’ of globalization maps directly onto how the ‘Muslim Other’ figures in Islamophobia scholarship as both inside and outside the Western nation.
• SEED: The ‘borderline time’ of minorities as a site of vernacular modernity could anchor an article on how marginalized religious communities inflect rather than simply resist dominant culture.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘the local’ as conjuntural, non-essential, and politically indeterminate — a key corrective against caricaturing minority responses as mere Tradition vs Modernity.