Post-Colonial and Spatial Turns in Theory of Culture: Discourse of “Subordinate” Localities

Abstract

The paper analyzes the discourse on the global and the local in social sciences and humanities. Models of understanding the global are identified and described. This research was triggered by criticism of the modern and the model of the global understood within the modern context and realized in post-modern, post-post-modern, as well as research programs on postcolonial studies, trauma studies and decolonial turn. The paper explores methodology opportunities of applying spatial, post-colonial and de-colonial turns to analyzing representations of local cultures and the local experience. “The local” has to submit to global trends not to be marginal; however, the need to fit itself into the global context neutralizes the regional culture’s distinctiveness. The research resulted in 3 models of understanding the global proposed by the author. Firstly, the global can be understood as scaling values and conventions of a single culture that is recognized as dominant in relation to all other cultures, while the latter are perceived as insignificant localities falling behind in development (the conventional “imperial” model of the global). Secondly, the model of the global can be understood as “the united universal” where a model of a single world is created, bringing together various cultures and neutralizing differences between them. Thirdly, the global can be understood as a space where various localities exist simultaneously, and each of them preserves its uniqueness. The article proposes the notion of a transit culture aligned with identities recognized within the decolonial turn. Differences between identities shaped within the transit culture and hybrid identities are distinguished.