Module 8: Capitalism and Culture

2) What factors contributed to economic globalization in the second half of the twentieth century?
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a deep concentration of global economic linkages as the aftermath of World War I and then the Great Depression. This was very big damage to the world’s economy.  There was a major acceleration in international economic transactions that took place in the second half of the twentieth century and continued into the twenty-first. The "Bretton Woods system" negotiated the rules for commercial and financial dealings among the major capitalist countries, while promoting relatively free trade, stable currency values linked to the US dollar, and high levels of capital investment. The technology was a major contributor to the acceleration of economic globalization. Containerized shipping, huge oil tankers, and air express services dramatically lowered transportation costs. Later the internet provided communication for global economic interaction. There was also a very large population growth in developing countries. The kind of economic globalization taking place in the 1970s was known as neoliberalism.


8) What distinguished feminism in the industrialized countries from that in the Global South?
During the twentieth century, women faced very different situations than white women in the United States and in Europe. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America the strongest issues were colonialism, racism, nation independence, poverty, development, political oppression, and sometimes even revolution. Women’s movements in the Global South took shape around a wide range of issues, not all of them were specifically gender-based. Black women in industrial countries used feminism to stand with the family and men in the struggle against racism and poverty. The South resented Western feminists' interest in cultural matters such as female genital mutilation and polygamy. Western feminists could easily be seen as a new form of cultural imperialism. In Chile, the women's movement emerged as part of a national struggle against a military dictatorship. Women were considered “invisible” in the public sphere.

11) In what ways did Islamic renewal express itself?
The most important of the late twentieth-century fundamentalisms was Islam. There were a lot of growing numbers of Muslims to renew and reform the practice of Islam and to create a new religious or political order centered on a particular understanding of their faith. Islamic renewal movements gained strength from the enormous disappointments that had accumulated in the Muslim world by the 1970s. Leading figures, such as the Indian Mawlana Mawdudi and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, insisted that the Quran and the sharia, Islamic Law, provided a guide for all of life. This would include political, economic, and spiritual. In an effort to return to Islamic principles an ancient and evocative religious term that refers to “struggle” to please God was labeled jihad. In its twentieth-century political expression, jihad included the defense of an authentic Islam against Western aggression.