Leap of faith

I believe (or want to believe) in the positive effects of globalization, which enable us to break more and more the boundaries that seprate us physically (countries), culturally (languagues & customs), intellectually (education), technologically (internet, social networks, etc.) and economically (transnationalism, corporations). We've become more and more interconnected, and we can take advantage of more opportunities. We can nourish greater ambitions, and break free from previous limitations.

As far as I am concerned, my whole adult life would have been different without "positive globalization". Thanks to the bridges that are constantly created, at every level of global exchanges, I was able to change my life for the better. I was born and raised in Gabon (Central Africa), a former French colony. Because of that, my primary language is French. I experienced the French educational system in Gabon. Later on, I experienced it in France as well, at the University of Bordeaux, where I went to study film. I decided to become a filmmaker, because I watched Hollywood movies during all my chilhood. I took advantage of an exchange program between the University of Bordeaux and the University of California, to experience American Grad school at UCSB. There, I met my future husband, who was an exchange Fulbright fellow from Germany. Even though my German is satisfactory, and his French is acceptable, we communicate in English.

Consequently thanks to "positive globalization," today I can even live in the US, have English as my my new primary language, and ambition to pursue a dual career as an African filmmaker, and as a scholar in America.

However, this week's readings modified my mostly positive outlook on things. Doreen Massey's article "A global sense of place," particularly was the one that affected me the most. For me, "place" is a point of origin, it is both our cultural and geographical point of departure on the globe. Thus, the article left me wondering about how important "the place" (where we live, where we are born, where we work, etc.) was in the construction of our personal identity, as well as our personalities. Because globalization has managed to considerably reduce distances, it has rendered us potentially more nomadic. In our contstruction of identity, the place where we come from defines lees who we are than the place where we live in, or the place where we work, or even the place where we aspire to go. Ultimately, this may considerably affect our sense of who we are, and the convictions that we have about our cultural identity. What place do we actually call "home"? What culture can we eventually call ours? What citizenship is the one that reflects our cultural identity? With globalization, is there virtually no place to belong to? No place to commit to? No place cultural identity to develop? It really depressed me.

The webs that are created with gloabalization have impacted so many aspects of our lives, at so many levels (sometimes that we are not even fully aware of) that at the end, it feels like we are just left hoping that it is actually "mostly positive"...