Product Description: The central metaphor in Globalization: An Asian Perspective on Modernity and Politics in America is partly constructed out of Michel Foucaults metaphor of the Ship of Fools in Madness and Civilization. Building on Foucaults brilliant argument, the three themes of hope, progress, and optimism as used in this book represent idiomatic expressions of the business of modernity that have developed since the time of the Industrial Revolution in the West...read more

Product Description: The Enlightenment theorists involved in the public/private debate exposed the logical fallacies of theology and the philosophical weaknesses of metaphysics but left little room for understanding contemporary modes of consumption. What does it mean to be a consumer in the early 21st century? Do modern markets provide real choices for consumers in neoliberal capitalist democracies? Or are consumers ironically slaves to their own patterns of consumption? Rejecting Habermas' conceptualizations in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991), Rappa offers an examination of modernity and consumption with a non-Marxist, modernity-Resistance-theoretical frame (mRf)...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)