Transnational spaces and everyday lives

This paper discusses some of the limitations of the global city hypothesis, in particular its economistic tendencies, the suppression of political and cultural domains, and the underdevelopment of human agency and everyday life. It tries to establish more fully the identities of global subjects. Examining two sets of global actors, transnational businessmen and cosmopolitan professionals, it argues that the expansive reach and mastery imputed to global subjects, their flight from the particular and the partisan, their dominance and freedom from vulnerability, are far from complete. The separation of the global and the local and the ascription of mobility and universalism to the global and stasis and parochialism to the local is an oversimplification, for an optic of transnational global spaces should not conceal the intersecting reality of circumscribed everyday lives.