Dr. Joshua Neves’ new book Underglobalization is to be released in March 2020 by Duke University Press.
In Underglobalization Joshua Neves examines the cultural politics of the fake as a key site through which contemporary forms of underdevelopment are governed, mediated, and contested—in China and globally. He shows how multiplying conditions of illegality and illegitimacy shore up dominant models for development and, paradoxically, drive dismissals of Chinese modernization as counterfeit or excessive. Combining site-specific research in Beijing with a set of theoretical problems tied to Asian globalizations, the book enacts a critical shift from the routine focus on copyright violations and the creative industries to the proliferation of illegal cities, citizens, and futures. Neves draws on media and political theory, and a wide range of engagements with Asian urbanism and popular politics, to explore the illegal but socially valid practices that constitute public culture in China and much of the world. His multidisciplinary analysis charts a range of contested claims on the social: urban planning’s visual culture, ambient TV, film and video exhibition, electronics labor and technological intimacy, and people as a media infrastructure. Arguing for a shift from global civil society to global political society, Neves considers how mundane and mediated practices of faking—from informal networks to piratical citizenship—undergird globalization as we know it. https://www.dukeupress.edu/underglobalization - GEM Lab