The discursive spaces of global politics

Abstract

Beginning with a description of the Bhopal disaster, when a leak at the Union Carbide company killed thousands, this essay turns to the issue of the politics of discursive practices. The discussion focuses at first on a genealogy of environmental discourses— ranging from conservation to sustainability and then proceeds to a treatment of the way various dimensions of political economy constitute events of ethnic exclusion. The essay ends with a juxtaposition of traditional ethics and a politics of aesthetics.

Keywords:

• Bhopal
• discursive practices
• environmental discourses
• politics of aesthetics
• Bread and Roses

Notes

1. This expression is borrowed from Tracy Neal Leavelle (2004).

2. Interestingly, corporate America is working hard to finesse the tension between ‘conservation and accumulation’. As part of a new ‘corporate activism’, emerging in the 1990s they have been involved in eco- or enviropreneurial-marketing, where corporate environmentalism has become a market strategy (see Chuihua et al., 2002, pp. 305–322).

3. This section is a revised version of Shapiro (2004).

4. As above, this is quoting from Foucault (1970, p. 130) on natural history.

5. See Matthias Fritsch's reading of Derrida on “the democracy to come” for a treatment of polemical space in Derrida (Fritsch, 2002, p. 579).