Off The Map
An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy
-
- $26.99
-
- $26.99
Publisher Description
Today’s global economy is yesterday’s empire. Imperialism in whatever guise is the same through time, penetrating every area of our lives, affecting whole cultures as well as the deep core of individuals. And maps have been the tools of empire, defining the territory to be exploited.
Off The Map is a unique exploration of globalization. Part history, part autobiography, and part fiction, it weaves together the history of the last 300 years of Western imperialism, the author’s own story of sexual abuse in the 1950s, and a present-day horseback ride through the recently colonized Chicano world of New Mexico. The author takes us with her as she travels "off the map" through the ancestral lands of her friend and travelling companion Snowflake Martinez, describing the Chicano people’s struggle to survive the onslaught of a globalized world, and the ways in which that struggle has been replicated countless times. In a different voice, she reveals scenes from her childhood, her grandparents adorning themselves with artifacts symbolic of the British Empire, and her medical doctor father raping both her and her brother for 12 years. The political is deeply personal. And hope, according to Glendinning, resides in our creating new maps that chart worlds fashioned by love and respect for community, place, and nature.
"A dazzling contribution to the critical study of globalization (qua imperialism)."—Devon Peña, author of Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin
Chellis Glendinning is a psychologist and award-winning author whose works include the acclaimed My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, and When Technology Wounds, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A pioneer in the field of ecopsychology, her specialty is the ecological and human costs of technological progress. She lives in rural New Mexico, where she works with Chicano and Native people for environmental justice and cultural preservation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Glendinning's freewheeling, lyrical meditation on the human costs of economic globalization fiercely blends the personal and the political. The enemy, as she sees it, is "corporate imperialism," a U.S.-dominated system that pockets the world's raw materials and labor at bargain-basement prices, using the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to snag nations into debt and colonial dependence. In her view, the global economy is unmitigated evil, causing mechanized lifestyles, the destruction of ecosystems and the demise of formerly self-sufficient communities. One chapter, a 1940-onward timeline, records U.S.-backed slaughter and repression in Indonesia, Chile and Vietnam, but neglects to mention Soviet imperialism or Chinese totalitarianism. On a personal note, Glendinning (When Technology Wounds) includes a moving autobiographical account of her decades-long recovery from what she describes as 12 years of rape and psychological torture by her father, a Harvard-educated doctor who also brutally molested her brother, by this account. While these recollections are harrowing, readers will be right to wonder whether calling her abusive father an "imperialist" really explains anything. Weaving history, meditation and confessional, her impassioned narrative centers on her horseback ride through northern New Mexico's badlands with Snowflake Martinez, a Chicano cowboy of mixed Mexican, Pueblo and Hispanic descent, who helps launch a movement demanding the federal government's return of his ancestral tribal lands. Though Glendinning sets down their conversations (his sprinkled with Spanish), he mostly remains a faceless, emblematic figure in this self-indulgent chronicle, which repeats and extends the message of her previous books.
