The way, today, we tell any of the tales of “voyage of1
discovery”, is in terms of crossing and conquering space.
Cortés voyaged across space, found Tenochtitlán, and took it.
“Space”, in this way of telling things, is an expanse we travel4
across.
We know “globalisation” in its current form is not the
result of a law of nature. It is a project. It is not a description7
of the world as it is so much as an image in which the world is
being made.
This much is now well established in critiques of10
today’s globalisation. But it is perhaps less often made explicit
that one of the crucial manoeuvres at work within it, to
convince us of the ineluctability of this globalisation, is a13
sleight of hand in terms of the conceptualisation of space and
time. And this has social and political effects. It says that
Mozambique and Nicaragua are not really different from “us”.16
We are not to imagine them as having their own trajectories,
their own particular histories, and the potential for their own,
perhaps different, futures. They are not recognised as coeval19
others. They are merely at an earlier stage in the one and only
narrative it is possible to tell. That cosmology of “only one
narrative” obliterates the multiplicities, the contemporaneous22
heterogeneities of space. It reduces simultaneous coexistence
to place in the historical queue. In the context of a world which
is, indeed, increasingly interconnected, the notion of place has25
come to have totemic resonance.
D. Massey. For space. London: Sage Publications, 2005, p. 4-5 (adapted).