Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In Making the World Global Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.

About the Author
Isaac A. Kamola is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and coeditor of Politics of African Anticolonial Archive and The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global/Transforming the Local.

Reviews
"Making the World Global is a rich and intriguing exploration of academic knowledge production and its effects on the material conditions of the world. In calling for the creation of "new conditions of academic knowledge production," [it] poses a necessary challenge that we should strive to meet." -- Rafael Khachaturian * Perspectives on Politics *
"[Making the World Global] is an important book with a guaranteed long shelf life and indeed virtual space life. His theoretical framework is part of emerging works that seek to bring Marxism and Decoloniality together...."
-- Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni * International Politics Reviews *
"Making the World Global merits high praise for accomplishing something that only some intellectual histories of the U.S. in the world succeed at: tying ideas, their makers, and their institutional homes to their lived consequences for the world's peoples." -- Paul A. Kramer * Reviews in American History *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478004738
Author Isaac A. Kamola
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 408g