Guest editorial The predicament of difference IEN ANG AND BRETT ST LOUIS University of Western Sydney and Goldsmiths College, University of London Speaking in 1989 on the relentless march of economic and cultural globaliz- ation, Stuart Hall noted its paradoxically multinational and de-centred character that issues a homogenizing, ‘westernizing’ logic and a fascination with proliferating difference as exotic, novel, and so on. This apparent contradiction or inconsistency is nothing of the sort: it testifies to the current historical and political conjuncture as a moment in the transform- ation of capital into mobile forms of power stretching across the entirety of human and social life; from financial markets to the free enterprise culture, from on-demand production to niche consumption, from the cornucopia of personal choices to the advent of ‘lifestyle’. Most interestingly for Hall, this malleable front characterizes the effectiveness and Achilles heel of the hegemonic project given ‘the fact that, at a certain point, globalization cannot proceed without learning to live with and work through difference’ (1991a: 31, emphasis added). The injunction to ‘live and work with difference’ is not, however, the sole prerogative of the globalization of capital and culture but also poses salient questions of the local and its protean subjects. In the midst of the continual human traffic and restless ideational flows evinced within the ‘ethnoscapes’ of the ‘disjunctive’ global cultural economy, the relative stabilities of filial, communal, and recreational associations are, as Arjun Appadurai informs us, ‘everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion . . . these moving groups can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wished to’ (1990: 297). This points to a necessary acceptance and understanding of difference in a more profound sense, where the effective distinction between established normative groupings such as cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities is thoroughly disturbed. Thus the various inter- sections within increasingly complex social identities emphasize difference EDITORIAL Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) 1468-7968 Vol 5(3): 291–304;054956 DOI:10.1177/1468796805054956 www.sagepublications.com peer-00571844, version 1 - 1 Mar 2011 Author manuscript, published in "Ethnicities 5, 3 (2005) 291-304" DOI : 10.1177/1468796805054956