There’s none so hurt at home
who forgets the pain outside
that’s the persistent ache one carries
until home’s safe to return to,
when it no longer matters where you live! (77)With globalization, the task of demonstrating its relationship to exile is perhaps most
challenging; not least because as a concept its reach is far flung and imbricates almost all
other conceptual elements by which various fields of enquiry have attempted to engage
with social epistemes and how we ought to live in the present age. While on the one hand
for instance some scholars trace its origin to the 16th century European exploratory and
subsequently imperial travels around the rest of the world (Stan Smith 2006:2), others see
its evolution as concomitant with modernity. As well as the aforesaid, there are others
who prefer to connect its evolution to the rise of English as a universal language (ibid. 2),
a phenomenon that can hardly be denied in view of the historical modes by which the
language was elevated to a global status. Other schools of thought do not hesitate to
single out the phenomenon of globalization for the justification of eschatological
persuasions in terms of the way it hastens Armageddon, and accelerates the admission of
the faithful to paradise in the context of the increasing spate of terrorism in contemporary
times and overtly and covertly underwrites the heating up of the apocalyptic rivalry
between Islam and Christianity (1). Yet, a number of other scholars prefer to bring the
narrative of its origin closer to the present by limiting it to the 20th century and the
advancement of information science and technology whereby, to allude to the popular
coinage by Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 work Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man , the world has been turned into a “global village”. David Harvey has since then
come to be identified as the theorist whose attempt at painting the scenario of
globalization infects most; this is precisely for the aptness of expression: “time/space
compression” and the accelerated progression in human capacity to demystify space
through the reduction of the needed time to cross it (cited in Don Kalb et al 2004:1)
Anthony Giddens (1990) in a similar vein advances this popular perception of the
dynamics of globalization by stressing the consequence of “time/space” compression. On
this score, globalization is read as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which