Globalization, postmodernism, and fascism: Reflections on ideology, urban space, and the cultural politics of global capital from Colombo and Los Angeles

As a contribution to the critique of globalization, this dissertation takes up the exemplary cultural and political consequences of rapid capitalist development in two distinct places: Los Angeles and Colombo, Sri Lanka. Its analysis of the role played by urban space in mediating between ideology and social totality in Los Angeles--informed by the history of her urban development, "cognitive mapping" research (a la Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson), and a theorization, with the proposed concept "urban sensorium," of how urban space produces hegemony and aestheticizes politics--furnishes an assessment of postmodern urbanism and its discontents. In Colombo, a symptomatic reading of the Jathika Chinthanaya (National Ideology) movement's recent ascent as the leading "Sri Lankan" (Sinhala-Buddhist) opposition to globalization--to the colonization of Sri Lanka by the commodity form (ushered in by the "urban sensorium" as much as the popular media)--highlights its fascist-nationalist aspects. A juxtaposition of the latter to those of the "Ecology of Fear" (Mike Davis) in Los Angeles then points to a deep structural similarity between these two contexts: socio-cultural anomie amid radical political-economic upheaval.