Page - 48 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:1

48 | www.limina-graz.eu thing looking the same (Barber 1996). Moreover, that homogeneity could undermine democracy itself, as unchecked economic power in its neolib- eral form could diminish the role of national governments and create an authoritarian form of rule by large transnational corporations (Martin/ Schumann 1996). This led others to dream of a rebirth of utopian possi- bilities that had blossomed during the upheavals of decolonialization in the 1950s and the Western upheavals in culture in the 1960s. On the other hand, however, there were those who lived in parts of the planet where the resources of the new connectivity of globalization were bringing disruption and exclusion rather than progress and inclusion. It was feared that globalization was but the new visage of an already well- known colonialism. Movements such as the World Social Forum were or- ganized to combat the annual Global Economic Forum in Davos where the captains of industry were extending their reach into the poor and develop- ing countries of the world. By the second decade of globalization, beginning roughly with the turn of the third millennium, some of the contours of this worldwide phenomenon were coming into clearer view. The movements of connectivity were by no means a one-way street. Resistance and reaction to global economic and social hegemony were prompting energetic responses within local settings around the world. Rather than erasing local difference to create globalized new “McWorlds” of homogeneity (governed by the richest nations), push- back resulted in much more complicated responses. Two such phenomena stood out in a special way (Tomlinson 1999). First, the outcome of the encounter of the global and the local turned out less likely to be an erasure of local identity to be replaced by a new homo- geneity. Rather, hybridity, or mixing to create a new entity, was the more likely outcome. The term “hybrid” had originally been a negative term in racialized colonial discourse, indicating a weakening of the more powerful (i.e., the colonizers) by intermarriage with the weaker (i.e., the colonized) culture (Young 1995). In postcolonial thinking, however, hybridity was seen to be an expected outcome of intercultural encounter that could have either positive or negative outcomes. Positively, it could lead to a more robust creature who could traverse different worlds more effectively; negatively, it could mean the “colonizing of the imaginary,” whereby colonized peo- robert J. schreiter | Globalization and Plural theologies On the other hand, in parts of the planet the resources of the new connectivity brought disruption and exclusion.