Alan Liu

Designed as a hybrid practical/philosophical discussion, the essay reflects on the development of Liu’s “Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research” in light of what it means to “globalize the humanities” in an era . . . the academic humanities—precisely in their professional and specialized organization—contain their own rich, dynamic, evolving vision of global knowledge.” (p. 53)when it is the postindustrial global corporation (self-dubbed the “learning organization”) that sets the paradigm of “knowledge.” What does it mean to remain an academic research site when knowledge is increasingly corporate and global? Can the distinctive humanities paradigm of knowledge—at once historical and interdisciplinary—offer a viable alternative to the equally distinctive anti-historical interdisciplinarity of “global knowledge” in “workplace 2000”? Can humanistic knowledge, that is, be an alternative global knowledge that refuses the high, old way of universalism to imagine a new way of localized universalism (field by field, culture by culture, history by history) able at once to collaborate and critique World, Inc.?