Globalization and lusophony – the debate of languages

Abstract

In the post-colonial literature, it is increasingly more commonly agreed that there are cultures of unity, as opposed to cultures of blending. The cultures of unity are cultures of exclusion, whereas the cultures of blending are cultures of participation. The West was built upon the inflow of a culture of unity. It was accomplished, since the Greeks, by a logos that is not only words, but also reason, since the logos is the ultimate instance of decision. The logos is one and only. And it was also rendered, by the Judeo-Christian tradition, a word possessing a symbolic function, a word that gathers and promotes unity. To the culture of the one and only – a logocentric, ethnocentric and imperialist culture, which assimilated the difference, destroying it – followed the culture of the multiple and of participation. This is the culture of multiculturalism, patent in the emergence of a wide range of different and multicultural countries, built upon the wealth of a diversity of languages, the combination of many ethnicities and the outburst of a multiplicity of narratives. This is also the lieu of Lusophony, a plural space in a post-colonial context. But however, in our time, the culture of difference and participation did not succeed in asserting their rights for long, since currently, all over the world, the culture of the one and only is back, prevailing over the difference, and multiculturalism regresses, to the detriment of the 'World-Culture'. This is an idea that homogenizes and impoverishes cultures, dilutes memories and borders, virtualizes landscapes and obliterates peoples and nations. Global information networks, propelled by information technologies, accelerated the historical time, and utterly and infinitely mobilized the time, thus creating the global market. The world kinetics is now this one, the one of a global market created by information technologies, a control space that converts everything into commodities, goods, bodies and souls, and never cease to mobilize us to it.