Book excerpt: Beyond Dichotomies examines literary texts, cultural production, and concrete local practices within the context of modernity and globalization by focusing on the ways in which some societies confront the complexity of cultures reflected in new forms of knowledge, narratives, and subjectivities. The contributors explore how particular societies negotiate the relations between the global and the local, and use a geographical, comparative perspective combined with an interdisciplinary approach to offer a diversity of views and illuminate the cultural impact of globalization on different societies around the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. These societies face complex questions regarding people's histories, identities, and cultures that embody the ambivalence, contradictions, and anxieties generated by the process of globalization. The contributors provide a compelling conclusion for a rethinking and reconfiguration of cultures and intercultural relations in today's global world in which dichotomized representations coexist with a discourse of globalization.