Proximity and the Post Colonial Part 1

Flemming introduced a lot of ideas about how productive dialectic occurs in the various ways people organize themselves in terms of proximity and conflict.

He states:

"We remain physical creatures, inherently embodies, inextricably situated, resolutely sensitive to proximity; and the weakest and most vulnerable among us remain the most spatially dependent of all." (Flemming, 15)

And . . .

"The case study at the heart of this book has presented strong evidence for a close relationship between physical location and individual and social welfare in our society and thus good reason to think that place and rhetorical well being are linked as well. The scenes depicted in Part 2 were materially so different from one another, and associated with such dramatic differences in socioeconomic status and opportunity that it seems noncontroversial to claim that different places in the country offer residents different changes for health, prosperity, and happiness. Place matters, and this is as true for rhetoric as for education and employment." (Flemming, 184)

And . . .

"Some of this can be explained, of course, by the changing conditions of residence, work, and play in our time, changes that have allowed us to think that we are less dependent on place than we once were, that physical proximity is no longer relevant, that cities have become obsolete, that new modes of transportation and communication have accomplished 'an awesome technological destruction of distance,' that the 'new' economy, driven by these less attached to and less dependent on place than ever before. The evidence for these changes has been summarized elsewhere: corporations dispersed across the globe ,their components linked by high-speed communication and transportation networks; a dramatic rise in the mobility of capital, with international trade increasingly comprised of financial services and investment funds rather than raw materials and agricultural goods; and labor astonishingly mobile as well, with jobs relocating overnight from one place to another, crossing borders well, with jobs relocating overnight from one place to another, crossing borders previously thought to be impermeable." (Flemming, 24)