Short description:

? Funk is located in Gainesville, FL ? Funk's monograph is a carefully-crafted expansion of his dissertation, which earned the American Political Science Association's Bronner Dissertation Award. He has a good social media presence and is well known and regarded in the Global Studies and Global South Studies fields. ? This text deals with issue of how the global elite see themselves in relation to their home countries and how this self-identification informs their politics and worldview. It is, for this reason, timely and promises to be relevant for many years to come. ? The work adds to the Framing the Global series on several fronts. To date, much of the work in the series has focused on anthropology, the arts, and issues surrounding NGOs and government organizations. This work offers a much-needed perspective from the field of political science. The work also approaches a South-South relationship which has to date received little attention from Western (American) scholars and publishers. ? The audience for this work is scholars working in political science, international relations, Arab studies, Latin American studies, and Global studies.

Long description:

Does the concept of nationality apply to the economic elite, or have they shed national identities to form a global capitalist class?

In Rooted Globalism, Kevin Funk unpacks dozens of ethnographic interviews he conducted with Latin America's urban-based, Arab-descendant elite class, some of whom also occupy positions of political power in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Based on extensive fieldwork, Funk illuminates how these elites navigate their Arab ancestry, Latin American host cultures, and roles as protagonists of globalization. With the term "rooted globalism," Funk captures the emergence of classed intersectional identities that are simultaneously local, national, transnational, and global.

Focusing on an oft-ignored axis of South-South relations (between Latin America and the Arab world), Rooted Globalism provides detailed analysis of the identities, worldviews, and motivations of this group and ultimately reveals that rather than obliterating national identities, global capitalism relies on them.

Kevin Funk's Rooted Globalism challenges the ubiquitous claim that leading capitalists have mentally divorced themselves from the nation-state as they congeal into a placeless hegemonic class with a global consciousness. Funk interviewed dozens of leading capitalists in South America and finds that the identities of these global actors intersect with ethnicity, race, family and ancestral ties, migration histories, nationality, and geography to generate an empirical class consciousness that he calls "rooted globalism." Funk concludes that the borderless one-world theme articulated by transnational corporations and corporate elites is more of a political strategy to intimidate state elites than an accurate representation of their empirical class consciousness. This pathbreaking book will interest scholars in Latin American politics and political economy, but it is a must read for anyone interested in the relationship between globalization, class formation, and the state.