Bibliographies

Literature of Globalization

Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2002
From: "Cheryll Glotfelty" <glotfelt@unr.nevada.edu>

Greetings, ASLE listserv,

Thank you so so much for the many helpful suggestions for a course on Literature of Globalization.  In an earlier posting I relayed the suggestions for scholarly treatments of globalization.  In this message I'll present the list of
suggestions for primary texts, along with any comments that people made about them.  Please feel free to mention some more books if any of these titles jar your memory.  The more the better!  Thanks again, Cheryll Glotfelty

Primary

For a novel, I 'd at least consider Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. 
It's a 1988 Zimbabwean story of a young woman struggling with patriarchy.  The cover blurb from Alice Walker reads in part, "[the two principal women] persist in their determination to be both free Africans and free women in a patriarchal society that is decidedly unhappy with this commendable daring." I second this.  A very readable and accessible/teachable story that does good things at the intersections of patriarchy and neo/colonialism.

There's a novel called Ambiguous Adventure by Cheik Hamidou Kane (I may be
misremembering the spelling of his name slightly), an African novelist - from the 1960s, I think. It's the story of a young African man from a prominent village family who goes to Paris for school, and is caught between the two worlds of African tradition and Western modernity. Nothing specifically about "environmental issues" in it, but lots of sensitivity of how it feels to live in different physical surroundings - e.g., at one point, when the protagonist first encounters automobiles and paved streets in a big city (in sharp contrast to the unpaved earth of his village), he is shocked at how Westerners have made their dwelling-places so dangerous. I found it very powerful.

Since I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind, I'll send you a list that covers a fairly wide range of possibilities for globalization/environmental issues (mostly novels):

Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
Nuruddin Farah, Secrets
Patrick Chamoiseau, Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows
Octavia Butler, Dawn; Kindred
Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Assia Djebar, Fantasia
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

This is an oddball suggestion, but I wonder whether a short story called 'Where the Debris meets the Sea' by the Scottish novelist ('Trainspotting') Irvine Welsh might be of interest. It's in his collection called 'The Acid House.'  In it, Victoria Principal, Kim Basinger and Madonna sit around talking in working-class Edinburgh dialect about how attractive they find working-class Scottish men, who are pictured in the glossy magazines the stars read. It's very funny and obscene. The reason I suggest it is that it's one of the few pieces of recent writing I know that looks at how national identity functions as a signifier in the global market place. Basically (and crudely) Welsh reverses the relationship in which, conventionally, Hollywood stars and places such as Malibu Beach function as objects of desire across the world. It ends with one of the stars saying that it's no good, they're just dreaming, they'll never get to Leith (Leith, a poor suburb of Edinburgh, famous for high-rise projects, heroin-addiction and AIDS, is the antithesis of Malibu). This story was written before Madonna complicated her signifying function a little by settling in Britain and beginning to speak Mockney.

Gloria AnzaldÏa, Borderlands/La Frontera
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

Secondary

Another book, just out, is Roger Epp and Dave Whitson, ed., WRITING OFF THE RURAL WEST: GLOBALIZATION, GOVERNMENTS, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF RURAL COMMUNITIES (U of Alberta P, 2001).

Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002
From: "Bob Mellin" <Mellin@purduenc.edu>

For two mas o menos literary works for such a course, Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps is worth considering.  Also, a small article in this week's Al-Ahram has an interesting Egyptian parable that the article's author, Hani Shukrallah, places within the context of globalization.  The article can be found at: <http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/568/op9.htm>