Politicizing globalization: Transnational conflict and change in the contemporary novel (Buchi Emecheta, Nigeria, Annie Proulx, Karen Tei Yamashita, Cristina Garcia, Cuba, Michael Ondaatje, Australia)

This study assesses narrative representations of “society in transnationalism” through the framework of globalization theory. The object of the study is to articulate meanings for globalization that both reassert the capitalist-based structures underwriting globalization's new social, political, and cultural forms, and meanings that—more importantly—make visible the human costs associated with those transformations. By providing a counter-narrative to the traditional imaginary surrounding globalization, this study politicizes the seemingly neutral terrain of everyday life and undercuts the anthem of “progress” and “triumph” that global rhetoric has thus far been so successful in propagating.; This work is divided into five chapters, each one focusing on a contemporary novel that illuminates a different political dimension of globalization. Chapter 1 articulates a bridge between colonialism and globalization by illuminating the impact of Western capitalism on the lives of the Ibo women of colonial Nigeria in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Chapter 2 problematizes the conventional theoretical framework of “the global” and “the local” through an analysis of the social and political dynamics at work in the small fishing village of Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (1993). Chapter 3 offers a critique of the inequitable distribution of wealth that the hegemony of global capitalism brings to bear on people both within developing nations and within spaces of poverty in the heart of some of the world's most notable “global” cities—a topic that forms the basis of the global critique in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange (1997). Chapter 4 assesses the role of women in the legitimization of the nation state and in the articulation of (and negotiation of) relationships between different nation states, a subject examined in Cristina Garcia's The Aguero Sisters (1997). Chapter 5 offers a critique of global human rights discourse by highlighting the Western bias inscribed in the UN-sponsored human rights investigation featured in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (2000).