Concept Note:
Globalization, in economic context, means a continual diminishing and a subsequent dismantling of the barriers between national frontiers so as to facilitate an easy influx of goods, capital, services and labour. It is characterized by the "acceleration and intensification of economic interaction among the people, companies, and governments of different nations". Sheila L. Croucher defines globalization as “a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, socio-cultural and political forces.” The unprecedented pace of globalization, especially in the last two decades, has influenced every aspect of our public and private lives. Countless technological innovations ushered in by globalization have resulted in the automation of production processes, continuous modernization and upgrading of work techniques, creation of virtual communities, and massive transformations in terms of geography and borders.This ceaseless movement of products, processes, and people has irrevocably transformed human cultures across the world. In this globalised world, diversity and pluralism are celebrated and the cosmopolitan impulses embattle at the altar of crisis-induced xenophobia. Religion too struggles against nihilistic aporias, and nation-states struggle to hold onto the loyalty of their citizens. Universalism is challenged everywhere by resurgent particularisms. Knowledge creation and dissemination are increasingly decentralized and democratized.
Developing countries followed the new model of economic reforms, commonly known as the LPG or Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation to make their economy the fastest developing economy in the globe to match up with the biggest economies of the world. The process of globalization received impetus in the late nineteenth century but faced a major setback at the beginning of First World War and remained hibernated till the third quarter of the twentieth century. This impasse was caused by the inward looking policies espoused by some countries to protect their respective industries. In globalization, space is engaged metaphorically as shrinkage or mobility or distance, influencing the process of decentralization, de-territorialization, redrawing of boundaries and spatial realignments and re configurations.
Globalization has had a huge impact on thinking across the humanities, redefining the understanding of fields such as communication, culture, politics, and literature. The different dimensions of globalization such as the rise of global capital and markets, new media and communication technologies, dissolution of political borders, and growth of consumerist culture cannot be seen in isolation from one another. Some view Globalization as a profoundly enriching process, opening minds to new ideas and experiences, and strengthening the finest universal values of humanity. The advocates of Globalization say that free trade and free markets don't dilute or pollute other cultures,they enhance them. Trade creates wealth. Wealth frees the world's poorest people from the daily struggle for survival, and allows them to embrace, celebrate and share the art, music, crafts and literature that might otherwise have been far from the reach of them because of poverty. Globalization has exercised a homogenizing influence on local culture and promoted the integration of societies, providing millions of people with new opportunities. This integration came at the expense of the extinction of uniqueness of local culture, traditional societies and communities, paving the way to the loss of identity, exclusion and even conflict. The process of rapid „modernization‟ is based on models imported from outside hence it was incongruous with local cultural context. The Third World perception of globalization is that of a harmful process that maximizes inequality within and among states. It can be said that globalization while integrating and fragmenting the world, uniformity and localization, increased material prosperity and deepening misery as well as homogenization and hegemony. And thus became a complex process and phenomenon of antinomies and dialectic. Viewed in terms of class hegemony, the culture of globalization seeks to divorce people from their actual realities of day to day life.
Culture here acts not as an appeal to the aesthetic, but as a distraction, diversion from the pressing problems of poverty and misery. Consequently, it seeks to disrupt the energy of the people and their struggle to change and improve their miserable existence. Far greater part of our culture is aptly designated as „mass culture‟, „popular culture‟, and even „media culture‟, owned and operated mostly by giant corporations whose major concur is to accumulate wealth and make the world safe for their owners, the goal being exchange value rather than use value, social control rather than social creativity. Much of mass culture is organized to distract us from thinking too much about larger realities. Public tastes become still more attuned to cultural junk food, the big hype, trashy, flashy, wildly violent, instantly stimulating, and desperately superficial offerings.
Literature isn‟t left untouched by the process of globalization. Some literary works feature the model of world cities and some have the traces of anti-globalization protests. The theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism have diverged from and converged with globalization studies. Amitav Ghosh‟s The Hungry Tide takes up cudgel against the waves of Globalization. Ghosh‟s The Calcutta Chromosome interrogates the Western policy of using science as its own possession, a civilizing mode, a mark of superiority, and its refusal to acknowledge nonwestern countries for importing scientific ideas from them. Some authors project that international companies have taken up the place of colonizers. They have spread their branches into the economies of all the nations. Booker Prize winner novel The White Tiger studies the contrast between India‟s rise as a modern global economic giant and the protagonist, Balram, who comes from rural poverty background. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his novel, Wizard of the Crow, deals with themes of colonialism and globalization in a politically troubled Kenya. He attacks universalism and wants African unique elements to be identified and not to be clouded by globalization or universalism. Salman Rushdie‟s Midnight’s Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, also deal with the anglophilia and effects of globalization. Indian Pulp-fiction has also taken cognizance of globalization. Works like Neelish Misra‟s Once upon Timezone,Swati Khushal‟s Piece of Cake, and Brinda Narayan‟s Banglore Calling deal with the death of heterogeneous culture amid globalization. Chetan Bhagat‟s One Night @ the Call Centre is a critique of positive neoliberal narratives around globalization and capitalism just as it champions them with nationalistic rhetoric. Globalization has diminished nationalism, through increased interdependence and weakening the national barriers between countries. National differences have disappeared or at least have become less important and noticeable. There is close affinity between translation and globalization. Translation, by dint of its trans-cultural dimension, plays pivotal role in the process of globalization. World Literature, in the modern sense, refers to literary works that are translated into multiple languages and circulated to an audience outside their country of origin. It underscores the growing availability of texts from other nations.
Multiplicity of the cultures in the globalised world also calls in the sense of comparisonamong cultures. Comparative literature, as a stream of study, enjoys its unique importance in such cultural set up.Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, sees artistic movements like modernism and postmodernism as cultural formations that accompany particular stages of capitalism and are to some extent constructed by it. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin argue that “the ultimate and unavoidable future of postcolonialism studies lies in its relation to globalization”. The concept of „world literature‟ describes the growing availability of texts from other nations. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto (1848) describe the existence of a world literature which is produced out of the constant revolutionizing of bourgeois production which spreads across national and cultural boundaries. The bourgeoisie has,through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
