Globalization

Globalization Order Description   ENG 320: Essay Assignment, 6-8 pgs. double spaced Due Thursday, November 16 by 11:30 am (bring a hard copy to class and upload your paper through Turnitin) Over the last few weeks, we have been considering two different strands of our globalized present as they pertain to literary and cultural expression. First, we discussed – via Harvey and Appadurai – the notion of “time-space compression” and the flattening of history and of cultural difference. Our readings of the theory and Rushdie’s short story, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” focused on the role of global capitalism in both producing and masking cultural differences and economic disparities. There is attention to the surface and to the fetishization of objects, with the result that it’s difficult to distinguish between surface and depth, real and unreal. We also noted how, in Rushdie’s story, those processes take place in a climate of fear that the market manipulates. We left open-ended the question he poses at the end of the short story, about the role of literary fiction in such a world. Second, we turned – via Nixon – to another, in some ways opposite dimension of our contemporary moment: to the deep, multi-scalar effects of environmental damages (which might be as large as a mushroom cloud or as microscopic as genetic abnormality; might last for generations or be over in a flash), their relationship to histories of oppression and exploitation, and the representational challenges these facets of the present pose to the standard building blocks of the novel: character, place, plot. “Darwin’s Nightmare” might be read as one attempt to find a way to tell such a story (successfully or unsuccessfully, depending on your perspective). Our current novel, Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas, engages both these dimensions of contemporary life (play with surface and attention to deep structures of harm). And he uses a combination of literary convention and experimentation in an attempt to create something transformative for his readers. In this essay assignment, you should: • address at least one of the theorists – Harvey, Appadurai, or Nixon – and Abani’s novel; • address both the form and content of the novel As always, you should make an argument about what the novel aims to do and HOW it does so and then support your argument with examples (quotes with page numbers) and analysis of those examples. I recommend that you use the theory to help you set up your argument. Please choose one of the following prompts to help you frame your essay. 1) In “Time-Space Compression,” David Harvey argues late capitalism and the technological developments that accompany have collapsed conventional divisions of time and space. He writes, “The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same place and time. But it does so in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production” (300). In other words, “Time-space compression always exacts its toll on our capacity to grapple with the realities unfolding around us” (306). He adds that this condition produces two distinct outcomes: an emphasis on “escape, fantasy, and distraction,” on the one hand, and “the search for secure moorings in a shifting world” (302), on the other hand. Make an argument about how Abani represents and responds to these conditions. What role do space (the desert, the city) and place (the Venetian Hotel, the death camp, Desert Palms Institute, the brothel, Troubador) play in these representations? 2) In an interview (2014), Chris Abani comments that noir or hardboiled detective fiction “can speak to the hope and despair of the 20th and 21st centuries in ways that resist sentimentality (when handled well) yet do not deny catharsis and hope.” He adds, noir “is a structural form of consciousness that travels across existing formal inventions and reclaims and repurposes them, the way that cities do” (238). Make an argument about why Abani turns to the noir genre to tell his story and how his novel seems inventive, across the expectations of conventions of the genre (you do not need to do research on noir to answer the question; just think about the values that the genre seems to promote and how the plots typically work). You may wish to consider how the novel is structured in terms of chapters, etc., but also how it distinguishes between mystery, crimes, and other forms of violence. 3) In his essay “Slow Violence,” Nixon maintains, “[o]ur temporal bias toward spectacular violence” increases the vulnerability of ecosystems and those Kevin Bales has called “disposable people.” Nixon argues for literary forms that undo that bias: “To confront slow violence is to take up, in all its temporal complexity, the politics of the visible and the invisible.” How does Abani take up (and perhaps extend and/or alter) Nixon’s call for literature that attends to the “politics of the visible and the invisible”? You may wish to consider how the trope of visible (or hypervisible?) vs. invisible structures more than just the ecological dimensions of the story. What, for instance, are the roles of race and gender and other forms of embodiment in shaping this theme? 4) In “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Appadurai writes, “The world we live in now seems rhizomic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) [i.e., structured like an underground root system, with many different roots and new shoots], even schizophrenic, calling for theories of rootlessness, alienation and psychological distance between individuals and groups, on one hand, and fantasies (or nightmares) of electronic propinquity on the other” (3). Make an argument about how Abani’s novel might be read in relation to this statement. Does Abani seem to create a rhizomic structure and represent rootlessness and alienation? Does he imagine an alternative to rootlessness and alienation? 5) Consider Abani’s novel in relation to Appadurai’s analysis of the role of history and memory in today’s cultural imaginary. Appadurai writes, “The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be had as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued....The crucial point, however, is that the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images, but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes. The world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life” (4). Make an argument about how Abani helps to define a role for the imagination in social life. 6) The theorists that we’ve read speak primarily about the processes of globalization and the social, cultural, economic, political, technological, and environmental dimensions and outcomes of those processes. Although Abani’s novel clearly engages with many of these aspects of globalization, his focus is always on how literature shapes our humanity. In “The Rumpus Interview,” he comments about The Secret History of Las Vegas: I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, ‘cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center. Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can. Make an argument about how Abani crafts this journey of change for the reader and where it leads. What antidotes to humans’ darkest capacities does the novel imagine?