Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

In the modern world, modernity and tradition, the nation/metropolis and the colony collide. There are two possible responses to that collision, as suggested in Massey’s “A Global Sense of Place”: nationalist insularity or the stretching out of social relations in the form of multi-culturalism. Forster’s A Passage to India and Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia reflect a modernizing world, but only under the conditions of colonization and its aftermath: in conditions that reinforce the national, political, and social formations associated with Empire. Even so, both texts project the possibility of change spurred by modernity identified in an ideal of cosmopolitanism. Yet, in both, cosmopolitanism is also an effect of Orientalism, a discursive knowledge of the world that frames the experiences of travel. In Forster’s text, Orientalism is projected to be an artefact of the past. In Kureishi’s text, Orientalism survives into the modern world (in both suburb and the nation/metropolis) for which it remains a vital ideology. It is only in the post-war emergence of the United States as a new global power that Kureishi might indict Britain’s provincialism. In political terms, Britain is a satellite to a new super-power, the United States. It would then follow that in cultural and social terms, Britain is also a second class citizen in its increasingly outdated colonial outlook. Revolutionary social relations are taking root elsewhere, in America, and must be transferred in the form of theory to revitalize the enervated social relations of a Britain in need of another American revolution.