Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Are nations and cultures at the mercy of global trends? In literature, this would seem to be the case. After all, the inherent universality of great fiction can be said to subtly diminish a text’s social and political timeliness. And for a text to be broadly successful, it has to serve the broader public. But “to serve” does not mean “to be servile.” In fact, much contemporary literature can also be seen to resist cultural globalization. I use three novels to argue this thesis. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit East, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and Yuri Herrera’s Transmigration of Bodies. Only the first of these novels was originally written in English; the other two were written in the native languages of their authors, respectively, German and Spanish. Writing for a global, though not necessarily English-speaking audience, these three novels represent a telling feature of much contemporary literature: it grapples locally while engaging globally. Through literary allusion, historical and geographical references, and cultural confrontations, these novels assert the primacy of local politics, demonstrating that specific, contextually-bound dramas create and generate global dynamics – not the other way around.