Globalizing Discourses: Literature and Film in the Age of Google

Abstract

Globalization is a centuries-old phenomenon. In pinpointing its contemporary meaning, however, globalization can be thought of as inseparable from the intricate and varied prisms of a neoliberal plurality-the 'neoliberalisms' of the world. For, even in a world dominated by economic volatility, both neoliberalism and globalization have been shown to transcend ethnic borders, lines of communication, and languages by bringing commerce and culture closer together. Global cinema, argued in this essay, is a way to comprehend this transcendence of the national. It is perceived as a positive concept that diminishes the neoliberal 'scale' of marketing campaigns, namely world literature and world cinema, implicating all things in its cultural web of non-Western production. While previous linguistic-political rephrasing of 'the world' to 'the global' has been tied to the pathbreaking research conducted by literary scholar Shu-mei Shih, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and film scholar Dudley Andrew, my usage of the global is also novel in two ways. First, it tames national cinema's depictions of its own home-grown social mores by showing its outwardness globally, yet simultaneously implies a regional scaling of pressing national issues such as poverty, labor woes, armed conflict, and health concerns; and second, global cinema acknowledges not a world of difference beyond the West, but a reflexivity to the world that is globally integrated by market forces and interethnic convergences that exists between the Global South and Global North axial divide.