Susie O'Brien

Introduction: The Globalization of Fiction/The Fiction of Globalization

The idea for this special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly emerged out of a question posed by one of our students: Does it make sense to speak about a literature of globalization? This question seems easy enough to answer, or rather, a whole host of possible answers offer themselves right away, which may not in fact be the same thing as coming up with a simple, satisfactory response. First, one could suggest (as a number of other scholars do) that though we have discussed it almost exclusively in national terms, literature has in fact long been globalized. Writing at one of the key moments of European nationalism, Marx and Engels already pointed to the existence of a world literature produced out of the constant revolutionizing of bourgeois production, and discussed its spread across national and cultural boundaries. Without question, one of the first elites linked globally—materially as much as imaginatively—was a literary elite able to sample exotic narrative confections produced outside of their original national and local contexts. But glimmers of a ‘‘world literature’’ appeared long before the explicit formulations of Marx and Engels or Goethe in the nineteenth century.

‘We Thought the World Was Makeable’: Scenario Planning and Postcolonial Fiction

Abstract This essay uses Indra Sinhas 2007 novel, Animals People, as a critical lens to analyse the discourse of scenario planning. I argue that scenario planning, a strategy of speculation about possible futures, elides history—specifically the intertwined processes of colonialism and capitalism—in favour of the idea of globalization as an inexorable unfolding of the world as a complex system. Following a brief genealogy of the discourse of scenario planning that highlights its Cold War origins, and ongoing function in imagining, and helping to secure, the future of global capitalism, I offer as counterpoint a postcolonial reading of Animals People. A fictional exploration of the aftermath of the 1984 Union Carbide factory gas leak in Bhopal, India, the novel contests (thematically and formally) the hegemonic temporality of globalization that informs scenario planning and the model of risk management it inspires.

Exploring the Intersection of Time and Globalization

. On 30 September 2014, Thomas Eric Duncan—a 42-year-old Liberian citizen who had traveled to Dallas, Texas to visit family—became the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola hemorrhagic fever in North America. By adding the USA to the list of countries with confirmed Ebola cases, Duncan’s diagnosis and subsequent death exacerbated a simmering global panic over the potential worldwide transmission of the highly lethal disease, whose previous outbreaks had not spread significantly beyond their initial sites of emergence. It was subsequently revealed that the period between his initial infection and ultimate diagnosis saw Duncan travel thousands of kilometers across three continents while remaining unknown to either national or global public health authorities (‘Retracing the steps of the Dallas Ebola patient’, 2014). . On 12 November 2014, US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping made a surprise announcement that their respective states—the world’s two largest economies, energy consumers, and carbon emitters—had reached an agreement to jointly limit greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades. Under the terms of the pact, the USA is required to reduce emissions to 26–28% below 2005 levels by 2025, while China pledged

Popular Culture: A User's Guide, International Edition

Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, International Edition ventures beyond the history of pop culture to give readers the vocabulary and tools to address and analyze the contemporary cultural landscape that surrounds them. • Moves beyond the history of pop culture to give students the vocabulary and tools to analyze popular culture • suitable for the study of popular culture across a range of disciplines, from literary theory and cultural studies to philosophy and sociology • Covers a broad range of important topics including the underlying socioeconomic structures that affect media, the politics of pop culture, the role of consumers, subcultures and countercultures, and the construction of social reality • Examines the ways in which individuals and societies act as consumers and agents of popular culture