ABSTRACT
One of the pithiest definitions of globalization is arguably John Tomlinson’s claim that it represents “complex connectivity” (1999). In sketching out this definition Tomlinson sees globalization as producing a “‘proximity’ that comes from the networking of social relations across large tracts of time-space, causing distant events and powers to penetrate our local experience” (9). A number of important ideas are contained within this statement; it acknowledges the sheer range of cross-cutting and interrelated forms that contemporary social interactions take and it points to the interplay between the local and global as mutually interpenetrating formations. For thinking about how literary texts might engage with globalization it is useful to note two related tendencies at work in Tomlinson’s description. In the first instance, globalization involves a high degree of concatenation, as various local actors are strung together by processes or “networks” that transcend their immediate locality. Somewhat contradictorily this leads to a second tendency towards concentration where the local becomes the nodal point for acting out these transnational relations. In terms of Tomlinson’s account, it is important to think of these processes as experiential. Roland Robertson makes a similar point when he talks of globalization as a twofold process; referring “both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson 1992: 8). Robertson’s sense that the phenomenological integration of globalization is matched by the perception of this process is vital for understanding globalization’s force as a descriptive term.
