ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how multiple texts thematize the social dynamics of the virtual contact zone and how these relate to the larger world-systemic dynamics of neoliberal globalization. It employs the word "borderland" denotes an extended area of socio-cultural congruence and overlap, and while this effectively figures the transnationalness of the virtual spaces within which call center agents and clients interact, that these spaces are a kind of virtual contact zone. Each text fails here to imagine social possibilities outside of a framework of global neoliberal capitalism in which the semi-periphery continues to be dependent on the center. As Alan Durant and Ifan Shepherd note, intercultural communication of the kind the novel's call center workers engage in for a living involves "idealization" of the Other on the part of all parties involved. One of the most widespread forms of interpersonal exchange between members of the Global North and South has come to be customer service calls made by the former.
