ABSTRACT

Central to neoliberal globalization is a glaring paradox: for all that the era is defined by a frenetic transnational circulation of capital, information, and people, there are now more obstacles to human movement than at any other time in human history. On a fundamental level A New World is a text about opening onto the world, submitting to the defining social and political-economic vectors of neoliberal globalization. Commentators on the mass siphoning of skilled workers – particularly doctors, engineers, and academics – away from the periphery to the center have labeled the phenomenon "brain drain" and questioned the extent to which it has hampered the social and economic development of poorer source countries. As Jennifer Drake argues, in Bharati Mukherjee's fiction globalization is not simply a matter of American hegemony, but a world in which peripheral subjects have agency in shaping their complex lives, particularly through the act of immigration.