Globalization: facet of dismantling Binaries within integral discourse of Comparative Literature

Author: Anmol Saeed Awan.

Comparative literature has perplexed its readers about its past, present and future altogether throughout its history. With the evolution of world into advanced technology, comparative literature is now confused with globalization. Some people think that globalization is inopportune for comparative literature and precarious for its future. While some believe in the profitability of globalization to comparative literature, I am also a proponent of this view. For it is through globalization that we come to know the history of literature, our history as colonial and orient subjects, epistemic disobedience, and current trends in literary world and so on.

            Globalization means the invention of new information and advanced technology, interconnection of different societies, wide spread of social media and so on. With the rise of globalization, everything is changing and so is the case with literature and comparative literature. Some critics believe that comparative literature blurs the national boundaries in the age of globalization. They believe that globalization is perilous to comparative study for the study of literature across national borders mainly ignores the scope of study within disciplinary borders. Moreover, it is also believed that globalization leads to the demise of literature and comparative literature for people have started spending more time on social media and other modern technology instead of focusing on problems within national borders. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her Wellek Library lectures, published as Death of a Discipline also believes that globalization makes the project of a discrete and integral discipline of comparative literature unsustainable. She contends that the Eurocentric discipline of comparative literature must not merely surpass national borders, but also its location with disciplinary boundaries.

            Meanwhile, as every coin has two sides so is the case with this issue i.e. comparative literature and globalization. Some critics and theorists argue for the utility of globalization and are strong proponents for globalization as the density of comparative literature. For it is through the new technology and applications that we can access new and different information which also adds to the epistemic disobedience. Modern technology makes the world a global village through which knowledge and new information can be accessed within seconds from every part of the world. It also makes contacts easily accessible across the whole world in seconds. In this age of science and technology, we can access to anyone in any part of the world to know any piece of information regarding any culture and belief. It is also through globalization that we come to know our representation as lazy, barbaric, unintellectual and uncivilized for West in the discourse of Orientalism.

            Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes also saw during 1950s and 1960s that literature and comparative literature are changing and also reading does change in an age of electronic media. So is the case with writing and knowing, but according to them, this change is not so sweeping that there are not continuities with the past. And in this age of business and applied science, the uselessness of literature is an affront so revolutions are never clean breaks. We come to know that how our history and knowledge is manipulated by West through mainly East India Company in the sub-continent, how our oral literature is changed and replaced by Western works and then how they demean it. For what Lord Macaulay said that, whole literature of East cannot be equal to one book shelf of our library. Romantic Orientalism becomes also known through globalization. It can be seen that how they (West) took the concept of painting from Eastern culture. Various paintings portraying Eastern culture can be seen in their plays and films. Through dramas, films and animated movies of a country, we observe its culture and values and also how it represents other cultures through characters. For instance, we see in different plays and animated movies of West that how it represents us as barbaric, murderer, uncivilized, procrastinate, disinterested in knowledge like in the movie The Kingdom, animated movie Breadwinner, in the novels Heart of Darkness, King Soloman’s Mines, Kim, The Tempest..,etc.

            Globalization makes you aware of the current issues and debates in the discipline of comparative literature. Change is good for sometimes it gets you more towards reality as in the case of globalization. It helps us to get the truth more radically and helps in comparing different literatures and cultures more profoundly by directly observing them across international and with national borders. It does not really blur the borders but makes them more prominent to see and analyze. Globalization in comparative literature should be welcomed for future as well. In a shrinking globe in which trade, health, peace and knowledge depend on international cooperation, a multicultural, international and open field like Comparative Literature can help to create more cultural understanding. There should be measured the dialects of difference in an increasingly globalized world. This has always been the aim of the discipline of comparative literature and it continues to be so. 

References

Brillenburg Wurth, K. (2018). The material turn in comparative literature: An introduction. Comparative Literature, 70(3), 247-263.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 108, note 1.

Hart, J. (2006). The futures of comparative literature: North America and beyond. Revue de littérature comparée, (1), 5-21.

Swanepoel, A. (1990). The strange world of Roland Barthes: some points of criticism.