After Globalization: Literature, Technology, National Identity

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The literature of the current information age is often associated either with the hasty celebration of a fully participatory online community that transcends national borders or with apocalyptic pronouncements on digital culture's postnational and globalizing consequences. While critical and theoretical work on the long-standing bond between technology and textuality is now gathering momentum, attention is only rarely given to literary fictions which refuse to see the digital age either as utopia achieved or as the last convulsion of a cultural order in terminal decline.'After Globalization: Literature, Technology, National Identity' will identify and explore contemporary fictions which offer an alternative sense of the uncertain and anxious status of global culture in the wake of recent technologies. Examining texts of the 1990s and 2000s, this book project will argue that alternative ideas about technology and globalization are emerging to challenge ideas of worldwide community and postnational dispersion. Pointing to a shift away from early narratives of global culture (which declare the collapse of national cultures in the face of hybridizing transborder movements), these fictions expose and reflect on recent efforts to reinvent and reassert national sovereignty in the face of technology's transnational effects. Informed by recent theoretical work on technology and culture, 'After Globalization' will examine how new technologies have resulted in nation-states' attempts to maintain sovereign authority as much as they have facilitated the emergence of global culture. While broadly supportive of the internationalist ethic that has informed certain responses to globalization, it will consider how the early sense of digital culture's transnational effects is now being supplanted in social and cultural theory by a new sense of national globalism. This research's theoretical co-ordinates will be provided by, among others, Zygmunt Bauman, Yochai Benkler, Manuel Castells, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Francis Fukuyama, Mark Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, Lawrence Lessig, Sherry Turkle, Paul Virilio, and McKenzie Wark. This study will map some of the complex and dynamic ways in which literary texts figure the reshaping of nationality by various technological forms, devices, and structures. Initially, it will survey and question notions of global 'netizenship' that became popular in the 1990s, with Indra Sinha's 1999 novel 'The Cybergypsies' providing a novelistic sense of how national belonging was seen to be increasingly displaced onto networked and virtual communities. The project will then consider the ways in which recent fictions (such as Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel 'Oryx and Crake' and Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film version of 'Starship Troopers') have often associated the biotechnological transformation of the body, subjectivity and cognition with the emergence of new, postnational, forms of sociality. It will consider the role of cryptology in the pursuit of national security, and on the transnational status of information archives and data havens - issues which preoccupy Neal Stephenson's 1999 novel 'Cryptonomicon'. This project will explore the reshaping of international law during the last decade in response to technomigration and cybercriminality, a context that forms the backdrop to Hari Kunzru's imaging of hacking (in his 2004 'Transmission') as an unidentifiable form of political intervention that interrupts the structures through which national and international legislation operate. Finally, 'After Globalization' will examine texts (Salvador Plascenia's 2005 'The People of Paper', Mark Z. Danielewski's 2006 'Only Revolutions', and Reif Larson's 2009 'The Selected Letters of T.S. Spivet') which not only question the overcoming of the print novel by electronic literature, but also document the persistence of territorial location and national cultures in the globalized present.