After Globalization: Literature, Technology, National Identity

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.

'After Globalization' will reflect recent reports on the difficulties associated with anticipating and assessing the impact of Arts and Humanities research, although I will, in accordance with recent shifts in research policy and practice, seek to maximize its impact across academic and non-academic communities. It will enhance UK intellectual life in its focus on contemporary social and cultural issues, and it will reinforce what the British Academy (in its 2010 report 'Past, Present and Future: The Public Value of the Humanities & Social Sciences') describes as the UK's tradition of 'argumentative democracy' (p. 51). It will also contribute to the UK's reputation as a country open to diverse cultures and engaged in research of international quality; it will, as a consequence, encourage the inward movement of scholars and research students.

The 2010 RAND report 'Assessing the impact of arts and humanities research at the University of Cambridge' observes that 'researchers [need] to be more ambitious and more confident in seeking broader and deeper impacts for their research' (p. 83); 'After Globalization' will, in such a spirit, look to non-academic and quasi-academic organizations in the pursuit of its wider dissemination. These organizations are engaged internationally in promoting both the public understanding of literature's changing status in technological environments and a dialogue between researchers in globalization studies and policy makers. Further information in this area is provided in the 'Pathways to Impact' document.

This project will contribute to the general field of academic work on globalization and national identity - work that reflects and develops wider and popular perceptions of technology and global culture. It will thus enhance the body of thinking that influences local, national, and international policy makers in their understanding of the social, legal, and ethical issues associated with the digital and informational transformation of global and national cultures. These issues are also central to the British Academy's sense of what is valuable in Humanities research. Its 2010 report emphasizes the importance of research on globalization, migration, inter-cultural understanding, technology, data property and privacy. 'Whereas the dominant global industries of the past focused on manufacturing industry', it observes, 'corporations today are increasingly active in the fields of communications, information, entertainment, leisure, science and technology' (p. 17). And it points out that 'Changes being brought about by new and emerging technologies are creating a range of major new challenges for innovation, regulation, privacy and trust... the rapid increase in personal data collection and usage has been facilitated by technological advances, but has raised complex ethical and legal issues' (p. 22).

'After Globalization' will, finally, be of interest to scholars working outside the UK and it will influence research in literary studies (and related disciplines) at the international level. The texts that form its focus represent a range of cultures, and ethnicities; US and Indian writing (identified by the AHRC as priority countries in its International Strategy plans for 2009-2012) forms a substantial part of this project. I am negotiating a contract for monograph publication with Continuum, a publisher well-known for its interdisciplinary Humanities catalogue, and with substantial overseas distribution.overseas distribution.