Mariam Pirbhai, Université de Montréal
In his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie explores the shifting cultural ground upon which identities, nations, and empires are built. In its evocation of music as a "globalized cultural phenomenon," [1] Rushdie's novel is at once a celebration of a fluid, hybrid vision of contemporary life and a darker portrait of the fragmented, divisive nature of contemporary politics. As such, the novel illustrates what could be called the paradox of globalization: while as an ongoing process globalization signals a literal and symbolic opening up of the world to the heterogeneous cultures and identities that comprise it, globalization also brings with it hegemonic economic and cultural practices against which national and cultural entities must form their own sites of resistance.
This study examines Rushdie's latest novel in terms of its articulation of the paradox of globalization. I will take Fredric Jameson's provisional definition of globalization as "an untotalizable totality" [2] as my starting point, because it closely mirrors Rushdie's evocation of globalization as a phenomenon that cannot be underestimated as a tool for political and economic domination or as an impetus for greater cultural diversification. I will also contextualize Rushdie's novel within other theoretical and cultural perspectives regarding the effects of globalization on a global and local scale. To this end, I hope to offer a discussion of globalization that does justice to Rushdie's nuanced, multifaceted critique of globalizing processes in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. By considering globalization as an ongoing process with implications as far-reaching as they are numerous, I must point out the shortcomings of Rushdie's own particularly cosmopolitan discourse, one which often tends to overemphasize globally shared cultural references, such as those found in pop culture, in an otherwise linguistically, culturally, and economically stratified and diverse world.
Oscillating between India, Britain, the United States, and Mexico, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is indicative of Rushdie's step into a more global fictional terrain, one that is nonetheless grounded in an ongoing narrative of postcolonial identity. Even though Rushdie speaks of his latest work as his first "American novel ... because rock 'n' roll is a thing that came from America," [3] The Ground Beneath Her Feet finds its inception in his previous works, and specifically includes characters and themes from Midnight's Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). [4] To some extent, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is another chapter in the continuing saga of postcolonial India, a saga that begins with Midnight's Children's Saleem Sinai, the split consciousness of a new body politic. [5] Upon finding the body politic of a decolonized India too fragmented, Sinai eventually invests his hope for national unity in his son, Aadam, by the end of Midnight's Children. Sinai's hope is then deferred across the narrative framework of The Satanic Verses, a novel in which emigration, the fate of numerous decolonized states, renders national unity and postcolonial autonomy an ever-evasive dream. Aadam makes a return appearance in The Moor's Last Sigh, a novel concerned with the extreme outbreaks of sectarian violence plaguing contemporary India. Here, Aadam (now Adam) no longer symbolizes the hope for a plural, secular, and united nation. Instead, he becomes the symbol of an overblown and sinister expansion into the global market: his "elephantine" ears are akin to "Star TV satellite dishes," his call to unity is a mere front for "developing" citizens in the interest of "optimis[ing] manpower utilisation." [6] Representing the infiltration of the "outside" world in new, nefarious forms of cultural capital, Aadam is globalization personified; or, in Rushdie's pun on "random access memory," he is "the battering RAM" [7] of a technocratic takeover. As such, he is merely the counterpart to the other, internal "battering Ram": the Hindu fundamentalist discourse of the RamRajyaist organization. Thus, Sinai's fast-disintegrating hope for national unity is thematically sown across these novels to expose the seed of a global novel that, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, eventually takes form as an exploration of the predicament and paradox of globalization as a new socioeconomic force in the building of nations.
In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Ormus Cama, a Bombay-born Parsee and one of two principal protagonists whose rise to international stardom the novel charts, finds he must grasp "how to make of multiplicity an accumulating strength rather than a frittery weakness. How the many selves can be, in song, a single multitude." [8] Indeed, Ormus Cama's challenge is a virtual replication of Sinai's plight in Midnight's Children, albeit at the global level, and a half-century later. As such, the theme of globalization extends Rushdie's ongoing discussion of national and individual identities as negotiations or struggles between the desire for coherence and the reality of fragmentation. This paradoxical state is now complicated further within the equally paradoxical processes of globalization, and is problematized in a postcolonial and, arguably, neoimperial context. Rushdie's latest novel thus alerts us to yet another stage in India's and, by extension, the world's development in the latter half of the twentieth century. Hence Aadam's "battering Ram," as a metaphor for globalization, has now metamorphosed into a Trojan Horse in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Rushdie invokes the image of the Trojan Horse to emphasize the duplicitous nature of business practices in a globalized economy: "They'd left a wooden horse standing at the gates, and when the Indochinese accepted the gift, the real warriors of America - the big corporations, the sports culture of basketball and baseball, and of course rock 'n' roll - came swarming out of its belly and overran the place" (441). The Trojan Horse's ironic invasion of Vietnam in the aftermath of war parallels Aadam's capitalization of a weakened Indian economy in the wake of extreme political and cultural fragmentation. The image of a forced American invasion disguised as a gesture of friendship also echoes Aadam's user-friendly computer lingo as he exploits the Indian worker and monopolizes the Indian market in his shady dealings with the outside world.
Echoing Rushdie's play on the term "elephantine," Fredric Jameson states that globalization is "the modern or postmodern version of the proverbial elephant," because no one knows quite how to define the term or quite what to make of the phenomenon. It is certain, however, that globalization is a "new kind of social phenomenon," not because the world is alien to cultural or economic interactions on a global scale, but because of the newly added dimension of the vast and rapidly changing technological networks in which contemporary globalizing forces are enmeshed. Jameson thus offers a provisional definition of the phenomenon of globalization as "an untotalizable totality which intensifies binary relations between its parts - mostly nations, but also regions and groups, which, however, continue to articulate themselves on the model of 'national identities'." [9] This bipolar, paradoxical view of globalization, as I will show, is repeated in similar attempts to theoretically (and, in Rushdie's case, creatively) gauge the term's contestable global and local implications. Indeed, in Rushdie's novel the bipolarizing effect of globalization is everywhere apparent. In this uncertain global age, Rushdie paints an unstable, shifting Earth that explodes from the tensions and contentions of its poles as well as from the ideological conflicts surging within its inhabitants: "We must brace ourselves for the tectonic movements, the slippages, the tsunamis, the landslides, the rocking, rolling cities et cetera et cetera, the smashing of the real. We must prepare for shocks, for the fragmentation of the planet as it goes to war with itself, for the endgames of the self-contradictory earth. Human Faults cause earthquakes too ... there are certain individuals in whom the irreconcilability of being is made apparent, in whom the contradictoriness of the real rages like thermonuclear war" (327).
The metaphor of a "rocking, rolling" world as an "irreconcilability of being" is embodied in the alter egos who shadow the protagonist-rock stars Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. For example, Ormus Cama is inextricably connected to his estranged, imprisoned brother, Cyrus Cama (the surviving twin of their deceased brother Virus). Cyrus is a psychopath whose violent behavior runs counter to Ormus's pacifist, antinuclear discourse. Cyrus's incarceration also stands in direct contrast to the creative freedom that Ormus Cama's world-renowned rock star status symbolizes. Ironically, Cyrus's intellectual outspokenness exposes his brother's self-absorbed, and often naive, creative voice. Cyrus thus publicly refutes the idea that Ormus's music symbolizes cultural or global unity, asserting that his rock-star brother has sold himself out to Western ideals and, by extension, is complicit in new forms of imperialism: "We must not take Ormus Cama at his own low estimate, as a mere troubadour or popster; for his self-hating, deracinated music has long been at the service, I would even say at the very heart, of the arrogance of the West..." (556).
Similarly, Vina Apsara - the U.S.-born Indian rock star who collaborates with Ormus Cama to form the world's most popular band - is eventually replaced by Mira, a younger, more stable version of herself. In seeking continuity rather than radical change, Mira "reveals herself to be Vina's polar opposite" (531). On the one hand, Vina is a groundbreaking icon who collapses under the weight of her own unattainable, constantly transforming image. On the other hand, Mira symbolizes the "ordinary human love beneath [one's] feet" (575), that is, the kind of stability and wherewithal that can ensure longevity without the sensationalist, self-destructive trappings of Vina Apsara's radicalism. Thus, "Mira" is a pun on "mirror," a pun that exposes the often false image one has of oneself: "Reflected in the circular mirror is a rectangular mirror containing an image of Vina Apsara. No, not Vina, but the greatest of the not-Vinas... Mira, Mira, who is the fairest one of all?" (541). In their intimation of both complimentarity and polarity, sameness and difference, Ormus Cama's and Vina Apsara's alter egos blur the line between the real and the imaginary, actual conditions and other possible worlds, the familiar and the unknown, past and present, present and future, etc. This splitting of self is mirrored in the ground itself, such that the "new Quake Age" symbolizes a world in which earthquakes (like nuclear powers or contending poles) continually destabilize our faith in absolutes - in the ground beneath our feet.
The "self-contradictory earth," like the self-contradictory individual, is a metaphorical echo of the contending, shifting processes of globalization. These processes often occur as a split between globalization as a cultural and as an economic phenomenon. As a cultural phenomenon, globalization at once underlines a cultural diversification of the world, the deconstruction of monolithic ideologies, the dismantling of rigid boundaries, and a celebration of difference. As an economic phenomenon, it ushers in divisive, self-serving policies that disclose a "rapid assimilation of hitherto autonomous national markets and productive zones into a single sphere." [10] However, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, globalization is ironically portrayed as a conjunctive process of diversification and assimilation. Rushdie's characters are constructed upon precariously balanced layers of contending forces, or "splittings" apart, to mirror the way in which the processes of globalization reveal a multiple layering of binarisms that destabilize hierarchical relationships between tradition and modernity, local and global, developed and developing nations, and so forth. Indeed, the processes of globalization are so numerous and densely interconnected that the apparent reinforcement of any given polarity is simultaneously deflected or conflated within another set of binarisms. The result is a kaleidoscopic vision of globalization in which "the fragmentation of the planet" mirrors a paradoxical vision of an outstretching toward more heterogeneous sociocultural practices as well as a retreat within exclusionary ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or the reification of infrastructures of economic and political domination.
In such a world, fragmentation walks hand in hand with its sinister other, homogenization. However, in Rushdie's shifting world, even homogenization is riddled with ambiguity. The homogenizing forces of globalization are ironically synonymous with the Americanization or standardization of culture by a culture that is itself overtly hybrid. In the same breath, homogenizing forces stem from an equally dispersed body of metropolises: New York, London, Tokyo, Bombay/Mumbai, Guadalajara, and others. These competing cities problematize a center-periphery model, at least insofar as the center can be attributed to one, dominant force. In this sense, the United States is also problematized as a neoimperial center, for while it capitalizes on, and dominates, information industries that channel goods, images, and ideologies globally, it is not alone in its construction of partnerships and its dissemination of information on a global or cross-cultural scale. Thus, multinational corporations complicate further the notion of homogenization in their transnational dealings. Moreover, as hierarchical binaries are complicated within complex networks of power relations, the multiple-channeled flow and reception of cultural capital moves not only between north and south, east and west, but also between far east and near east, near east and west, and so forth, thereby further destabilizing any perceived center.
As a complex network of processes, globalization nonetheless exercises economic and political forms of hegemony that cannot be extricated from the greater historical fabric of decolonization and its simultaneous shift toward neocolonial practices. To this end, Rushdie ironically plays with the notion of disorientation: "Disorientation is loss of the East... The east orients. That's the official version... But let's just suppose. What if the whole deal - orientation, knowing where you are, and so on - what if it's all a scam? ... Suppose that it's only when you dare to let go that your real life begins?" (176 - 77). Here, disorientation is a pun on both the West's loss of the East since decolonization, and the subsequent discontinuity or displacement of a European master narrative. It can also be read as a play on the East's loss of its own postcolonial stability in terms of mass migrations and internal political conflicts as well as the onset of globalization itself. The "scam" refers both to decolonization as a clean break with the past and a simultaneous postcolonial scam of singular "orientations," or a confidence in roots, origins, history, unity.
The "scam" of decolonization, therefore, is the myth of postcolonialism as a definitive split from imperialism. In this light, globalization is a neoimperial force that operates primarily as a continued politics of cultural division. In turn, disorientation serves as a simultaneous upstaging of a centripetal, imperial grounding and as a tightening of the reigns that hold the albeit shifted center together. While things fall apart (again), the center is holding; however, it is doing so from a different axis - and, in an "elephantine" satellite age, from a different orbit. Globalization as a shifted neoimperial strategy undermines a postmodern "celebration" of a global culture, such as found in Mike Featherstone's reading of globalization as a process that "makes us aware of the sheer volume, diversity and many-sidedness of culture. Syncretisms and hybridizations are more the rule than the exception." [11] Rather, globalization underlines a shift in power that, according to Rai Merchant (the first-person narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet), "scared us so profoundly, this fracturing, this tumbling of walls, this forgodsake freedom, that at top speed we're rushing back into our skins and war paint, postmodern into premodern, back to the future" (343). In this shifted neoimperial landscape, the phenomenon of a global culture is closely allied with more violent forms of cultural division or fundamentalism. As Sherif Hetata writes, in "Dollarization, Fragmentation, and God": "To maintain the global economy and the global culture, unification must exist at the top among the few, the very few... People must remain divided, confused, fragmented... The global economy, the global culture, must exercise an undivided rule." [12]
Hetata's vision of consumerist politics echoes Rushdie's satirization of the American cultural invasion in Indochina via the duplicitous Trojan Horse. Rushdie also brings Hetata's argument to life in his characters Yul Singh and Shri Piloo Doodhwala. Yul Singh, the North American - based music mogul who gives Ormus and Vina their chance at stardom, praises the virtues of the American Dream while secretly financing his own religious uprising: "the celebrated Non-Resident Indian ... the consummate rock 'n' roller, who has always presented himself to the whole world as the ultimate cosmopolitan, wholly secularized and Westernized ... has been for many years a secret zealot, a purchaser of guns and bombs, in short one of the financial mainstays of the terrorist fringe of the Sikh nationalist movement - of, in fact, the Wagahwalé cult" (407). As Yul Singh's split loyalties demonstrate, global unity is a masquerade for the struggle for power "at the top among the few." In the drive to fund his movement, Singh is a complicit ally to the power structures that directly or indirectly undermine his own cultural, political, and religious autonomy. While Singh's underhanded dealings are ostensibly driven by his sense of political injustice, Shri Piloo Doodhwala (Vina Apsara's Indian foster parent) offers a reverse image of Singh's politically motivated business ethic, that is, Doodhwala's political acts are merely a means to purely materialistic ends. In fact, Doodhwala's self-interest is so extreme that his humble origins as a doodhwala, or milkman, are superseded when he initiates a bloody expansion across the many regions of India as a meat-supplying slaughterhouse tycoon: "the dairy-goat king of what became the state of Maharashtra... Piloo the milkman thought of his 'little business,' his 'milk round,' as a mere stepping stone to far higher things: that is to say, public office, and the immense wealth that such office can bring to a man who knows how the world works" (114 - 15). Ironically, then, for Doodhwala to go "to war" is to dispense "bribes and threats in equal measure" (115) in the name of self-interest. In his satirization of Singh and Doodhwala, Rushdie provides a jaded image of globalization, one in which economic complicities and alliances tend to muddy any easily discernible distinctions between various forms of national, cultural, and individual self-preservation.
Rushdie's portrayal of a powerful Western music industry, which produces rock 'n' roll invasions as well as Ormus Cama's brand of "world" beats, illustrates the argument that economic might is always "right" and "rightist," regardless of the external packaging: "But ask the rest of the world what America meant and with one voice the rest of the world answered back, Might, it means Might. A power so great that it shapes our daily lives even though it barely knows we exist, it couldn't point to us on a map" (419 - 20). In his inclusion of rock 'n' roll as part and parcel of the self-same American invasion, Rushdie ironizes that which is "hailed" as a music of protest and social conscience - the very anthem for democratic principles that resound firmly against the brute force of neoimperial practices - as yet another form of cultural and economic domination: "Where soldiers had failed, U.S. values - that is, greenbacks set to music - had triumphed... Even the old-time anti-war demonstrators were pleased... What's irony when you can celebrate this new Cultural Revolution? Let the music play. Let freedom ring. Hail, hail, rock 'n' roll" (441). Even with the changing notes of rock 'n' roll within new, transcultural collaborations of sound, displays of cultural pluralism continually commodify the other. In other words, world music merely promotes a myth, the image of a harmonious and healthy diversity, while the world itself continues to live within its Manichean, local spheres in which cultural complexity is reduced to its lowest common denominator. Thus, on the one hand, Ormus Cama and his music are outsiders in a Western-based music industry: "to the un-American sounds Ormus adds ... the sexiness of the Cuban horns, the mind-bending patterns of the Brazilian drums, the Chilean woodwinds moaning like the winds of oppression, the African male voice choruses ... the grand old ladies of Algerian music ... the holy passion of the Pakistani qawwals" (379). On the other hand, his transcultural blends are criticized as "regrettable ditties ... where the world's tragedy is repackaged as youth entertainment and given an infectious, foot-tapping beat" (556).
While Ormus Cama harmonizes the world's beats, therefore, world audiences still respond in the Manichean discourse they are continually programmed to "buy," thereby reducing the complexity of his sounds to stereotypical images of the other. To the Indian, American music, inspired by the fame and success of pop culture icons such as Ricky Martin and Madonna, represents a stereotypical image of the American Dream, a dream in which economic, racial, and cultural differences are seemingly overlooked in an individual's rise to the top. In Rushdie's cynical fictional world, only shrewd, well-travelled observers, such as the narrator, Rai Merchant (a freelance photographer by trade), can see through the myth of the American Dream: "with the dream America everyone carries round in his head, America the Beautiful, Langston Hughes's country that never existed but needed to exist - with that, like everyone else, I was thoroughly in love" (419). Conversely, the American still perceives Indian culture in Orientalist terms, such that India is exoticized in its caricatured role as the world's spiritual headquarters, a view that has not evolved since the guruphilia propagated by The Beatles in the 1960s. Thus, a henna-dyed, spiritually "enlightened" Madonna weaves in and out of the narrative. Similarly, "Goddess-Ma," one of many memorable minor characters, sells her own exaggerated versions of Indian mysticism for exorbitant fees to Manhattan elites: "India in general is hotter than ever: its food, its fabrics, its doe-eyed dames, its direct line to Spirit Central ... (When India explodes a nuclear device, the notion of Holy Mother India takes a few dents, but it is quickly agreed by le tout Manhattan that in this matter India's unwise political leaders have betrayed the land's true spirit...) ... O dancing Earth, Says Goddess-Ma" (496). On either side of the cultural divide, the importation and exportation of cultural goods results in the blind consumption and commodification of the other. Such forms of cultural exchange maintain stereotypical differences and continue to ignore, if not undercut, the political and sociohistorical realities governing other cultures along the course of their particular histories.
With the American dollar at the heart of globalization's neoimperial agenda, homogenization and Americanization become synonymous terms. Culture thus signals a commodity to be purchased or sold for the right price and then "deracinated" through shallow values of consumerism to help maintain an ever-expansive global market. However, homogenization wreaks of implications of cultural purity, which, in Rushdie's discourse, is a form of sociohistorical posturing, and, in the global marketplace, is merely an economic strategy. This is not to suggest that Rushdie denies the hegemonic economic practices that occur in the dissemination of information from media-controlled empires. Rather, Rushdie's novel emphasizes the heterogeneous, hybrid construction of identity so as to undermine the extent to which such hegemonies can exercise claims to cultural eminence in the "back yards of the world" (419). Thus, rock 'n' roll as an American product signals neither homogenization nor a postmodernist belief in the sudden "extension outwards of a particular culture to its limit, the globe." [13] Rather, it signals an ongoing process of the heterogeneous, rhizomatic criss-crossings of cultural influence and production.
Ironically, then, Rushdie's novel shifts yet again to reveal the United States not as the heavy hand of Americanization, but as a contemporary icon of the impurity of origins, that is, as the epitome of the heterogeneous nature of cultural and historical foundations. For this reason, Vina Apsara is ironically presented as an all-American rancher's daughter from backwoods Virginia whose true origins reveal her Greek and Indian parentage: "Her mother, Helen, Greek-American ... fell during the World War II man shortage for a sweet-talking Indian gent, a lawyer - how'd he get all the way out there?" (102). In her rise to superstardom as an American singer and in her subsequent embodiment par excellence of the American Dream, Vina Apsara is the most American character, but only in an ironical sense, for her American identity is one of mixed, heterogeneous origins. Vina Apsara's character thus complicates the notion that Americanization is synonymous with homogenizing practices because a) American culture is already hybrid and heterogeneous and b) the rest of the world is neither a level playing field, nor an empty vessel, nor a passive recipient to the cult of Americana or the external influences of globalization. Vina Apsara's heterogeneous American identity stands as a testament to the former point as readily as Ormus Cama's rock 'n' roll or world music - composed of Latin American, African, and other beats - underscores and ironizes the latter. In Rushdie's text, even the sounds that appear to be exotically foreign and "un-American" to American audiences are, in fact, the sounds of America. This is because "American" sounds are shown to be composed of various musical traditions that draw from a rich, diverse cultural background. Ironically, that which non-American audiences around the world receive as American music is, to some extent, the music of the world.
In Rushdie's fictional world, globalization is a kaleidoscopic vision of a multifaceted, highly complex network of cultural, economic, and political practices. Thus, as Vina Apsara's and Ormus Cama's music embodies heterogeneity, it becomes equally possible to imagine a plethora of ways in which world audiences respond and react to the subtly layered cultural influences (or caricatures, as the case may be) at the heart of their music. Arjun Appadurai's five-part theory of globalization as an interconnected and dynamic flow of electronic media networks, human patterns of migration and travel, technology, financial transfers, and ideologies helps gauge the complex processes of cultural exchange. As Appadurai suggests, "[m]ost often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization, or an argument about 'commoditization.'... What these two arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized." [14] Appadurai describes what is more commonly referred to as "glocalization," that is, the interplay between the dissemination and reception of information and technologies. In some instances, then, local spheres are not standardized by outside forces so much as outside forces are "tailored" to meet "the demands of the local markets." [15] In other instances, glocalization is the process of hybridization itself, wherein different power dynamics are negotiated and reinscribed within local spheres to produce a dialectic that is both "assimilationist and subversive, restrictive and liberating." [16] Reflecting on the latter position, Appadurai suggests that cultures do not only receive specifically tailored goods, but also "repatriate," locally, those very same goods in various, heterogeneous ways.
In processes of "glocalization," therefore, Ormus Cama's world music is conceived both as a Bombayite's response to American rock 'n' roll (together with its ipso facto blend of ideologies and images) and a repatriation of rock 'n' roll in new, more eclectic, diversified forms. Not only do locals tailor imports to their own cultural tastes, but they also transform and then export those newly localized tastes (for example, "Pakistani qawwals" now sing to the beats of Cuban percussionists and the riffs of electric guitars). Similarly, the rhizomatic processes of cultural hybridization put into question, from the outset, the direction in which cultural exchanges and influences flow. For example, Ormus Cama hears the songs that will be imported into India prior to their production, not to mention their release. In such processes of repatriation, then, Ormus Cama's character further complicates Appadurai's concept of "indigenization" by raising the question of origins and originality itself: how does an Indian come to hear the all-American tune before the American? This question, of course, is paralleled in the cross-cultural movements of Vina Apsara's Indian-American father: "how'd he get all the way out here?" Rushdie seems to ironize the extent to which we can trace any singular points of origin in a heterogeneous, hybrid world, as well as the extent to which we can ascertain at which point cultural homogenization begins and ends. Thus, the narrative continually poses, but defers answering, questions as to the direction and flow of cultural values and information.
The processes of "glocalization" as a crisscrossing of cultural channels are most vividly embodied in Rushdie's Mexico. Mexico sets the stage for Rushdie's vision of hybridity as the cultural condition of the world, as well as the concomitant coming apart of the world into innumerable fragments. Thus, Mexico underlines the site of actual and metaphoric hybridity that America, as a whole, represents; the site in which "discontinuity" is both "the forgetting of the past" as well as "a new world in the company of other altered lives" (441). Nestór García Canclini offers an analysis of Mexico's role in a globalized marketplace that echoes, to some extent, Appadurai's theory of the "indigenization" of external forces. Garc"a Canclini speaks of the integral role that traditional production and artisanship plays in the face of modernization. Although he often overestimates the extent to which tradition is positively rearticulated and reinforced in modern processes, he nonetheless offers an important definition of "glocalization" as a hybrid, dynamic process that resists the more hegemonic practices of globalization: "The Manichean and conspiratorial representations of power find partial justification in some contemporary processes... The classic paradigms with which domination was explained are incapable of taking into account the dissemination of the centers, the multipolarity of social initiatives, the plurality of references - taken from diverse territories - with which artists, artisans, and the mass media assemble their works." [17] Mexico thus emphasizes the paradoxical nature of globalization as a growing acceptance of, and engagement in, cultural hybridization, and as the vulnerability of nations in an age of NAFTA and OAS alliances. Thus, globalization ushers in the potential effacement of local economies in the interest of free trade. It simultaneously brings to the fore a "Latin American Boom," [18] or the dissemination and redistribution of Latin American culture (particularly in terms of music) across world markets. Consequently, Mexico's fate in the global marketplace is open to the possibility of newly articulated pluralisms; it is also susceptible to a collapse of socioeconomic infrastructures to the point of self-destruction.
As García Canclini and others maintain from their respective cultural vantage points, the local often has as great a role to play in the world marketplace as the global does in local production and consumption. However, to examine the engagement of the local in terms of the global, Mexico can only be seen to play an exemplary rather than a representative role. Since localities are, themselves, too far-flung and numerous to be spoken of as a totality, any all-embracing celebrations of the hybridization and revitalization of culture in the global marketplace are premature and suspect. To this end, Rushdie offers little insight into the role that particularly isolated rural regions play in a globalized world. Rural India is shown to be effected by globalization insofar as it is dominated by urban alliances. For example, the narrator refers to alliances between Mumbai and Delhi as "[t]he corruption of money and the corruption of power, united in a super-corruption that no opponent could withstand" (247). Moreover, rural labour is the first victim of these corrupt urban alliances - a reality made frighteningly evident by Piloo Doodhwala's nationwide slaughterhouses.
In his novel, Rushdie maintains that rural India represents a reality that is as different from urban India as any foreign import: "The sheer unchartedness of rural India in its most profound depths never failed to amaze... Here the polyphonic reality of the road disappeared and was replaced by silences, mutenesses as vast as the land. Here was a wordless truth, one that came before language, a being, not a becoming" (238). In Rushdie's own discourse on Indian and global identity, however, the rural/urban divide is often disregarded in a rhetoric of cosmopolitanism. For example, Rushdie speaks of rock 'n' roll as "a language of cultural reference which people all around the world could easily get in the same way that people once might have got a range of classical or mythological reference." [19] By using rock 'n' roll as "a language of cultural reference," Rushdie tends to homogenize Indian identity and culture from his own privileged site as a transnational member of the Indian elite. Clearly, all of India does not receive global transmissions in the way that Indian cosmopolitans and urbanites do. Thus, as Rushdie points to rural and urban divides in the dissemination and reception of globalizing forces, he contradicts himself by claiming that when the "Western hit parade" arrived, "we all heard." [20] To this extent, Rushdie's novel concerns itself with cultural hybridity as it takes root within an urban, cosmopolitan context, without sufficiently probing the ways in which rural India is, itself, a "polyphonic" reality, or the ways in which localities are, themselves, heterogeneous. Hence, for Rai Merchant, where urban India ends and rural India begins, heterogeneity is "replaced by silences, mutenesses" (238).
Rushdie is not alone in his vision of globalization as a complex interaction of power relations, economic alliances, and technological networks, rather than as solely a monolithic force and foe. The interconnected processes of globalization thus paradoxically produce discourses and practices of exclusion and exploitation as much as they expose and heighten the hybrid, heterogeneous ways in which cultural productions and interactions occur. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, therefore, globalization is one of many processes that underline the instability of the modern condition. This earth-shaking condition is the result of innumerable and, in some cases, age-old clashes between opposing forces, values, and ideologies. It is also the result of change itself, the awareness that change is the only constant in a new world order and within ongoing processes of hybridization. With the added dimension of globalization, then, cultures paradoxically respond and play to the rift and riff of not simply change, but of radical change (cf. 480). And radical change, like everything else in Rushdie's novel, is double-sided: it is at once the ability to break free from the oppressions of the past and the tendency to react to one's world in fundamentalist terms.
Notes
[1]
In an interview conducted by Peter Kadzis, Rushdie speaks of music as a "globalized cultural phenomenon" because it can most
easily penetrate political and geographic borders. See "Rushdie Rocks," The Boston Phoenix, 10 May 1999, on-line 5.
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[2]
Fredric Jameson, Preface, The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) xii.
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[3]
Salman Rushdie, Interview with Peter Kadzis 9.
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[4]
For example, William Methwold makes a return appearance from Midnight's Children. The stammering Sisodia, together with the elite
Bombay setting of Malabar Hill, also makes a return appearance from The Moor's Last Sigh. Numerous other echoes, in terms of theme and character,
make this novel a continuation of, rather than a break from, Rushdie's Indian community's saga. Rushdie's own salesmanship of the "American"
bent to his novel notwithstanding, I believe it is important to contextualize this work within his developing discourse on postcolonial identity.
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[5]
It is my contention that Rushdie's three previous novels form a loosely constructed, chronologically developed trilogy, the creative
epicenter of which is Indian national identity.
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[6]
Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) 341.
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[7]
Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh 342.
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[8]
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Knopf, 1999) 299. All subsequent references are to this edition and are
cited in the text in parentheses. All emphases are Rushdie's own.
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[9]
Jameson xii.
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[10]
Fredric Jameson, "Globalization as Philosophical Issue," The Cultures of Globalization 57.
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[11]
Mike Featherstone, Introduction, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (London: SAGE, 1995) 14.
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[12]
Sherif Hetata, "Fragmentation, Dollarization, and God," The Cultures of Globalization 283.
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[13]
Featherstone 6.
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[14]
Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Theory, Culture, Society 7 (1995): 295.
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[15]
Featherstone 9.
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[16]
Marwan M. Kraidy, "The Global, the Local, and the Hybrid: A Native Ethnography of Globalization," Critical Studies in
Mass Communications 16.4 (1999): 473. Kraidy defines the hybridization of identity as "the intersection of globalization and
localization" (472).
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[17]
Nestór García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995) 258 - 59.
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[18]
Jameson, "Globalization as Philosophical Issue," The Cultures of Globalization 69.
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[19]
Rushdie, Interview with Peter Kadzis 8.
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[20]
Rushdie, Interview with Peter Kadzis 5.
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