Local worlds: The place of globalization in Anglophone Caribbean writing

Although Anglophone Caribbean literature has been read in the context of the nation and postcolonial theory, I claim in this project that we can demonstrate more convincingly the literary and cultural contributions of recent Anglophone Caribbean writing by establishing its relationship to globalization. I propose that recent texts by Derek Walcott, Dionne Brand, Caryl Phillips, Pauline Melville, and others contribute directly to the literary and theoretical construction of globalization. They do so by giving us new ways to constitute locality and place in a changing contemporary context. Working with the ideas of Fredric Jameson, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Arif Dirlik, and others, I theorize globalization as a process that replaces modernity's division of the world into centers and peripheries with a universalizing system of production, the market, and governance that exceeds local authority and boundaries. Globalization diminishes the particularity and specificity we often associate with place, and instead creates proximity between categories that used to be considered distant and different. We continue to experience society, culture, and politics in particular places, but, as recent Caribbean writing helps us recognize, the places themselves are no longer particular. Place and experience, that is, often no longer coincide, because places are now thoroughly connected to decisions and events that happen at a distance. While we don't actually inhabit multiple places at one time, my dissertation shows that we need ways to imagine the effects of such multiplicity on our experiences and representations of both local places and global processes. The Anglophone Caribbean texts that I discuss in this dissertation constitute a literature of globalization. As such, they counter globalization's imposition of standardization and instead find location in multiple, shifting, and transformative imaginaries.