The Liquid Phenomena Of Globalization-an Analysis Of Hari Kunzru’s Novel Transmission

Globalization is a process or set of processes which exert great influences over economic, political and cultural life. It bears varying levels of significance. It involves the growing scale of international trade of commodities and services, the transfer of policies across national borders, and the social and cultural process in which individuals of different cultural backgrounds interaction with each other in all spheres of life more intensive than before. The multidirectional movements of people, capital, and information gradually became more moveable as technologies advanced and construct the liquid phenomena of globalization.Arjun Appadurai, the contemporary social-cultural anthropologist, proposes his concept of "scapes" which consists of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financscapes, mediascpes and ideoscapes. Ethnoscapes refer to the landscapes of people who constitute the globalized world in which they live; technoscapes mainly describe the global configuration of technologies moving at high speeds across previously impermeable borders; financescapes contains the global grid of currency speculation and capital transfer; mediascapes present the distribution of the capabilities to produce and disseminate information and the repertoire of images and narratives generated by these capabilities and ideoscapes are political images produced by nation-states and accord with their ideology, or the images produced by political movement that supplant those in power. These landscapes describe the integration of global processes with various local realities, producing varied forms of political, economic and cultural structures.Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s concept of landscapes, this thesis attempts to interpret the liquid phenomena of globalization on the basis of analyzing Hari Kunzru’ novel Transmission. Hari Kunzru is applauded as one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelist by Granta magazine. Transmission, Kunzru’s second novel, won him the inaugural "decibel award" at the British Book Awards. In the novel Kunzru creates a fictional universe in which a powerful computer virus hurls the world into chaos. The novel is divided into two sections: Signal and Nose, which mainly tells the rise and fall of the central character Arjun Mehta, a young computer engineer from New Delhi, who lashes computer viruses to his own company in order to save his job in America. As markets and firms crash while the virus multiplies, the other lives that Kunzru had so far carefully built around Mehta’s, his favourite Bollywood star Leela Zahir, the English businessman Guy Swift also experiences great changes.The present thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter one talks about the flow of migrants and their identification anxieties both in the host country and in the process of moving. Chapter Two focuses on three issues related to the new global economy. Dot-com bubbles reflect the financial instability; the slide of international PR firm in the collapse of financial market exposes individual investor’s lost of trust in the world’s major reserve currency; international economic networks extend the global scope of venture capital functions. Chapter Three uncovers the power relations in the global mediascapes. This chapter centers on the female image of the Leela virus and the link between the internet and sexualities, pointing out the commodification of women is in many cases facilitated through information and communication technology which is a part of globalization.