The Paradox of Globalization as an "Untotalizable Totality" in Salman Rushdie's the Ground beneath Her Feet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie explores shifting cultural ground upon which identifies, 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 fragmented, divisive nature of contemporary politics. As such, novel illustrates what could be called paradox of globalization: while as ongoing process globalization signals a literal and symbolic opening up of world to heterogeneous cultures and identifies 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 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 impetus for greater cultural diversification. I will also contextualize Rushdie's novel within other theoretical and cultural perspectives regarding 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 ongoing process with implications as far-reaching as they are numerous, I must point out 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 otherwise linguistically, culturally, and economically stratified and diverse world. Oscillating between India, Britain, 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 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 continuing saga of postcolonial India, a saga that begins with Midnight's Children's Saleem Sinai, split consciousness of a new body politic.(5) Upon finding body politic of a decolonized India too fragmented, Sinai eventually invests his hope for national unity in his son, Aadam, by end of Midnight's Children. Sinai's hope is then deferred across narrative framework of The Satanic Verses, a novel in which emigration, fate of numerous decolonized states, renders national unity and postcolonial autonomy ever-evasive dream. Aadam makes a return appearance in The Moor's Last Sigh, a novel concerned with extreme outbreaks of sectarian violence plaguing contemporary India. Here, Aadam (now Adam) no longer symbolizes hope for a plural, secular, and united nation. Instead, he becomes symbol of overblown and sinister expansion into global market: his elephantine ears are akin to Star TV satellite dishes, his call to unity is a mere front for developing citizens in interest of optimis[ing] manpower utilisation.(6) Representing infiltration of 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 RAM(7) of a technocratic takeover. As such, he is merely counterpart to other, internal battering Ram: Hindu fundamentalist discourse of RamRajyaist organization. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".