“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere… The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country” —Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto
Globalization, in the view of its proponents, is the expansion of free markets, open borders, and shared culture that raises living standards and knits the world into a single interconnected community.
Critics argue that this narrative obscures who benefits and who is displaced. They would define globalization as the uneven process by which goods, capital, and culture move freely across borders while people often cannot, producing new forms of connection of goods and markets and new forms of dispossession of people from jobs and land at the same time. It is a (perhaps irreversible) process of capitalist accumulation and growth rather than a universal good.
How does Desai use the novel’s structure, its alternating plotlines, shifts in time and place, and movement between characters who never meet, to represent the kinds of connections and disconnections that globalization produces?
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