Spatiality and the Literature of Globalization

Abstract

Global flows and the inequalities they generate affect how fiction is published, marketed, read, and taught in universities; therefore, they embody important portraits of globalization's effects on social life. A novel like Shani Mootoo's When Cereus Blooms at Night illuminates how colonial notions of space have been carried over into the world under globalization, and how those notions organize experiences in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. The major themes in Cereus Blooms at Night are of spatiality, but space also plays an important part of the novel's revelations and it is this stylistic element that most obviously mirrors colonial notions of space. The development of the novel depends on the subversion of the rules governing how space can be thought of and used that are a legacy of colonial paternalism. Colonialism and globalization are not to be conflated, and globalization continues to rely on colonial logics of space. Keywords: Colonialism;colonial logics; globalization; globalization literature; Shani Mootoo; spatiality