The Limits of Connectivity: Literary Knowledge of Globalization in Thomas Meineke’s Hellblau

Abstract

The article analyzes the propositional and non-propositional knowledge of globalization in Thomas Meinecke’s novel Hellblau (2001). This literary knowledge has two dimensions. First, Hellblau, formulates a knowledge about non-hegemonic forms of cultural globalization, which understands minorities and their subcultures as agents of globalization processes. Second, Hellblau supplements the predominant view of globalization as increasing connectivity by emphasizing that such a perspective needs to be brought together with an insistence on issues of social division and cultural disconnection. Such knowledge is articulated through the text’s literary from and can be located in tensions between the protagonists’ critical discourse and parts of the novel that I term exploration narratives. Hellblau makes a literary contribution to globalization theory by showing the limits of the often-cited paradigm of global interconnectivity.