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Heterogenizing Imagination: Globalization, The Merchant of Venice, and the Work of Literary Criticism
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 3, Summer 2005
- pp. 425-437
- 10.1353/nlh.2005.0049
- Article
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By all accounts, the distinguished economist Jagdish Bhagwati's recent rigorous and urbane defense of the material and social benefits of globalization, In Defense of Globalization (2004), is likely to become a classic. According to Ernesto Zedillo, the former President of Mexico, for instance, the book constitutes "a precise rebuttal of the most common and pernicious fallacies about globalization." In this essay, I offer a reading of Bhagwati's book through the argument of grace as it is articulated in one of his favorite Shakespearean plays, The Merchant of Venice. I do this in order to draw attention to some of the cultural problems inherent in globalization that literary criticism seems more able to illuminate than instrumentalist economics.