Abstract

Popular accounts of globalization have tended to dwell on the speed, extent and depth of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life, from trade and financial flows to culture, entertainment, crime and spiritual matters. This has given the dominant impression of globalization as inevitable, indeed desirable since it promotes increasing global awareness and interdependency and the emergence of trans-national civil society in which global non-state actors could put pressure on nation-states and international institutions in order to facilitate 'global justice.' What is often left out in these accounts is how the processes of globalization are currently bound to relationships of power, domination and exploitation, thus underplaying the crucial roles of agency, power blocs and imperial interests in a set of concrete social, political and economic agendas promoted and resisted by different agents. What will globalization be like if the racist, imperialist or neo-liberal capitalist driving forces of its processes are acknowledged and seriously addressed? In this paper, we look at how two novelists, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie, writing from the same cultural environment but separated by age, gender and style, represent the agents of the powerful globalizing cultures of the north in their novels. Perhaps the problem is not with globalization but the nature of the forces driving its agents.

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