Final Post

Allison Terlizzi

            Arundhati Roy’s article served as a great wrap-up for this course as it ties in many of the larger themes we have discussed in class. Roy says we live in a schizophrenic world, stuck between modernity and tradition. We try to fit in with one or the other and this struggle is what we have been discussing all semester. This can be applied to any aspect of society, drawing on themes of liberalism and conservativism. It is this endless struggle that determines reform.

            Roy says that India is a microcosm of the world and that versions of things that happen there happen everywhere, but on a larger scale. I liked Roy’s analogy on wealth disparity, when she said that the people of India have been loaded onto two convoys of trucks headed in different direction. The tiny convoy is headed to the top of the world and the large one melts into the darkness. This reminds me of the dowry murders article and how in the United States we have violence against women, it’s just called something else. Issues such as these are global, but when looking at different social, cultural and historical contexts it is difficult to make these connections.

            Roy also discussed the role of a writer in society, which I found to be very important. She contemplates to what extent does is free speech actually free? Is it used for entertainment and not internalized? She takes offense to being called a writer-activist because she is seen as a writer through her fiction books, and an activist through her political essays. She says as a writer that she takes a side, and has a clear point of view. She doesn’t mask her morals or writes with ambiguity, setting her methods apart from corporationalism, a mask for “progress” and an “escape from poverty”. I thought this connection was a great way to show humility vs. greed. This article also had strong connections to as she wonders what is going to happen to the fate of India after globalization has taken place. She asks, “What is it going to do to a country like India in which social inequality has been institutionalised in the caste system for centuries” and where close to half the population is illiterate. India has no choice but to conform to modern demands, to be the sweatshop workers. We can only hope the government is strong enough to recognize the potential danger and has not already been bought out by these corporate industries.

            One of the major questions I have been grappling with this whole semester is “Is globalization the same thing as Westernization?” Many of the commodities and cultural practices we have read about seem to have been intrinsically Western, such as McDonalds and standards of beauty. Additionally, the articles we read on sweatshops and corporate globalization have been modes of Western colonization. The articles we read for last week have even shown that Western mental illness has become globalized through the seemingly forced diagnosis of those in Japan and China to have symptoms of Western illnesses. Furthermore, the drug industries have expanded their market into these countries as a way to commodify feelings according to Western standards. When looking at “cultural issues” in the “other” through our own modern Western lens, we often fail to see how these issues are parallel to issues we face in our culture. The most compelling piece of information I will take away from this course is that globalization shows us that we all have universal issues, but no real universal solutions. I have become frustrated with many of the issues we have discussed in class because these issues have become institutionalized at this point and are in a sense now irreversible. Whether we like it or not, all cultures include ideals from others. To me it seems like many of these ideals first started off as Western.