Emily Davis

The Globalization of Desire in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Film (in process)

This project examines how contemporary writers and filmmakers connect narratives of bodily desires to international politics to create global romances. I designate as “global” those cultural productions by postcolonial, diasporic, and Western writers and filmmakers that foreground issues such as international political conflict; the movement of immigrants, refugees, and exiles across national borders; and the transnational production and circulation of goods, ideologies, and wealth that sustains the global economy. These texts and their authors tend to cross traditional markets and national literatures, creating new readerships out of diverse audiences. I track their consumption on the global literary market as a way to gauge their appeal and meaning in different contexts. I ask: why has transgressive desire been such a recurrent trope for representing an array of late-twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century global exchanges? Does the romance narrative eclipse politics for Western readers who lack the knowledge to make sense of the texts’ political critiques? Or, by providing a familiar narrative framework, does romance make global politics legible for certain readers and film audiences? What new possibilities for representation emerge from bending genre formulas to the task of anticolonial aesthetics? I trace a historical trajectory from nineteenth-century colonial romances and orientalist fantasy to their appropriation by postcolonial and diasporic British authors such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ahdaf Soueif, and Nayantara Sahgal. While the first part of the project discusses the ways in which these writers refigure the genre of romance to speak to the concerns of anticolonial nationalism, neocolonial corruption, and Western economic domination, later chapters turn to literary and filmic representations of how globalization reconfigures the body itself—whether that of the immigrant, the Western subject, or the postcolonial author—as a sexual commodity.