Assignment 5

"Now you are passing a mansion, an extraordinary house painted the colour of old cow dung, with more aerials and antennas attached to it that you will see even at the American Embassy. The people who live in this house are a merchant family who came to Antigua from the Middle East less than twenty years ago. When this family first came to Antigua, they sold dry goods door to door from suitcases they carried on their backs. Now they own a lot of Antigua; they regularly lend money to the government, they build enormous (for Antigua), ugly (for Antigua), concrete buildings in Antigua's capital, St. John's, which the government then rents for huge sums of money; a member of their family is the Antiguan Ambassador to Syria; Antiguans hate them." Jamaica Kinkaid, A Small Place, page 11

The Infosys campus is reached by a pockmarked road, with sacred cows, horse-drawn carts, and motorized rickshaws all jostling alongside our vans. Once you enter the gates of Infosys, though, you are in a different world. A massive resort-sized swimming pool nestles amid boulders and manicured lawns, adjacent to a huge putting green. There are multiple restaurants and a fabulous health club. Glass-and-steel buildings seen to sprout up like weeds each week." Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat, page 5

Both of these passages talk about recently built buildings. These buildings do not match their surroundings and were built either by foreigners or by natives acting like foreigners. The buildings are a foreign element introduced into the countries (Antigua and India) through globalization.

Jamaica Kinkaid describes the house and buildings built by Middle Eastern immigrants by emphasizing her distaste for both the immigrants and their architecture. She describes a house "the colour of old cow dung" and "ugly concrete buildings." Kinkaid wants to show us how international influences have corrupted and destroyed her country. Throughout her book, she portrays globalization as inseparable from its negative effects. This is unsurprising because Antigua would have been much better off if the rest of the world had left it alone.

Thomas Friedman draws our attention to the contrast between the Infosys campus and the "old" India outside it's gates, but he doesn't say how the Indians feel about this. The passage I choose comes from the very beginning of Friedman's book, where it seems Friedman is trying to introduce examples of globalization so that he can analyze their effects later in the book. Friedman is willing to put the negative effects of globalization aside to be examined later. I think it is important to consider that Friedman is from the United States, a country that has benefited from globalization.

Another difference between Friedman and Kinkaid is that Friedman is examining globalization in another country, while Kinkaid is telling us the story of her own country. It is much easier for Friedman to dismiss the downsides of globalization when he does not personally know anyone who has been hurt by it.