Globalization

The World Is Flat

“No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: “Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.” I was standing on the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green. The Goldman Sachs building wasn’t done yet; otherwise he could have pointed that out as well and made it a threesome. HP and Texas Instruments had their offices on the back nine, along the tenth hold. That wasn’t all. The tee markers were from Epson, the printer company, and one of our caddies was wearing a hat from 3M. Outside, some of the traffic signs were also sponsored by Texas Instruments, and the Pizza Hut billboard on the way over showed a steaming pizza, under the headline “Gigabites of Taste!” No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas. It didn’t even seem like India. Was this the New World, the Old World, or the New World?”

A Small Place

“You are looking out the window (because you want to get your money’s worth); you notice that all the cars you see are brand-new, or almost brand-new, and that they are all Japanese –made. ..You continue to look at the cars and you say to yourself, Why, they look brand-new but they have an awful sound, like an old car—a very old, dilapidated car. How to account for that? Well possibly it’s because they use leaded gasoline in these brand-new cars whose engines were built to use non-leaded gasoline…”

In The World Is Flat, Friedman employs very obvious markers of globalization through the astonishing ten different brands/company names placed in one single paragraph of the starting passage in his novel. Right away, Friedman explicitly emphasizes the overbearing presence of the brands in Bangalore, India, which is interesting to note because the headquarters of these companies are located in the United States. Friedman takes on a very American perspective of globalization throughout the rest of the passage, leaving out other voices and perspectives. The continuous string of brand names and companies originated in America but present in India suggests that ‘the world is flat’ and the playing field has been leveled in terms of the economy. No longer does only the United States have a booming economy, product placement, and a continuous bombardment of advertising—now the same can be found across the globe. This world experienced by Kincaid has no limits or boundaries to the possibilities of expansion as seen through the almost dozen well-known brands in the passage which act as signifiers of globalization.

In A Small Place, the markers of globalization employed by Kincaid are slightly less obvious than Friedman, but nonetheless still prevalent. While Friedman incorporated brand and company names into the story, Kincaid chooses to add a little extra explanation about the Japanese made cars that are too expensive for the people who are driving them. When I read this passage, what stuck out to me was the seemingly unneeded description about which cars used which gasoline, etc. Then, upon further analysis, I realized this addition functioned as a marker of globalization. The cars themselves obviously convey the idea that globalization has spread to this small area where it sticks out like a sore thumb. Kincaid points out through this signifier that although beneficial (the cars are nice and expensive and luxurious), globalization has underlying faults and problems that are not necessarily addressed. The shiny, appealing outside of the car represents the ‘progress’ and ‘improved quality of life’ brought to areas in need by the spreading out of business and economy; however, these cars were not built for ‘leaded gasoline’, or globalization, and they will not function properly once installed. Kincaid points out through the signifier of the fancy Japanese car that invading other countries with progress and ‘good intentions’ may not necessarily be in that areas best interest.