The Culture Of Liberty, And Kanishka Chowdhury And The...

Cosmopolitan fiction, the most prominent strand of contemporary global Anglophone literature, gives us images of the â€Å"solution† to the violent history of colonization in a new era of a post-national cosmopolitan global culture brought about by â€Å"globalization†. In this purportedly new global era of a â€Å"hybrid† mixing of national cultures, the very idea of a â€Å"national identity† is deemed irrelevant in what Thomas Friedman calls â€Å"a flat world.† Some noteworthy cosmopolitan ideas can be seen in Bharati Mukherji’s â€Å"Orbiting,† in that the short story can be read as advocating a cosmopolitan world view. This, however, directly clashes with the ideas of globalization presented in Mario Vargas Llosa’s â€Å"The Culture of Liberty,† and Kanishka Chowdhury’s Globalization and the ideologies of Postnationalism and Hybridity.† Accordingly, Rana Dasgupta’s â€Å"The House of the Frankf urt Mapmaker† and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Moshin Hamid, critically challenge the cosmopolitan outlook as questionable fiction. Cosmopolitanism is the idea that everyone belongs to a worldwide community, that there is a hybridization amongst people that serves as a uniting factor and is almost synonymous with multiculturalism. This notion has been brought about by capitalists and the elites of society, who prefer a world without borders, which, in turn, enables unrestricted access to a plethora of markets and resources. Coincidentally, this only furthers to empower the World Bank and the IMF, two of the