Sharmila Mukherjee

America Globalized: A Hologram for a “Weakening” America

Oct. 13, 2:00pm, Library Law Classroom (NL-314)

With the slogan “Let’s make America great again!” Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump asks U.S. citizens to imagine America in the image of a weakened giant, fallen from heights of greatness. This strange declaration of American weakness has come to brand a nation in the throes of globalization and its multiple inequities. Long before Donald Trump and his cohort ossified the phrase through repetition on social media, however, contemporary American novelists had represented the U.S. as a nation weakened under the impact of economic globalization. This talk will discuss the representation of America as a sovereignty in steep decline in Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King, a parable of America in the global economy. Contrasting the hollowing out heartland of America with the gleaming infrastructure of Jeddah--Saudi Arabia's most cosmopolitan of cities--Eggers' novel is an indictment of globalization and the American elite’s complicity in sacrificing nation-building over personal wealth-formation.

Sharmila Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of English at Bronx Community College, where she teaches a variety of courses ranging from Composition to Afro-Caribbean Literature. Her areas of interest are the intersection of Globalization and literature, Postcolonial and South Asian literature, and global discourses of poverty. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2010 and has published essays on the contemporary South Asian novel in Modern Language Studies. Her essay, "Slumdog Millionaire and the Emerging Centrality of India," appeared in The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology (Anthem Press, 2013). Dr. Mukherjee is also the author of a novel, The Green Rose (Penguin India, 2012). She is currently working on a book--"Everybody Loves Capital: South Asian Narratives of Money, Market and Consumption"--under review by two major academic publishers.

moderator: John R. Ziegler