Not Going Anywhere: Local Protests as Post-global Politics

Abstract With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive restrictions on travel and migration effectively destroyed the global mobility of persons, while widespread supply chain disruptions meant that commodities were no longer as globally mobile. Drawing on this 2020 context, this article shows how 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests indicate the contours of what we might think of as a “post-global” politics: that is, a movement that reflects a globally informed analysis but nonetheless draws only implicitly on ideas of global commonality. National movements affirm the unity of national space, but BLM insists on its very unevenness; internationalism seeks to forge communities across regions and nations, but BLM takes the unity and transportability of “Black” as a given; globalization discourse argues that the world is coming ever closer together, but BLM lays claim to no future unity. This article demonstrates this post-global conceptualization through two of 2020’s most successful novels: Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half and Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. What, then, is the analytic value of worldwide comparisons for a post-global movement? To answer this question, the US-based BLM protests of 2020 are considered alongside Indian politics in the same period, both through the Indian farmers’ protests that began in late 2020 and through an analysis of a successful 2020 US novel about India, Megha Majumdar's A Burning. This novel was explicitly connected by US readers to BLM's critiques of state violence against minority populations, yet the book itself feels claustrophobically small. Through the combined analysis of these three recent literary successes, this article shows how a post-global politics is reshaping US understandings of racialization.