Free Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India by Parmesh Shahani

international organizations like the UN), cultural (global circulation of media and entertainment, fashions and lifestyles, tastes and habits, the predominance of English as the global language), technological (the personal computer revolution, emergence and spread of the Internet, miniaturization of technology), ideological (neoliberalism, protectionism, anti-globalization) and so on. All of these are inexorably intertwined.
    Economic and technological globalization is now considered ir-
    reversible (and also faces the most flak from anti-globalization writers like Naomi Klein144 and Arundhati Roy;145 thousands of protesters in places like Seattle [anti-WTO, 1999] the Narmada valley [anti-dam, ongoing]; and at every iteration of the World Social Forum).
    The end of the Cold War brought forward two significant and contrasting theses on political globalization—Francis Fukuyama (1992) proclaimed grandiosely that this was surely ‘the end of history’, while Samuel Huntington debunked this thesis (1996), proposing equally Introduction 55
    grandiosely that it was merely the beginning to an even bigger battle—
    the ‘clash of civilizations’.146 Neither of these rings completely true today and instead we find—
    both clashes of civilizations as well as the homogenization of civilizations, both environmental disasters and amazing environmental rescues, both the triumph of liberal free market capitalism and a backlash against it, both the durability of nation states and the rise of enormously powerful non-state actors. (Friedman, 2000)147
    For this book, I am more interested in the area of cultural globalization, which might be defined as ‘a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding’
    (Waters, 1995).148 Arjun Appadurai (1996) presents two perspectives from which we can view cultural globalization—homogenization and heterogenization.
    From a homogenizing perspective, globalization might be seen as a force that erases difference. It is commonly perceived (using a centre-periphery scheme of understanding) as Westernization or Americanization. Other names for this force include ‘coco-colonization’ (Hannerz, 1990) and ‘McWorld’ (Barber, 1995)—where the global might of (mainly American) consumer goods and pop culture overpowers local habits and soon everyone is eating at McDonalds, sipping Coke, listening to Britney Spears and playing basketball while wearing Nike.
    The heterogenizing view is more complex than the mere reverse of privileging local over global. Here globalization is understood to set up a ‘dialectic between the local and global, out of which are…born increased cultural options’ (Benyon and Dunkerley, 2002).149 It challenges the assumption that globalization is primarily a Western phenomenon.
    It talks about multiple rather than one-way flows. It says that flows occur from the peripheries to centre as well as within the peripheries themselves. It also states that global products and processes are reimagined, re-appropriated and reconstructed in their interaction with the local. It is characterized by paradoxes—such as ‘the rise of multiculturism and the celebration of ethnicity rather than its extinction’
    (Bhagwati, 2004).150 Rosaldo and Xavier (2002) call this ‘customization’,151
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    while Robertson (1995) deems it ‘glocalization’ (after a Japanese marketing term)—‘the creation and incorporation of locality, processes which themselves largely shape, in turn, the compression of the world as a whole’.152
    From this viewpoint, McDonaldization does not equate to Americanization or uniformity—thus the vegetarian McAloo Tikki Burger™ (spicy potato patty burger) I eat in my Bombay McDonalds is uniquely local, while the sambhar (lentil soup) and rice that I get with my Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bangalore will not even accompany the dish if I