Seeds of Change and Emancipation: Towards a Cognitive Mapping of Globilisation in Literature

Abstract

200 years of industrial capitalism, and 500 years of colonialism, have caused the worst human and environmental crisis in the history of human kind. Rapid and unprecedented depletion of natura resources, global warming, the exploitation of human beings, the global economic crises, and the military might needed to enforce the free flow of capital, al these call for a common, emancipatory articulation of local struggles. However, the creation of a larger empowering discourse requires the formation of a cognitive mapping whereby different local struggles can identify and map the structural source of their oppression.

In this paper I argue that recent approaches to globalisation from the perspective of complexity theory and recent developments in cognitive linguistics and poetics, can help to construct a cognitive mapping of contemporary postcolonial poetry that enables us to scrutinise the impact of global capitalism on the loca context. Complexity theory and cognitive theories regard language as rooted in human perception of a complex and dynamic environment. Cognitive mapping articulates the reader's bodily experience to the writer's embodied conceptualisations of the effects of global capitalism on their land. In this way modernity can be redefined in more democratic terms that incorporate the voice of the marginalised and the oppressed.