‘A Cosmopolitan Conceptualisation of Place and New Topographies of Identity in Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men.’ Carmen Zamorano Llena. Transnational Literature Vol. 8 no. 2, May 2016. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html A Cosmopolitan Conceptualisation of Place and New Topographies of Identity in Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men 1 Carmen Zamorano Llena In an interview coinciding with the publication of his novel Gods Without Men, British author Hari Kunzru explained how this fictional text originated during his 2008 fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center in the New York Public Library when researching on the subject of sixteenth-century India for his planned book. This initial project, which had been the motivation for Kunzru’s temporary relocation to the United States where he is still resident, was soon overridden by his American experience and his consequent need to process it intellectually and artistically. As Kunzru declares, ‘I’d underestimated what it would mean to be in America, surrounded by Americans, having to deal with and understand America in a way that I hadn’t before. It seemed the only sensible thing I could write about was America’ . 2 Although Kunzru does not explicitly claim to have written an American novel in the traditional sense of the term, with its associations to a specific national ethos, Gods Without Men is a notable contribution to the reconceptualisation of the American novel and of American literary history in the current context of globalisation and transnational exchanges. In his earlier work, Kunzru has also engaged critically with the consequences of globalisation processes on individual and collective identities. Significantly, Peter Childs and James Green selected Kunzru’s work as representative of a twenty-first century British fiction which ‘assumes a common backdrop, which can be described in terms of the forces of globalization [which took] precedence over national contexts’. 3 Kunzru’s second novel Transmission (2005) epitomises this fictional focus, by analysing the consequences of transnational interconnectedness facilitated by modern technologies in a global age. Far from being a paean of contemporary global mobility, Kunzru’s work shares a concern with the type of ‘totalising mode’ that, as David Lyon observes, discussing an age as ‘global’ can produce. 4 Kunzru’s fiction is marked by global mobility in different epochs and denounces the disruptive consequences of totalising narratives of the global on individual and collective identities. 5 This is what unites such apparently disparate novels as The Impressionist (2002), Trasmission (2005) and Gods Without Men (2009). Whereas The Impressionist, as Shane Graham contends, shows how ‘the cracks in structures of colonial domination […] giv[e] characters space to recreate their identities and their collective 1 I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) for the completion of this essay (project reference number: 2010-1820). 2 Erin Gilbert, ‘“That’s Where Coyote Comes In”: PW Talks with Hari Kunzru,’ Publishers Weekly 13 January 2012, 31. Web, accessed 15 September 2013. 3 Peter Childs and James Green, Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) 2. 4 Childs and Green 8. 5 This critical view of global mobility is also a key component in Berthold Schoene’s analysis of contemporary fiction in his seminal study The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009). As Schoene contends, global, transnational mobility ‘as a commodity is by no means unproblematic; it remains a fraught and divisive manifestation of the unequal distribution of both socio-economic and cultural capital’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, 3).