David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and 'The Novel of Globalization': biopower and the Secret History of the Novel

David Mitchell's debut novel Ghostwritten (1999) not only depicts a globalized world; its peculiar formal organization also embodies the mode of relatedness that characterizes globalization. This article shows that the invisible, decentralized power that defines globalization can be understood as what Michel Foucault called biopower. As a novel of globalization, Mitchell's novel lays bare the hidden historical and theoretical affinities between the novel genre on the one hand and biopower on the other