A Way of Life Worth Preserving?

Identity, Place, and Commerce in Big Business and the American South

Authors

Sharon O'Dair University of Alabama

Abstract

Rather than suggest that The Comedy of Errors explores doubling and, ultimately, the finding of identity, current criticism suggests that the play reveals identity to be malleable, and, as such, that it participates in the discourse of an early modern crisis of self-representation. In contrast, Jim Abrahams's 1988 film, Big Business, at first suggests identity to be rather more essential, strongly rooted in place and blood. But, as the film explores the identities of its sets of twins — one located in Manhattan and the other in Jupiter Hollow, West Virginia — Big Business also negotiates the difficult and charged relationship between global commerce and local habituation, only to undercut its posited identification of identity with place and blood and therefore to suggest that globalization may co-exist with local habituation, that profit may co-exist with "the right thing to do," and that we still live in a time when markets remain subject to the socially derived moral imperatives. Though almost twenty years old, the film's negotiation of globalization and local habituation, and its mystification of that relationship, remains of interest in the current moment, as jobs in the United States continue to be outsourced, while rural places and natural resources are put under pressure by population growth and urban sprawl.

Author Biography

Sharon O'Dair, University of Alabama

Sharon O'Dair is Professor of English at the University of Alabama and interim Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. She co-edited The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Cornell 1994) and is author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (Michigan 2000). She has published essays on Shakespeare, literary theory, and the profession of English studies, and currently is working on two manuscripts, Elitist Equality: Class Paradoxes in the Profession of English and The Eco-Bard: The Greening of Shakespeare in Contemporary Film.