Fernando Meirelle's The constant gardener at the crossroads of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic globalization

John Le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener (2001) focuses on the ongoing exploitation of former African colonized people by international interests in a post-colonial time marked by globalization. Despite the novelist’s attempt to render the complex machinations among multinationals, Britain and underdeveloped states visible, his focus is mainly placed on characters connoted with power. This essay analyzes Fernando Meirelles’s 2005 filmic remediation of Le Carré’s novel and demonstrates how Meirelles transforms Le Carré’s representation of multifold conflicts into a reflection on the complexity of the phenomenon of globalization and of its impact on the Global South. I claim that Meirelles transforms his film into a stage on which the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces of globalization (Santos, “The Processes”) are confronted and interrogated froman ethical perspective. The latter highlights the relevance of a globalization from below (Appadurai “Grassroots”) and cinema’s role in denouncing the evils of globalization.