The Postcolonial Exotic

Marketing the margins

Graham Huggan

When creative writers like Salman Rushdie are seen, despite their cosmopolitan background, as representatives of Third World countries; when literary works like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) are gleaned, despite their fictional status, for the anthropological information they provide; when academic concepts like postcolonialism are turned, despite their historicist pretensions, into watchwords for the fashionable study of cultural otherness—all of these are instances of the postcolonial exotic, of the global commodification of cultural difference that provides the subject for this book. The Postcolonial Exotic is, in part, an examination of the sociological dimensions of postcolonial studies: the material conditions of production and consumption of postcolonial writings, and the influence of publishing houses and academic institutions on the selection, distribution and evaluation of these works. The book aims to address some of these sociological issues, inquiring into the status of postcolonial literatures—postcolonialism itself—as a cultural commodity, and exploring the relations between contemporary postcolonial studies and the booming ‘alterity industry’ that it at once serves and resists. The book is a study, in other words, of the varying degrees of complicity between local oppositional discourses and the global late-capitalist system in which these discourses circulate and are contained. The charge of complicity is of course hardly a new one, and might easily lend itself to the type of reductionist thinking that practitioners of postcolonial studies have always been eager to avoid. Suggestions, for example, that postcolonialism is primarily a form of academic careerism, or that the success of postcolonial products is merely a function of their viability as commodities on the global market, are recent cases in point—indications, perhaps, of the current intellectual backlash against postcolonial studies which, whether conducted from Left or Right, aims to cast serious doubt on, even to discredit, the field.

جهت استعلام قيمت و سفارش چاپ اين محصول لطفا با انتشارات گنج حضور تماس حاصل فرماييد