The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins/Graham Huggan
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The Postcolonial Exotic Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing? In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies and the means by which postcolonial products are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. Global in scope, the book takes in everything from: • the latest ‘Indo-chic’ to the history of the Heinemann African Writers series; • the celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize to those of the US academic star system; • Canadian multicultural anthologies to Australian ‘tourist novels’. This timely and challenging volume points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field. Graham Huggan is Professor of English at the University of Munich. His publications include Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction (1994), and Peter Carey (1996). The Postcolonial Exotic Marketing the margins Graham Huggan London and New York First published 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2001 Graham Huggan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Huggan, Graham. The postcolonial exotic: marketing the margins/Graham Huggan. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism. 2. Fiction— Appreciation—English-speaking countries—History—20th century. 3. Fiction— Publishing—English-speaking countries—History—20th century. 4. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Commonwealth fiction (English)—History and criticism. 6. Multiculturalism in literature. 7. Decolonization in literature. 8. Ethnic groups in literature. 9. Exoticism in literature. 10. Booker Prize—History. 11. Canon (Literature). 12. Postcolonialism. I. Title. PR120.M55 H84 2001 823'.91409–dc21 00–045937 ISBN 0-203-42010-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-44586-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-25033-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-25034-X (pbk) Contents Preface vii Introduction: writing at the margins: postcolonialism, exoticism and the politics of cultural value 1 Postcolonialism in the age of global commodity culture 1 Exoticism in the margins 13 Toward a definition of the postcolonial exotic 28 1 African literature and the anthropological exotic 34 2 Consuming India 58 1997 58 1981 69 2000 77 3 Staged marginalities: Rushdie, Naipaul, Kureishi 83 4 Prizing otherness: a short history of the Booker 105 Introduction 105 Two cheers for Booker: the emergence of a literary patron 106 Revision and revival: Booker versions of the Raj (and after) 112 Conclusion 118 Appendix: Booker Prize management and adjudication procedures 121 v vi Contents 5 Exoticism, ethnicity and the multicultural fallacy 124 Introduction 124 Comparing histories: Canadian and Australian multiculturalisms 126 Comparing literatures: Canadian and Australian multicultural writing 133 Bissoondath and Demidenko 138 Elliott and Egoyan 147 Conclusion 153 6 Ethnic autobiography and the cult of authenticity 155 Introduction: the demand for autobiography 155 Autobiography, gender and the paradoxes of Native authenticity 157 Aboriginal women’s life-narratives and the construction of the ‘market reader’ 164 Conclusion: competing authenticities, or, some passing thoughts on passing 174 7 Transformations of the tourist gaze: Asia in recent Canadian and Australian fiction 177 Exoticism and the tourist gaze 177 Spiritual tourists 180 Anti-tourist tourists 193 8 Margaret Atwood, Inc., or, some thoughts on literary celebrity 209 Preface: soundings from the Atwood industry 209 Atwood as celebrity 210 Atwood and the canon 217 The Margaret Atwood Society 223 Conclusion: thinking at the margins: postcolonial studies at the millennium 228 The rise of postcolonial studies 228 Postcolonial studies and the pedagogic imaginary 243 Coda: postcolonial Tintin 262 Notes 265 Bibliography 291 Index 317 Preface 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. Yet as an academic field postcolonial studies has always been more conflicted, and usually more finely nuanced, than its critics will admit. Its methods, although by no means unified, will no doubt vii viii Preface continue to be misrecognised—and strategically homogenised—by those possibly self-serving critics who call for the latest paradigm shift. Nonetheless, there remains a case to be made that postcolonial studies has yet to account for the often rapid transformations within its own discursive field. And one of those transformations has been its increasing institutionalisation as a recognised field of academic research across the English-speaking world. Postcolonial studies, it could be argued, has capitalised on its perceived marginality while helping turn marginality itself into a valuable intellectual commodity. Meanwhile, postcolonial writers, and a handful of critics, have accumulated forms of cultural capital that have made them recognised—even celebrity—figures despite their openly oppositional stance. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has suggested provocatively, the best known among this highly diverse body of writers and thinkers operate as latter-day culture brokers, ‘mediating the international trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery’ (Appiah 1992:149). Appiah’s suggestion, while contestable, raises several pertinent questions about postcolonial modes of production/ consumption that are central to the concerns of this book. What are the various mediating roles of postcolonial writers/thinkers, and to what extent is their capacity as mediators a function of their recognised status? To what degree is the recognition—the cultural capital—of postcolonial writing bound up in a system of cultural translation operating under the sign of the exotic? What role do exotic registers play in the construction of cultural value, more specifically those types of value (re)produced by postcolonial products and (re)presented in postcolonial discourse? How are these exoticisms marketed for predominantly metropolitan audiences—made available, but also palatable, for their target consumer public? How, within this process, do postcolonial writers/thinkers contend with neocolonial market forces, negotiating the realpolitik of metropolitan economic dominance? How has the corporate publishing world co-opted postcolonial writing, and to what extent does the academy collaborate in similar processes of co-optation? This book seeks to address, if hardly to answer, these various questions, operating in the spirit of informed and, inevitably, interested