Introduction: Global Intimacies 1
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Notes Introduction: Global Intimacies 1. See Chapter 2 for an extensive analysis of the novel’s critical reception. For a representative discussion of the novel’s combination of romance and politics as an aesthetic failure, see Gabriele Annan, “The Map of Love,” London Review of Books 21.14 (July 15, 1999): 28. On the novel’s loss of the Booker for its perceived anti-Semitism, see Asim Hamdan, “Zionist Denies Soueif the Booker Prize,” Arab View: The Internet Home of Independent Arab Opinions, http://www. arabview.com/article.asp?artID=39. May 25, 2003. Emma Richler echoes Hamdan’s argument in “The Booker ’99: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace an Honourable Choice,” The Ottawa Citizen (October 31, 1999): C12. 2. Judith Thurman, “Choosing a Place,” New Yorker (June 29, 1987): 89. 3. Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, “Introduction: The Global and the Intimate,” in The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1. 4. On science fiction, see the MELUS special issue “Alien/Asian” 33.4 (Winter 2008); Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Sci- ence Fiction Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy,ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). On detective fiction, see Diversity and Detective Fiction, ed. Kathleen Gregory Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Maureen T. Reddy’s Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Stephen F. Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); The Post-Colonial Detective, ed. Ed Christian (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World, ed. Nels Pearson and Marc Singer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 5. Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” Remapping Genre, spec. iss. of PMLA, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins 122.5 (2007): 1382–3. 6. Ibid., 1385. 174 Notes 7. Vilashini Cooppan, Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 19. 8. Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 32. 9. Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4. 10. Ibid., 43, 51–4. 11. Ibid., 23. See also B. E. Perry, The Ancient Romances: A Literary- Historical Account of their Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 12. Ibid., 24. 13. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 35. 14. Barbara Fuchs, Romance, 37. 15. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1975). Rptd. in The Secular Scripture and Other Writ- ings on Critical Theory 1976–1991. Vol. 18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 6, 14. 16. Waïl S. Hassan, “Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love,” PMLA 121 (May 2006): 753–68. 17. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–4. See also Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 18. See Terry Lovell’s Consuming Fiction (London: Verso, 1987) and William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) for similar discussions of the ways in which early novel- reading was condemned as a market-driven form of entertainment corrupting its readership of primarily young women. 19. Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 291. 20. Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (New York: Routledge, 2008). 21. I borrow the characterization of sublime, potentially uncivilizable spaces such as the sea, the arctic, and the desert from Siobhan Carroll. 22. Fredric Jameson, “Romance and Reification: Plot Construction and Ideological Closure in Joseph Conrad,” in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 206–80. 23. Frye, The Secular Scripture, 19. 24. See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984, 1991); Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horrors and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and Laura Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Notes 175 Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 25. See Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 206–80; and Anne McClintock, “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism,” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 21–74. 26. Jane Bryce and Karia Dako note a similar ambivalence with regard to Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1991 novel Changes: A Love Story. See Bryce and Dako, “Textual Deviancy and Cultural Syncretism: Roman- tic Fiction as a Subversive Strain in Black Women’s Writing,” in FonTomFrom: Contemporary Ghanaian Literature, Theatre and Film, ed. Kofi Anyidoho and James Gibbs (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 155–64. In Changes, Aidoo, known for her outspoken political views in Ghana, adopted a literary medium that made it difficult for publishers to categorize her work. According to Bryce and Dako, Aidoo’s novel is an ironic commentary on the disillusion that fol- lowed the degeneration of the physical fabric of Ghanaian society and the disappointment of those early hopes. The vehicle— the use of which is itself an ironic about-face on what she presents as an earlier, “revolutionary” position which precluded such frivolity—is that of the romance novel. This “despised” form is used self- consciously, both to subvert the dominant political and social discourse of Ghana today, and to expose the specific contradictions of gender and its power relationship. (157–8) Unable to find an African publisher, the novel was eventually pub- lished by the Feminist Press at CUNY (160). 27. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 225. Hennessy is drawing in this passage from insights in Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 28. Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 84–5. 29. Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2–3. 30. Ibid., 8. 31. Ibid., 5–6. 32. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 13. As I argue throughout this book, Stoler’s point about sentiment as the historical domain of literature only underscores the role literary studies can and must play in analyzing the affective force of global ideologies and imaginative responses to them. 33. Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tac- tile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in 176 Notes North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 14. 34. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 203. 35. Ibid. 36. For useful introductions to the most prominent thinkers in this emerging field, see Globalization: The Reader, ed. John Beynon and David Dunkerley (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Andrew Jones’s more recent Globalization: Key Thinkers (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). 37. Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 11. Originally published in German as Was ist Globalisierung? (Frankfurt: Surhkamp Verlag, 1997). 38. Ibid., 12–13. 39. For an example of the argument that globalization will lead to cul- tural homogenization, see John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (London: Pinter, 1991). Ahmed Gurnah argues for a greater com- plexity of different local responses to Western media in his essay “Elvis in Zanzibar,” in The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments,ed. Alan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1997), 116–42. 40. See, for example, Chris Barker, Global Television (London: Blackwell, 1997); Ann Cvetkovich and Douglas Kellner, eds. Articulating the Global and the Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (New York: Westview Press, 1997); John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Global-Local: Cul- tural Production and the Trans-national Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, and Herbert Reiter, Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006); and Jan N. Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Cultural Mélange, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). 41. Pratt and Rosner, “Introduction: The Global and the Intimate,” 12. 42. One of many examples here is the cynical deployment of the stock figure of the oppressed woman of Afghanistan in the lead-up to the US invasion in 2001. 43. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity