The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins

by Huggan,Graham

• ISBN13: 9780415250337
• ISBN10: 0415250331
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-26
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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 so-calledpostcolonialwriting? InThe Postcolonial Exotic,Graham Hugganexamines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis,Huggandiscusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial "products" are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. This timely and challenging volume examines everything from well-meaning multiculturalism, tourism, and pseudo-anthropology, to the Booker prize, anthologies, and academic texts. It 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.

Author Biography

Graham Huggan is Professor of English at the University of Munich.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Introduction: writing at the margins: postcolonialism, exoticism and the politics of cultural value	1	(1)
Postcolonialism in the age of global commodity culture	1	(12)
Exoticism in the margins	13	(15)
Toward a definition of the postcolonial exotic	28	(6)
African literature and the anthropological exotic	34	(24)
Consuming India	58	(25)
1997	58	(11)
1981	69	(8)
2000	77	(6)
Staged marginalities: Rushdie, Naipaul, Kureishi	83	(22)
Prizing otherness: a short history of the Booker	105	(19)
Introduction	105	(1)
Two cheers for Booker: the emergence of a literary patron	106	(6)
Revision and revival: Booker versions of the Raj (and after)	112	(6)
Conclusion	118	(3)
Appendix: Booker Prize management and adjudication procedures	121	(3)
Exoticism, ethnicity and the multicultural fallacy	124	(31)
Introduction	124	(2)
Comparing histories: Canadian and Australian multiculturalisms	126	(7)
Comparing literatures: Canadian and Australian multicultural writing	133	(5)
Bissoondath and Demidenko	138	(9)
Elliott and Egoyan	147	(6)
Conclusion	153	(2)
Ethnic autobiography and the cult of authenticity	155	(22)
Introduction: the demand for autobiography	155	(2)
Autobiography, gender and the paradoxes of Native authenticity	157	(7)
Aboriginal women's life-narratives and the construction of the `market reader'	164	(10)
Conclusion: competing authenticities, or, some passing thoughts on passing	174	(3)
Transformations of the tourist gaze: Asia in recent Canadian and Australian fiction	177	(32)
Exoticism and the tourist gaze	177	(3)
Spiritual tourists	180	(13)
Anti-tourist tourists	193	(16)
Margaret Atwood, Inc., or, some thoughts on literary celebrity	209	(19)
Preface: soundings from the Atwood industry	209	(1)
Atwood as celebrity	210	(7)
Atwood and the canon	217	(6)
The Margaret Atwood Society	223	(5)
Conclusion: thinking at the margins: postcolonial studies at the millennium	228	(37)
The rise of postcolonial studies	228	(15)
Postcolonial studies and the pedagogic imaginary	243	(19)
Coda: postcolonial Tintin	262	(3)
Notes	265	(26)
Bibliography	291	(26)
Index	317