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
* from the celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize to those of the US academic star-system
*from 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.
Preface, Introduction: writing at the margins: postcolonialism, exoticism and the politics of cultural value, 1. African literature and the anthropological exotic, 2. Consuming India, 3. Staged marginalities: Rushdie, Naipaul, Kureishi, 4. Prizing otherness: a short history of the Booker, 5. Exoticism, ethnicity and the multicultural fallacy, 6. Ethnic autobiography and the cult of authenticity, 7. Transformations of the tourist gaze: Asia in recent Canadian and Australian fiction, 8. Margaret Atwood, Inc., or, some thoughts on literary celebrity, Conclusion: thinking at the margins: postcolonial studies at the millennium, Notes, Bibliography, Index
