Table Of ContentPramod K. Nayar
Brand Postcolonial: ‘Third World’ Texts and the Global
Pramod K. Nayar
Brand Postcolonial:
‘Third World’ Texts
and the Global
Managing Editor: Izabella Penier
Language Editor: Adam Leverton
Associate Editor: Adam Zmarzlinski
ISBN: 978-3-11-062563-9
e-ISBN: 978-3-11-062566-0
EPUB: 978-3-11-062582-0
© 2018 Pramod K. Nayar
Published by De Gruyter Poland Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com.
Managing Editor: Izabella Penier
Associate Editor: Adam Zmarzlinski
Language Editor: Adam Leverton
www.degruyter.com
Cover illustration: Getty Images
This book is for K. Narayana Chandran,
teacher.
Contents
1 Introduction: The Postcolonial in/as the Global 10
1.1 The Postcolonial Author and Global Mobility 12
1.2 The Postcolonial Text in the Age of Global Reading 16
1.3 The Postcolonial and English Language 19
2 The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity 22
2.1 Introducing the Postcolonial Exotic 23
2.2 Manufacturing Authenticity 28
2.3 The Literary Investment in Race and Ethnicity 31
2.4 Competing Authenticities 37
2.5 Conclusion 46
3 Re-Orientalism: The Indigene and the Subaltern 49
3.1 Re-Orientalism and (the) Postcolonial Remains 50
3.2 The Global Indigene 53
3.3 Decolonization, Land and the Indigene 54
3.4 Criterial and Relational Indigeneity 59
3.5 Alter/native Frames 63
3.6 The Global Subaltern 68
3.7 Subalternity and Citizenship 70
3.8 Postcolonial Subalternization 72
3.9 Conclusion 75
4 Thirdworldism: The Transnational Literary-Ethnic Chic 81
4.1 Authors, Authority and Global Appropriations 81
4.2 Authorial Self-fashioning in the Age of Global Cultural Empires 82
4.3 Market-fashioning and the Postcolonial Author as Ethnic Chic 89
4.4 Text and Textuality 91
4.5 Postcolonial Literature and Subjunctive Nationhood 107
4.6 Conclusion 109
5 Postcolonial Texts: Towards a New Humanism 111
5.1 The Biopolitical Regime in the Postcolonial Text 114
5.2 Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Prejudice 120
5.3 Hope and Humanism 125
5.4 National and Natural Consciousness as Internationalism 131
5.5 Conclusion 136
6 Conclusion 140
6.1 The Postcolonial (as) Global Celebrity 140
6.2 Global Authors and their Homes/Homelands 141
6.3 Postcolonial Literary Tourism 143
6.4 The New ‘Hermeneutic of Intimacy’ and the Global Author 146
Bibliography 151
Index 161
Acknowledgements
Izabella Penier invited me to write this book for de Gruyter in its Open Access program.
Since commissioning, Izabella has been an exemplary editor – discussing content,
title and form with both enthusiasm and patience. To her, then, I owe a huge debt.
Nandini and Pranav, offered, as usual, their fullest support. My parents and par-
ents-in-law periodically query about health and stress-levels but more or less leave
me to my ways. To this environment of affection, and care, I commit this work.
Teaching the postcolonial course – for a change! – in the MA program at the Uni-
versity of Hyderabad in 2017 enabled me to think through several of the themes dis-
cussed in the literatures that I read, and have found their way into this book in some
form or the other.
Numerous sections of the book also grew out of several years of discussions
with Anna Kurian, drawing upon but also extending ideas in my earlier books and
essays on the postcolonial. Finessing these ideas with inputs from Anna was, as it has
been for fifteen years now, exhilarating and illuminating. To Anna, again, therefore,
unquantifiable gratitude.
Nandana Dutta always manages to get me to think laterally, especially on the
‘Theory question’. She engages with random ideas I throw at her, on WhatsApp no
less, and with considerable gentleness urges me to ‘think more’. To her affection,
I remain indebted.
Friends such as Neelu, Angel, Ajeet, Soma, Ibrahim, Haneef, Josy, Vaishali, Prem-
lata, Walter are not people I meet regularly, and some I haven’t met for years: but their
solicitous enquiries and good wishes constitute strongly supportive forces.
Molly Tarun, a.k.a, Chechu, deserves a special mention for her ‘how are you, little
one?’ (all msgs in perfect grammatical agreement, even on WhatsApp!).
To Moumita Chowdhury for furnishing requested journal articles from assorted
databases, even at short notice – thank you.
The DoE, UoH, as a space of work has been for many years a source of inspiration
and shared knowledge – and this may be traced, with no deviations whatsoever, to
K Narayana Chandran, whose supply of references and ideas has remained undimin-
ished. To KNC’s wisdom and generosity, then, like dozens of people around the world
in this profession, I genuflect; for his affectionate support, I express my gratitude.
1 Introduction: The Postcolonial in/as the Global
In an early and justly influential essay, Arif Dirlik pronounced: ‘[Postcolonialism
begins] when Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe’ (1994:
329). Dirlik went on to make this argument about postcolonialism as a field of study:
It is intended, therefore, to achieve an authentic globalization of cultural discourses by the
extension globally of the intellectual concerns and orientations originating at the central sites
of Euro-American cultural criticism and by the introduction into the latter of voices and sub-
jectivities from the margins of earlier political and ideological colonialism that now demand a
hearing at those very sites at the center. The goal, indeed, is no less than to abolish all distinc-
tions between center and periphery as well as all other “binarisms” that are allegedly a legacy
of colonial(ist) ways of thinking and to reveal societies globally in their complex heterogeneity
and contingency. (329)
Dirlik argues that
there is a parallel between the ascendancy in cultural criticism of the idea of postcoloniality and
an emergent consciousness of global capitalism in the 1980s and, second, that the appeals of the
critical themes in postcolonial criticism have much to do with their resonance with the concep-
tual needs presented by transformations in global relationships caused by changes within the
capitalist world economy. (331)
There is, in Dirlik’s argument, the suspicion that the postcolonial is in some ways
complicit with the new global capitalism and refuses to acknowledge its origins
within this global system. There is no critique, argues Dirlik, of the social, political
and economic conditions of global capitalism by postcolonialism because it does
not recognize that the new forms of domination are merely reconfigurations of older
forms (331).
On the one hand, Dirlik draws attention to the link between the postcolonial, or
the formerly colonized nations of Asia, South America, Africa, the former settler col-
onies of Canada and Australia, and the global, but on the other he does not see how
the postcolonial affects and intervenes in the circuit of culture, a circuit which is not
wholly given over to the unevenness of economics alone. A founding assumption of
this book is that the postcolonial text critically informs global debates about ethnic
identity and authenticity, the commodification of this identity, cultural imperialism,
Human Rights and the redefinitions of the human, among others. That is, the postco-
lonial text – and there is no one prototype of standardized postcolonial text, so I use
the term to gesture at a wide variety of literary fiction produced from the former col-
onies – is not a simple derivative of global discourses but an active force that shapes
these discourses.
This book examines the sites, processes and debates that generate the ‘postcolo-
nial aura’ (the title of Dirlik’s original essay and subsequent book) or what this book
treats as ‘brand postcolonial’, in the circulation of global culture. The ‘auratic’ nature
© 2018 Pramod K. Nayar
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