The protean self: dramatic action in contemporary fiction Book

"How do postcolonial writers/thinkers contend with neocolonial market forces, negotiating the realpolitik of metropolitan 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?"

I first encountered Graham Huggan's The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) back during my undergraduate studies. I was, just about, beginning to get a sense of postcolonial studies. But back then I was so wedded to close reading – based, I think, on an over-interpretation of Barthes's 'Death of the Author' – that I was basically left non-plussed by Huggan's explicitly sociological literary critique. I don't think I realised back then that literary critics could also write about the publishing industry, about canonisation, or about the politics behind the reception of Things Fall Apart or Midnight's Children.

It's kind of lovely, then, at the end of my PhD, just a few days before my viva, to return to and re-read The Postcolonial Exotic. It is a great book – one which has actually gained in relevance in the years following its publication. Although broad in focus, its main object of critique is the growing appropriation and mainstreamification of postcolonial voices in the years leading up to the millennium. By putting Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of literary legitimacy (publishing is a war; authors are locked in discursive struggle for scarce resources; prize-giving both produces and records material and ideological power) in conversation with the developing claims of postcolonial studies, Huggan argues that postcolonial authors are having to negotiate (both within their prose and within their celebrity) the west's exoticising gaze: whether knowingly or unknowingly, some writers capitulate to this gaze, others resist it, while others ironise it within their work itself. Huggan's traces this argument across works by Achebe, Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood, and many others.

The Postcolonial Exotic faces in three directions, offering 1) a meta-commentary on postcolonial studies and its critics; 2) an analysis of postcolonial writers within the global literary marketplace; and 3) a diagnosis of the neocolonialism of that marketplace. Huggan's chapters on the history of the Booker Prize and Heinemann's African Writers Series are particularly notable: these chapters provide short, accessible histories of two of the most important publishing phenomena of the late twentieth century. What role does the Booker play in re-writing, papering over, or even legitimising the colonial history of its sugar plantation benefactor, Booker plc? And how has the African Writers Series – adored by academics as being responsible for bringing new voices to the literary stage – also actively participated in conjuring a limited and essentialising notion of Africanness that over-represents itself as if it were Africanness itself?

Over fifteen years have gone by since The Postcolonial Exotic's publication. Rushdie has become even more of a reactionary. Margaret Atwood's celebrity has risen higher. The Booker has opened itself beyond the 'commonwealth'. Arundhati Roy retreated from the literary marketplace and threw herself into politically committed journalism and documentation. The African Writers Series has slowed down. Postcolonial studies has now embraced ecocriticism. There is a new wave of World Literature scholarship which, when at its best, offers an important new perspective on literary circulation, translation, consecration and reception while also asking powerful questions of postcolonial studies. Where, then, does The Postcolonial Exotic's hypotheses stand today? That's for somebody else, somebody smarter than me, to figure out.