Description
Book SynopsisConfronts the importance of cultural stereotypes in shaping the ethics and reach of global literature.
Trade ReviewThe stereotype-that fixed and frozen form of cultural unknowledge-is brought to animate life in this book. Rereading an indispensable archive of South Asian Anglophone fiction through iconic stereotypes of the postcolony and the postcolonial (hunger, crowds, slums, migrant dislocation, global metropolis, civil war's deathscape, and terror), Mrinalini Chakravorty brilliantly reveals what lies within the stereotype. Hypervisual and fetishistic, yet also spectacularly mobile, relational, and affectively charged, the stereotype emerges as a virtual and vital technology of literary globalism and a surprising education in ethical reading. -- Vilashini Cooppan, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing, A well-theorized consideration... This reviewer knows of no comparable treatment of South Asian stereotypes... Highly recommended. CHOICE A lucid and provocative analysis of the significance of stereotype in contemporary South Asian literature. South Asian Review An important book not only for postcolonial studies of South Asian Anglophone literature and culture, but also for modeling what an ethical reading practice is and does in the so-called age of globalization. The Comparatist What Chakravorty's book allows is a wonderful meditation on the work of the stereotype... We learn to read the novel differently after reading her book, to make demands on our sensitivities at her urging and to our profit. Contemporary Literature A provocative and insightful catalogue of features that characterize stereotypes. -- Saikat Majumdar South Asian History and Culture The close readings one finds in every chapter offer marvelously useful material for classroom teaching and discussions of stereotypes in a postcolonial context. Modern Fiction Studies Eminently readable, it will be of interest to scholars and students of postcolonial studies, cultural studies of globalization, South Asian literature, and global literature... A remarkably cogent and clarifying book, lucid in its genealogical tracks and impassioned in its perusal of well-loved novels. Novel: A Forum on Fiction
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Prologue: Stereotypes as Provocation 1. Why the Stereotype? Why South Asia? 2. To Understand Me, You'll Have to Swallow a World: Margins, Multitudes, and the Nation in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children 3. Slumdog or White Tiger? The Abjection and Allure of Slums 4. The Dead That Haunt Anil's Ghost: Subaltern Stereotypes and Postcolonial Melancholia 5. From Bangladesh to Brick Lane: The Biocultural Stereotypes of Migrancy 6. Good and Bad Transnationalisms: Outsourcing and Terror Epilogue: The Afterlife of Stereotypes Notes Bibliography Index
