In Stereotype

South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-16597-6
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 228 mm x 155 mm, Gewicht: 464 g

Reihe: Literature Now

In Stereotype confronts the importance of cultural stereotypes in shaping the ethics and reach of global literature. Mrinalini Chakravorty focuses on the seductive force and explanatory power of stereotypes in multiple South Asian contexts, whether depicting hunger, crowdedness, filth, slums, death, migrant flight, terror, or outsourcing. She argues that such commonplaces are crucial to defining cultural identity in contemporary literature and shows how the stereotype's ambivalent nature exposes the crises of liberal development in South Asia.

In Stereotype considers the influential work of Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Michael Ondaatje, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, and Chetan Bhagat, among others, to illustrate how stereotypes about South Asia provide insight into the material and psychic investments of contemporary imaginative texts: the colonial novel, the transnational film, and the international best-seller. Probing circumstances that range from the independence of the Indian subcontinent to poverty tourism, civil war, migration, domestic labor, and terrorist radicalism, Chakravorty builds an interpretive lens for reading literary representations of cultural and global difference. In the process, she also reevaluates the fascination with transnational novels and films that manufacture global differences by staging intersubjective encounters between cultures through stereotypes.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chakravorty, Mrinalini

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Kultureller Wandel, Kulturkontakt, Akkulturation
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsPrologue: Stereotypes as Provocation1. 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 Children3. Slumdog or White Tiger? The Abjection and Allure of Slums4. The Dead That Haunt Anil's Ghost: Subaltern Stereotypes and Postcolonial Melancholia5. From Bangladesh to Brick Lane: The Biocultural Stereotypes of Migrancy6. Good and Bad Transnationalisms: Outsourcing and TerrorEpilogue: The Afterlife of StereotypesNotesBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Mrinalini Chakravorty is assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia and concentrates on postcolonial literature and film; studies of race, gender, and sexuality; and cultural studies. She is particularly interested in the theoretical intersections among these areas, including but not limited to transnational approaches to the study of literary culture, aesthetic responses to globalization, and modes of minority discourse. She is the author of several articles that have appeared in differences, PMLA, and Modern Fiction Studies, as well as in various edited collections.