Description
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.
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. 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.
About the Author
Mrinalini Chakravorty is associate 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, Ariel, and Modern Fiction Studies, as well as other journals and collections.
Reviews
The 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
Book Information
ISBN 9780231165976
Author Mrinalini Chakravorty
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
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. 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.
About the Author
Mrinalini Chakravorty is associate 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, Ariel, and Modern Fiction Studies, as well as other journals and collections.
Reviews
The 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
Book Information
ISBN 9780231165976
Author Mrinalini Chakravorty
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
