The Alterity Business between Commodification and Resistance in World Literature

Abstract

The global literary market is currently witnessing an unprecedented race towards visibility ; an enterprise which unavoidably entails cross-cultural encounters with cosmopolitan taste. While this project of World Literature is not as unproblematic as it may appear, it has enacted an unreserved heeding of to the aesthetic norms of the global market whereby the production, dissemination and consumption of literary works are inevitably informed by a manifest concern with the norms that govern literary taste worldwide. Thus, workers on the literary scene, from different locations, in trying to walk a tight rope between the demands of the international publishing industry- duly responsive as it is to a vogue for exoticism- and significant linguistic, cultural and aesthetic stakes, find themselves grappling with the dilemma of either commodifying their local cultures for the global market- and hence capitalizing on self-othering- or adopting a resistant standpoint. Accordingly, minor authors seem to be the candidates ‘par excellence’ for this lucrative business of alterity, where their mediated discourse runs the risk of being stage-managed by mass market taste makers, prize institutions and global patterns of commodification at work in the book industry. This dissertation broaches the much controversial debate on World Literature, and surveys a wide range of critical attempts to draw the contours of a highly contested category namely global fiction, it equally explores ways whereby established authors in the caliber of Elif Shafak, Amine Maalouf, Kazuo Ishiguro or Kiran Desai intervene in the debate, while negotiating their status from metropolitan locations, managing literary fame within the international ‘economy of prestige’, and addressing the vexed issue of self-exoticism.